I paid 25 cents for this book and it was the best quarter I ever spent. This book grabs you at the beginning and does notlet go of you to well after you are done reading it. The subject matter is so topical that the 22 years from original press does not matter at all. Buy it used, find in in the library, or if you have money to burn buy it from a Zshop. You won't be disappointed.

Readers of Frederick Forsyth, Jack Higgins and Tom Clancy must get their hands on this brilliantly written thriller of a potential nuclear catastrophe in NY city. This book seems especially plausible today and adds to the impression. The characters are believable and the plot unfolds superbly, no let-ups or loose strings! A must read for all thriller readers, you will not be disapppointed. I read this book at a stretch and it is at the top of my all-time favorites list (and I've read quite a few thrillers!)

The prospect of an event is everyone's worst nightmare. Yet it is precisely what the think tanks responsible for national security have on their agenda, and have for years...what to do...if. The prospect was so daunting that the US and USSR for decades pulled out all the stops to insure that a nuclear explosion would never be initiated at the expense of either side, yet ironically devised every diabolical delivery vehicle, intellectual platform and system capable of destroying NY or MOSCOW in a NY minute. Now it is horribly realistic, save the inability to acquire and successfully detonate one (but would need several to probably assure that a success would be achieved, notwithstanding discovery of one or more attempts)Fanaticism is unpredictible. Can you match unpredictibility with effective unpredictibility? An extraordinary look into a fictional story which we should hope never strays from that genre.

I had this book as a textbook for my World Literature class, and I can tell you - this is a very good book for studies. It's got a good collection of authors in a broad area of ages and cultures.

After taking an art history class, I found this book to be very handy in many ways, although if preparing for an AP test, it does leave some major works of art out. I found using The Annotated Mona Lisa, and Janson's Art History also helped majorly in preparing for the AP test.

Marilyn Stokstad has put together a real masterpiece of art history with her book, Art History. In collaboration with Bradford Collins, and with contributed chapters from Stephen Addiss, Chu-tsing Li, Marylin Rhie and Christopher Roy, this large volume published by noted art publishers Henry N. Abrams, Inc. is deserving of pride of place on any art bookshelf.

The scope of this work is as broad as is the expanse of human history. Indeed, the first chapter begins with a survey of prehistoric art and prehistory. Spanning all the ancient cultures, there are chapters devoted to the art of the ancient Near East, Egypt, the Aegean, Etruscan and Roman art, Christian, Jewish and Byzantine art, Islamic art, the art of India, China, Japan, the Americas and Africa. And from there, it gets complicated!

This book tackles all the issues of art: philosophical considerations (the relationship between art and reality, and the meaning and importance of beauty in art), focus on artists in general and in particular, society's relationship to art, including the role of the patron, the importance of museums, and an investigation that goes behind the phrase, 'I know what I like.'

'Art history, in contrast to art criticism, combines the formal analysis of works of art--concentrating mainly on the visual elements in the work of art--with the study of the works' broad historical context. Art historians draw on biography to learn about artists' lives, social history to understand the economic and political forces shaping artists, their patrons, and their public, and the history of ideas to gain an understanding of the intellectual currents influencing artists' work.'

In addition to presenting a history of art, Stokstad and her contributors also present an introduction to various aspects of art appreciation, without with art history loses much meaning. Each chapter has an explanation of the techniques that were developed and important during the time under examination (for instance, lost wax casting, glassamking and Egyptian faience, Japanese woodblock technique, and Islamic carpet making, among many others, are illustrated in detail to enhance the knowledge and appreciation of the finished art works). Each chapter and time period also has a section entitled Elements of Architecture, which include discussion on elements from pyramids to skyscrapers and much in between.

The text is clear and concise, carefully explaining technical terms when they are used, and then using them sparingly. Every page is a visual feast, with full colour plates of photographs of paintings, sculpture, artists, locations, or architectural examples in great form, as Henry N. Abrams, Inc. publishers are famous for doing. There are literally thousands of illustrations, as there are often many per page; almost no page is without one, and the book is nearly 1200 pages long.

As an aid for those who will use this book for more scholarly purposes, there is an extensive bibliography in the back, in three classifications of listings -- general surveys and art history references, a selected list of art history journals, and then a chapter-specific directory of further reading for each art topic/period. Additionally, it has after the bibliography as Website Directory of Museums, which includes museums in every state in the United States and most major museums around the world. The index includes listings by artist, period, topic, and particular works of art.

This book has been intended to be useful as a text for a course in art appreciation, but also designed to be a joy to read for the casual reader who might not want an academically rigourous presentation. As Stokstad says in her preface, the intention was make this book itself a work of art, and in that task she has succeeded admirably.

This book is simply wonderful. It is indeed physically ponderous (this 2nd edition is one very, very large book, not two slipcased books as shown in some illustrations). However, its content easily compensates for its considerable bulk. All historical periods of art history are chronicled, with copious illustrations well-produced and nearly all in color. The text is incisive and easy to follow, yet never boring.

I recommend this book to any and all art lovers, whether beginners, advanced students, or just those who desire a comprehensive reference for library or home use. I personally consider this publication a better choice than the otherwise excellent Janson "History of Art" for most readers-- the writing is just more user-friendly, in my opinion (and the content is more inclusive, especially regarding non-Western art).

Though very short, this little book is packed with useful facts about armoured vehicles , though limited only to a single photogaph. It is also a shame that it does not feature some of the more specialized vehicles such as self-propelled guns and engineering vehicles. For more detailed study, readers may invest in the recognition guide also by Jane's which features a wider selection of vehicles.

This book is an excellent piece of reference material, it has not only all current main battle tanks, but also almost all armored cars and APCs in military service. Information is in-depth, though it seems to wander from time to time. Pictures are good, no black and white fuzzy shots, and lots of performance data for the size. That is another thing, although it does not detract from the reading experience, the book is literally tiny, about 3"x5". Once again a great book, solid content, small package, its $6.40, buy the book!

This book is a great source when you need to know something quick and fast about any combat vehicles all you have to do is take out this book. The pictures are in color and unbelievably realistic. This book is pocket size which is very convienant when you need a portable source for combat vehicles.If you need to know about combat vehicles this is a perfect book for you.

Combat Aircraft is a great book.It was one of the first military reference books that I bought.It works great at air shows or just to thumb through it in your spare time(which I like to do).It fits nicely in your pocket and still has the quality of the big books.If you want to look up a bomber,helecopter,or a fighter this is a real handy book.

This is a handy reference to have when reading tales of aviation adventure in WW2. The book itself is small, smaller than those yellow 'used-car value' books, and because of its lack of size it doesn't go into the variants of any particular airplane. What you get is 3 paragraphs of text about a plane, a photograph so you can visualize the plane, and a list of technical specifications such as engine, armament, rate of climb, etc. On the upside, just about every airplane is listed, including those used in the Spanish Civil War. On the downside, you don't get too much depth about each airplane's sub-variants. I feel that if they had made the book itself a bit larger, Jane's would have been able to include a lot more material. Still, there's enough information there to make you feel comfortable with the airplane type and allows you to understand whatever passage you were reading in the WW2 story that prompted you to refer back to this book in the first place.

This is a great book for the person that loves aircraft but doesn't want to carry around a ten pound book. It has a picture of every aircraft it describes. There is two full pages dedicated to each aircraft. All in all it is nice and handy book to have around.

What a book..."The Book of life." Why it's a modern cartoon book of paleontology. Though its wonderful life-like illustrations and tree-of-life charts are delivered as scientific facts, they are simply graphic theories that illustrators doll up into hypothetical reality. If you like science and fiction, here is a book for you. The realistic pictures belie the text, which says: "We do not even know how to conceptualize, much less to draw the worldview that would place Homo sapiens into proper relationship with the history of life."

Its authors caveat is that "science can only operate as a work in progress without perfect knowledge, and we much therefore leave a great deal out from ignorance --- especially in a historical field like paleontology, where we must work with the strictly limited evidence of a very imperfect fossil record." It's that fossil record, that the book presumes is accurate in its layer-by-layer record through time, that requires scrutiny. The oldest fossils are found in the bottom layers and the youngest in the top layers of rock, but little or no evidence is presented to provide skeptical readers information they can decipher for themselves as to the accuracy of fossil dating by rock layers. Are we to believe, without exception, that the fossil record is progressive from bottom to top? What about fossilized trees that protrude through millions of years of time? They are conveniently omitted. Michael Benton of England's Bristol University, one of the book's contributors, says "All the periods in the geological time scale receive their names in recognition of obvious changes in the fossil record." Yet, to the contrary, Benton adds, "the history of Earth's crust has been far too violent to preserve much more than a random sample."

Its general editor, Stephen Jay Gould, is magnanimous in his promotion of a single theory of man's origins, from monkeys he and most other fossil hunters say.

There may be missing pieces to the paleontological puzzle, but the bone diggers cliam they have finally filled in the evolutional blanks and can conclusively attest to the idea that life evolved from simpler single-celled organisms into modern man. The book's most ardent opponents are taken head on by Gould: "The lack of fossil intermediates had often been cited by creationists as a supposedly prime example for their contention that intermediate forms not only haven't been found in the fossil record but can even be conceived." But Gould holds a trump card. He says: "a lovely series of intermediary steps have now been found in rocks.... in Pakistan. This elegant series, giving lie to the creationist claims, includes the almost perfectly intermediate Ambulocetus (literally, the walking whale), a form with substantial rear legs to complement the front legs already known from many fossil whales, and clearly well adapted both for swimming and for adequate, if limited, movement on land." Oddly, the book never shows a drawing of Ambulocetus, but does have an illustration of a skeleton of a 400-million year old fish with a small underside fin bone the authors claim "must have evolved" into legs in four-legged animals. Man's imagination is not found wanting here. Out of millions of fossils collected and stored in museums, is Ambulocetus the main piece of evidence for evolutionary theory?

Richard Benton says that Charles Darwin had hoped the fossil record would eventually confirm his theory of evolution, but "this has not happened," says Benton. Darwin hoped newly-discovered fossils would connect the dots into a clear evolutionary pattern. The book attempts to do that with its fictional drawings of apes evolving into pre-humans (hominids) and then modern man. Yet the book is not without contradictions. It says: "It remains uncertain whether chimpanzees are more closely related to modern humans or to the gorilla."

The horse is shown as evolving from a small, four-toed to a large one-toed animal over millions of years. There are different varieties of horses, yet there is no evidence that a horse ever evolved from another lower form of animal, nor that horses evolved into any other form of animal.

Another evolutionary puzzle that goes unexplained in the book is the pollination of flowers. How did bees and flowers arrive simultaneously in nature? What directed the appearance of one separate kingdom of life (insects) with that of another?

The book describes 6 1/2-foot millipedes and dragonflies with the wing span of a seagull, but gives no explanation for them. Life was unusual in the past and not all forms fit evolutionary patterns. Consider the popular supposition that life evolved from the sea onto land. That would make more advanced forms of intelligence land bearing. But the aquatic dolphins defy that model, since they are among the smartest mammals.

The book maintains an "out of Africa" scenario for the geographical origins of man, but recent fossil finds in Australia challenge that theory and even the book's authors admit that "a single new skull in an unexpected time or place could still rewrite the primate story." Consider Java man (Homo erectus), once considered the "missing link" and dated at 1.8 million years old. Modern dating methods now estimate Java man to be no more than 50,000 years of age, a fact that was omitted from this text.

Creativity, invention and language are brought out as unique human characteristics. Yet the true uniqueness of man is not emphasized. Humans biologically stand apart from animals in so many ways. Humans can be tickled whereas animals cannot. Humans shed emotional tears, animals do not. The book does not dare venture beyond structure and function, beyond cells and DNA, to ask the question posed by philosophers --- does man have a soul? The Bible speaks of a soul 533 times, this "book of life," not once.

Gould's temple is science. He calls the scientific method "that infallible guide to empirical truth." Science works by elimination. It can only work from experiment to experiment, eliminating what is not true. It can say what is probable, it can never say what is true. Gould appears to begrudge the shackles of science by stepping outside its boundaries in overstating what it can accomplish. Whereas creationists await the day they will stand in judgment before God, for the evolutionists Gould says "Someday, perhaps, we shall me our ancestors face to face." Imagine, standing there looking at a man-like monkey skeleton.

One cannot fault the flaws in this book. After all, it was written by highly evolved apes.

You would have expected more time and detail to the ermergence of the nervous system and the Cambrian Explosion. A more up-to-date section on human evolution (no mention of Ardipithecus Ramidus) but on the whole the book is a good synthesis of the state of the knowledge in this field.

This singular book gives a very nice popular overview of the state-of-the-art in paleontology, chronologically covering everything from the Archean to the evolution of man. It is a beautifully illustrated and well-written book, although the text is perhaps sometimes a bit too technical and dense for the paleontological novice.
And please don't buy some creationists' claims that this is science fiction. The contents of this book is based on material from thousands of scientific articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals such as "Nature" and "Science", representing the fruits of the hard labour of paleontologists from all over the world. And the fossil record, even if it is convincing in itself, is far from the only support for evolution. Independent evidence for evolution can also be found in biogeography, development, molecular analyses (gene DNA, junk DNA, mtDNA etc), anatomical analyses, and even field observations of new species evolving. This large amount of evidence is why evolution is considered an established and undisputable fact. Of course, if one rather than facts wants comic book fantasies such as humans coexisting with dinosaurs and evil scientists conspiring to hide the truth, then one should look for creationist books instead. Or comic books.

I picked this book up in Smithsonian Gift Shop. It is pocket sized and has 1 page on about 220 species. Each page has a description of the snake and a good (but small) color photo. It then gives a brief blurb about average size, distribution, habitat, diet, breeding and similar species. Overall, a nice little book - well worth the [money]. You won't get much detail on any individual species, but there are some neat facts on the overview pages. Well worth it for someone with a basic interest in various snakes around the world -- even if just for the photos. Don't expect a lot of new info. While there are not too many details, they seem to have most of their facts right.