Written for even the casual reader on scientific matters, this volume filters out the redundant and the superfluous, wrings the waste from scientific understanding and allows the reader to digest information in intellectual mouthfuls, rather than being goose-fed with more than can be understood. Exceptionally appropriate volume for secondary students as a supplement to cultural literacy studies. Easily implemented for gifted students.

My 5 year old was thrilled to find a book he could read ( with some help) that had several stories from all of our favorite authors! James Marshall, Dav Pilkey and six others!

As a baseball fan, Bill James speaks his mind entertainingly, and as a student of statistics, he puts evidence where his mouth is, convincingly. This collection brings together excerpts from a number of his earlier books, with the focus on the entertaining and opinionated writing, rather than the statistical analysis. The intelligent baseball fan will find this, like his other books, to be unputdownable reading.

James W. Hall not only tells an intriguing story, but his quality of writing is superior to most in this genre.

James W Hall has a knack for creating quirky characters and sleazy bad guys. In this book, he has outdone himself with Dougie Barnes, a dimwitted, muscle-bound, rhyme-spouting, trash-talking thug with an appetite for murder and sex. If you think he's bad, wait until you meet his dad, Douglas, Sr.

In Bones of Coral, ambulance paramedic Shaw Chandler of Miami finds his long lost dad dead in an apparent suicide. Then he gets a frantic call from his Mom. The next thing you know, Shaw is headed to his hometown of Key West to learn the truth about his dad's death and some startling discoveries about his past. James W Hall is an excellent story teller and Bones of Coral is a knock down thriller that will stay with you long after you put it down.

FIVE STARS!!

Hall has the ability to bring you right into setting and engross the reader in the story. As in all of his books, he always has great villians and that is the fun part of the book.

The Bones in The Cliff

This is one of my favorite books. It was one of James Stevenson's books. I think he is a pretty good writer. I like how he worded the whole book. He really makes things interesting. There really wasn't anything I didn't like about his book. It isn't a very long book either, that's something I like. I like the types of book that are interesting but not a very lengthy book. Most of the books I've read have been real long and don't get interesting. That's why I like books from Stevenson. I would recommend this book to anyone over any other book in the library.

This book was great. It was the best and it was a very great thriller. If a hitman was after me dad I don't think I would be as brave as Pete!

Except for Martha Grimes, I don't usually go in for English mystery series, the sort of thing with continuing characters and starring a Scotland Yard investigator, nor have I read any others in this series. But I can see why this novel was voted a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and why it was nominated for both the Edgar and the Agatha.

Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid has been divorced for twelve years, his life is ticking right along, and he has a nicely developing romance with his sergeant, Gemma James. And then he hears from his ex-wife, Victoria, now a professor of modern English poetry at Cambridge, who has been researching a biography of Lydia Brooke, who died in what Victoria has come to believe are suspicious circumstances a few years before. She wants Duncan's help, and he agrees, to Gemma's consternation. Sounds like a pretty routine plot, doesn't it? It's not, believe me. Where most writers in this genre concentrate on the plot, with characters who are less than three-dimensional, or (again, like Martha Grimes) develop wonderful characters but tend to stint the mystery itself, Crombie succeeds very well at both. Duncan and Gemma and Victoria all come alive, as do the supporting players, and you won't guess at the solution to the mystery until the denouement, either. By the end of the book, Duncan's life has become permanently more complicated, and I want to know what happens next! (Obviously, I'm going to have to go back and read the first four books in this series before tackling the sixth one.)

Deborah Crombie gives a nice comfortable mystery story with several detours for one to ponder. Characters are very interesting people. This story was strange but well written. It kept my interest. Kincaid and Gemma's relationship is moving along nicely. On to the next.

So how can an author keep the readers interested in the two main characters after they become romantically involved with each other? For Deborah Crombie, it is easy. Bring in Duncan's ex-wife with a several-year-old murder masquerading as a suicide, her 11 year-old son, another murder, and still tie in Duncan and Gemma's explorations of their new relationship. This is a book about shattered dreams, new expectations, surprise revelations, and distorted relationships.

DREAMING OF THE BONES is, at times, funny, extremely sad, touching, and infuriating. It is Crombie's most emotionally complex book yet. I couldn't put it down and read it cover-to-cover in one sitting. Enjoy!

A supremely intense book that is a fast read except for the convoluted, chemically induced prose that suggests that the pumped up state that drives people to sacrifice everything in pursuit of being the best --- ever. Be ready to re-read sections as you are caught off balance, without ever falling of the paceline of the mystery that unravels. The story has elements of cyberpunk in the pace and prose that the most hardcore Gibson or Stephenson fan will enjoy this, even in the absence of nothing more technical than a hyper-tricked out bicycle in a chapter about a stage that takes place in the velodome.

An excellent introduction to the attraction of professional bicycling racing, the monotony and the glory or surviving. It also captures the team dynamics of professional cycling, that most are hard pressed to explain in an obviously individual sport. The author clearly knows his cycling history and peppers the story with vignettes that add color and tradition to the classic sport. The author has done his research and the extrapolation of advances in sports medicine seem plausible and frightening. A subplot involving a female detective is insufficiently developed but thankfully doesn't distract from the main story.

If you have a cycling fan in your life, get this book for her or him right away.

there's nothing wrong with it, its just very limited.
Don't expect much conrete information, but it does
cover the basics of faunal analysis.

A very brief synopsis of what zooarchaeology is capable of. Very good for an inexperienced beginner.

A great book because I love anthropology, archaeology, and ethnobotany!

This book gives a great overview of archaeological techniques during excavactions and tells how archaeologists determine age, sex, climate, etc.. based on just the bones!

Then Rachham goes on to explain how the animal bones can tell us about early Homosapiens.

Short book though, only 65 pages (small print so that's okay!) Great pictures!

Although the subject matter of this book is very exciting, this is not (as the blurb text has it) a "vivid picture of early marine mammal hunters". Instead it is a fairly dry survey of archeological sites relevant for the first peopling of North-America, with lots and lots of attention paid to stone projectile points. Certainly, the book is sound and thorough, but it only becomes really interesting in the last 12 pages or so, where we finally get the promised "revolutionary archeological synthesis". Dixon argues that the first inhabitants of the Americas where not - as orthodox archeology has it - big game hunters who came across the Bering land bridge but people dependent on a marine economy, who navigated along the coast (probably as early as 13,500 BP) and from there on gradually and at different times moved landinward along river courses. Unfortunately the book stops there. Still, if you are looking for a thorough outline of current archeoligical research in the subject matter at hand plus a tentative new insight, this book is allright.

Bones, Boats and Bison provides an excellent overview of current thinking about the peopling and occupation of western North America to ca. 8,000 years ago. The book synthesizes a broad array of literature, making it a valuable resource for professional archaeologists. However, the book's greatest strength may be its accessible writing style. Avocational archaeologists, interested members of the public, and students will find this text both highly informative and refreshingly judicious in its use of jargon. The book would make a good text for a "Peopling of the New World" or "Paleoindian Archaeology" course, and it could also be profitably excerpted for various regional archaeology classes (e.g. "Plains Archaeology" or "Alaskan Archaeology.")

Nine of Dixon's ten chapters are straightforward data-oriented chapters on key "peopling" topics and regional Paleoindian prehistory. These data are important, and synthetic texts like this one are helpful to those unable to keep up with the ever-expanding "peopling" literature. In Dixon's final chapter, he presents his model for the peopling of the New World (ca. 13,500 years ago and via watercraft). Certainly some will disagree with Dixon's interpretation, but (a) Dixon is careful to point out that his interpretations are speculative, and (b) after painstakingly outlining the data in the preceding chapters, Dixon earns the right to propose whatever model he likes.

I'd love to say this is is a great book.But it isn't. Go into a large public library, and if they have a section on canoeing the chances are you'll find a copy of Path of the Paddle by Bill Mason

I can't be the only person who learned to paddle an open Canoe by reading this book. With a library copy stuck in a plastic bag and resting on the hull, I bruised my knees and my ego trying to make 16ft of uncooperative fibre glass do the things in the diagrams. If it hadn't been for the photographs that equated canoeing with stunning wilderness scenery and beautiful campsites in remote places, I would probably have thrown the book away and retreated to my Kayak.

Bill mason did more to popularise the Open canoe than anyone else. His position is unique, since there is no one with a comparative influence on the art of kayaking. When he died, the British canoe union dedicated a chapter of its hand book to him, a film festival and scholarship were set up in his memory in Canada, and even now, when modern writers of books on the sport of open canoe paddling, like Slim Ray, disagree with what he said, they do so with a with a genial reverence that is rarely found in paddling circles.

Since Mason was such an important figure in my private mythology, I approached Bill Ruffan's biography with mixed feelings. To deal with myths is a difficult task, and Mason was many things to many people: the Author of Path of the Paddle, the maker of other films that were successful, a husband , father and friend.

The dust jacket and subtitle seemed to suggest that Raffan had taken the logical course and chosen to use Mason the paddler and his relationship with the tradition he came to embody as the unifying theme.

Instead the book is a rather logical and thorough attempt to cover everything. Ruffan, as Biographer, has used Mason's career as a film maker to hold his narrative together, and the result is a book that reads like an extended portfolio of a film maker's life. While those films were highly praised, and at least six of them are "about" canoeing, there is precious little about Mason the paddler. And outside of Canada, Bill Mason will be remembered most as the man who paddled rivers in an open canoe and indirectly taught thousands to follow him.

At the end of the book I did not know what it was like to go down a river with him. There are almost no stories about Mason as river traveler from someone else's perspective. There is nothing from the students he worked with on camp. There is little from Paul Mason on what it was like to be the very competent son of a paddling legend. I was not expecting to finish the book relatively ignorant of where Mason got his style and terminology from: it's mentioned briefly, but this subject, Bill Mason's position in terms of the tradition he came to represent, which the book's subtitle claims the book is about, is brushed over quickly.

All in all a disappointment. And an education. Watters couldn't find a publisher for his life of Blackadar: Never turn back. Yet "Never turn back" is a far better biography than Fire in the Bones

To canoeists, nature artists and film makers, Bill Mason stands out as an icon "The man in the red canoe". The book reveals what drove the man to live his art and the demons that haunted him. Necessary reading for any canoeist and nature film maker