After just barely discussing Dr. McClintock's work in my genetics class, I just had to know more. This book is very insightful, and it discusses her work thoroughly. Her use of corn plants in the discovery of jumping genes (transposable elements). Truly an interesting topic and an incredible geneticist who's discovery has no doubt changed all of genetic research. This book gets a bit more in to detail than people may want for just background information. It includes some diagrams of her work, etc. A great book in all that I will add to my library.

This is an extremely useful field guide for lovers of wildlife in Australia. Many animals are nocturnal and leave only small clues to their presence. With this guide I have been able to sleuth out a number of previously unobserved species. The descriptions of tracks, scats and traces are clear and thorough and there are many useful photographs, illustrations and distribution maps.

This book is a fascinating collection of literary and historical references to rats. There are quotes, urban legends, comic book covers, movie synopsis, and lots more. My favorite is a photo of an ivory carving of a ratcatcher, with the rat escaping by climbing over him. If you have a horror of rats, you'll enjoy the book. The author herself seems fascinated but horrified with them. If you like rats as pets or just as interesting animals, you will find that the book leans heavily toward the horrific and sensationalistic. References to bitten babies and devouring hordes abound. There are positive references to rats as well, but they are in the minority, including a quoted paragraph from the Rats of Nimh. Positive references have obviously only been cursorily researched. There is, for example, no reference to the history of keeping domestic rats, stories of prisoners in the Bastille taming rats, mention of Jules Verne's(!) story The Adventures of the Rat Family, though much lesser authors are quoted for much less rat-oriented literature.

I admit it, I am facinated by rats. This is due in part to my owning terriers, the ultimate rat-dog (the Norway rat first showed up in the British Isles in 1714, and England is the "mother country" of almost every terrier breed). I enjoyed reading this book and picking up little snippets of information about our ratty friends. The information is presented in an interesting format and if you like rats (even secretly), give the book a read. After all, long after human's are extinct, the rat will still be thriving.

I actually read this book cover to cover, I'm still not sure how. Phillips work reads like one long rambling run-on never getting to a point. The entire book could be summed up by the following: "Mediation is good, litigation is bad" and "Mediators are great." If you read these statements you can throw the book away. It is a steady repetition of these themes told through less than interesting cases and accounts. This book oversimplifies the subject and has little in the way of concrete, applicable information.

I found this book to be an excellent guide to the topic of mediation. Concise, and very well written. Should be required reading for anyone looking into alternative dispute resolution methods.

If there is a major error in Tom Wolf's deeply researched work on the Sangre de Cristo mountains, it must be the chronic overestimation of human potential. He makes a case for a new sort of "management" of the mountain range, one that places control among locals. However, having evolved over millions of years without human assistance into marvelous things, mountain don't need management.

Perhaps what Wolf intends is to better manage the people who come to the mountains. That is a worthy goal, as long as the people to be managed are wielding destructive devices such as cars or chain saws. But if he means, as I think he does, that everybody who wants to take a walk in the mountains should pay five or ten dollars in "user fees", then I oppose him enthusiastically.

Such a course seems to me to be needlessly commercial, taxing and selling activities which are as basic and essential as breathing. He has doubts about wilderness status for the Sangres, because of the lack of revenue from so-designated land. But what is this foregone revenue to have been put toward? Management, in a word. He wants to take the levers of control out of the hands of what he calls the Iron Triangle (politicians, special interests, bureaucrats), and place them into the hands of a trust composed of local ranchers, community activists, forest rangers, shampoo tycoons, biologists, economists...some sort of Iron Polyhedron. This body would act sensibly when a crisis such as insect or disease epidemic arose. One can assume there would be controlled burns, controlled wood cutting (going under the euphemism "harvest"), controlled hunting (going under the euphemism "harvest"), and controlled entry into the controlled wilderness area.

Now, I have nothing against hunting or lumbering or even wildfires. All are necessary or desirable in their time. But the notion of the sand dunes being ruined because of increased hikers, or of valleys being inundated in a sea of elk droppings, or of forests being denuded by out-of-control herds of deer are far fetched. Similarly, Wolf's assertion that at the end of the last Ice Age, primitive hunters, without the use of guns or horses or sport utility vehicles, indeed without anything but "new flint technology", were able to drive into extinction 32 genera of post-Ice Age mammals strains credibility. Just as we should cast a jaundiced eye on any of society's plans to "save" nature, we also should guard against giving mankind too much of the blame for the ebb and flow of natural cycles.

Wilderness status for the highest reaches of the range simply protects it from the exploitation of the sort Wolf detail. If one can take any lesson from his account of the various follies visited on the range, it is that no plan can benefit the mountains as much as leaving them alone. And yes, I consider hordes of recreational users who are not shooting anything or cutting anything to be leaving the mountains alone. Crowds of people, if they ever do materialize in the roadless areas, will be as benign a presence as a herd of buffalo. And I'll gladly take 20 random flyovers by jet fighters in place of every No Trespassing sign put up by the so-called "Ranch for Wildlife" crowd. The former are thrilling and harmless, the latter oppressive.

One must take the hat off to Wolf for his monumental effort, however. Who would have thought so much could be written about a backwater, and that it could be linked in so many ways to the mainstream? A greater effort should have been made in the way of editing so as to correct mistakes such as on p.80, where he states "The Sangres stretch from the 42nd to the 41st parallel." These coordinates would put them in Wyoming, giving the lie to the title's claim that they are Colorado's. Also, on p.265 Steve McNichols is mistakenly named as the governor of Colorado in 1975. Dick Lamm was governor at that time. But these are trifling errors...