Covers many topics in Mathematical Physics with great clarity. Highly recommended for those who are interested in a modern approach to Mathematical Physics.

A beautifully written book which should be entitled "quantum gravity primer for the practical man". Clear and self-contained, this book will serve aa a small survey of mathematical physics, giving the reader tools in particle physics and gravity. Excellently motivated topics. Compact enough to bring with you anywhere. The only thing it fails at is dicing a proper tomato.

I think the review above by J. Pullin puts it very well. This is a great book, and a good place to get started (it also provides suggestions for further reading). The authors have done a fantastic job, and I highly recommend the book!

This book is the result of a three-way collaboration between a scientist, a philanthropist and artist dedicated to producing a diorama depicting 300 years of New England's natural and cultural history.

The work, started in the late 1920, captures the essence of the Harvard Forest approach to environmental science, in which a solid understanding of the landscape history provides a basis for interpretation and conservation of nature.

Lifelike and detailed, the dioramas' historical and ecological approach remains relevant today as it becomes more apparent that changes in nature can only be assessed through long-term perspectives.

Many people do not realize that Harvard University has its own forest in New England. The forest has been a source of study for silviculture since its founding in 1907 for almost 100 years.

In the late 1920s, Harvard professor Richard T. Fisher joined with a philanthropist, Dr. Ernest G. Stillman, and talented artisans in the studio of Guernsey and Pitman in Harvard Square to develop a remarkable series of dioramas to capture conservation issues for future generations of silviculture students to study. These dioramas are the basis for the text and illustrations in this book.

New England was mostly ancient forest when the European settlers arrived. The small Native American population cleared only a modest portion of the forests, and used the game from the forests rather more than the timber. With immigration, New England rapidly became one big farm. So much for the original forests. Next, the New England farms were put out of business by richer, midwestern farms shipping their goods to the east. Within a few decades, new forests arose to cover the temporarily cleared and abandoned fields. With rapid growth in pines, a second wave of clearing occurred about a hundred years ago, leaving the forests to start to regrow again. The current hardwood-dominated forests are a result of this man-driven process. These experiences provide many lessons for understanding the impact that people have on forests, and for suggesting better practices for the future.

In one sequence of seven dioramas depicting the same place over time, you can see the whole historical process take place. I found it fascinating. I recognized in each image places that I had visited in New England. Now I can connect each site to what it represents in terms of environmental circumstances. That is like learning to read nature in the way I can read a book to get a message.

Today, we think ahead further (but probably not yet far enough) to consider the implications of our actions on future generations and other species. These dioramas show the importance of capturing the natural history of an area to begin to draw those lessons.

Another set of dioramas were designed to exemplify the conservation issues in New England forests, including loss of old-growth forests, habitat needs for wildlife, natural losses due to hurricanes, erosion from cutting forests, imported pests that feed on forests, and the impact of natural fires and fighting forest fires.

To me the most fascinating part was in the suggested good principles of forestry management. Each stage of forest growth and regrowth is displayed, along with what needs to be done for each stage. This reminded me of being asked about what to do by a client with very large holdings of forests in Maine a few years ago. If I had known about these dioramas, I could have given much more appropriate and valuable advice. I do feel quite a pang of regret at the missed opportunity, as a result.

The final section of the book shows the detail of how the dioramas were created.

The book also tells you about the history of the Harvard Forest and how to reach the Fisher Museum where the dioramas are displayed. I recommend the visit!

The reference to Bullough's Pond in the title of this review is for the highly regarded book that slightly preceded this one, about the ecological history of a man-made pond in Newton, Massachusetts. If you have not yet read that fine work, you have a real treat ahead of you. Anyone who is interested in understanding the rhythms between humans and nature can learn much from these two books.

Having read these two books, a new question occurs to me. At one time, forest fires were aggressively avoided in New England. The current view is that these are a natural process and should not be so aggressively countered. Where else do our views need to be shifted to reflect the long-term best interests of all?

How should use of forests and water reserves be adjusted to reflect optimum benefits for the next ten generations? How would our use change if this question were stretched to cover twenty generations? Do we even know how to think about these questions? Do we have plans to be able to learn how?

Overcome the presumption that only the here and now is important. What we do here and now is very important, but our decisions need to be much more independent of momentary needs and perspectives.

Perhaps microcosm is not quite the world, Forests Through Time offers a fascinating angle of insight into one aspect of the ecological development of New England. For a wider angle, one reads Bullough's Pond, and for the complete picture of the land in colonial times, Changes in the Land. This however is a fascinating view and well worth perusing.

I got this book when I started to deepen my faith and found it as a great way to learn the Bible. Every day, there is a story from the Bible that includes scriptures to look up that apply to the story and a fun thing such a verse to memorize or a profile on a person in the Bible. I have since passed it down to my sister and she reads it every day. A great book with great intentions.

I am in my early forties and just found a type of Bible that I really enjoy reading. It is not easy to read just one study a day since you want to continue reading. Would recommend to those who want to start reading the Bible.

I am a middle schooler and I read it every day. my church friends read it every day and like it. This is a very good way to learn the bible in 1 year and be able to read it year after year. my youth paster gave this to me because he thinks its a good way to read the bible. this book only does the main points of the bible but at the bottem of each scripture it show verse that are realated to that scripture.

A terrific book for all types of nature-loving readers. If you like pictures, they're here. If you want the best information available about African Wild Dogs and efforts to save them, it's definitely here. All people who are fascinated by wild animals will find this book to be a treasure. The photography is beautiful...It's the next best thing to being there. Leave this book on your coffee table and I guarantee that every guest will pick it up.

These animals truly are in trouble. McNutt does a good job explaining exactly why these dogs are endangered (or should be classified as such).

Like most books published under Smithsonian, this one is a keeper.

Hi, I'm an OAC biology student (that's grade 13 in Ontario) who is doing my ISP on African wild dogs. This is the best book I have ever found on wild dogs and probably the best ever written. I could not believe my luck when I found it. It is an excellent, coffee-table-type book with lots of beautiful pictures that you would like even if you were not specially interested in wild dogs. You will be surprised at how similar the dogs look in the pictures to your own dog.

Are you fascinated by wolves? Do you dream of going on safari in Africa? If you answer yes to either question then this book will be of interest to you.

I had the good luck to see a pack of 10 wild dogs while on safari in Botswana in September of 1998. Being a wolf enthusiast, I was very interested in the similarities and differences between the American grey wolf and the African wild dog. This book was in the library of each safari camp I stayed in so I had the pleasure of studying about the wild dogs while in their native habitat. As you'll learn from this book, wild dogs are extremely social, even more so than grey wolves, and very efficient, successful predators.

The photographs in this book are fantastic and the text is well written, well organized, and aimed at the general public rather than the scientific community.

The author continues his African wild dog research in Botswana. The fate of these fascinating predators is very precarious due to their small population and the relentless persecution by people, similar to that experienced by the grey wolf in America earlier this century.

The writing in this book is simply gorgeous. What a gift when a poet can be convinced to write prose, because each word is selected and crafted and inserted in each sentence as if its value were immeasurable. My only dismay at the end of this book was to discover that Mr. Haines is not a prolific writer (at least of books). Fewer and fewer people will have the view of the world that this author had-as a homesteader and trapper. We are blessed that he has shared this account of life at its most raw and simplest elements.

Haines is best known as a poet, and you can see it here--the ideas and descriptions are spare and powerful. He gets right down to flesh and bone, the essences of things: the people he's met, the traps set, stories heard, the bone-cold loneliness of the place, it's all right here to be read, as if everything superfluous has been chipped away and all we have left is the experience in itself, what the land has told the writer. For anyone who wants to see what a master can do with the English language, or who wants a glimpse of a land and a way of life the likes of which few will ever see again, here's your ticket.

It's THE book about Life in the Alaskan Wilderness. An absolute MUST for every Alska Fan!

If you own property in urban, suburban or rural settings, you should have this book. It's the definitive guide to understanding wildlife, common diseases, and problems they may cause, and how to effectively solve them.

The first few chapters explain how to prevent and identify wildlife problems - and the right questions you should ask before hiring a professional to help you. The book also explains what methods work - and ones that don't - to save you money. The most humane and effective methods are clearly explained.

The next 31 chapters each deal with specific animals: bats, crows, deer, mice, moles, pigeons, snakes, etc.

This is an excellent description of methods and techniques to use for the most commonly-considered "nuisance" species of wildlife. John Hadidian, the author, is both a wildlife enthusiast and a gardener, and he has edited a very balanced set of explanations on how to discourage wildlife when it has become a problem for a homeowner. The solutions are humane and can leave the homeowner proud that the situation was resolved peacefully. I ran a wildlife hotline with 50 volunteers frequently dealing with the public on these very issues, and this book was the reference the volunteers found most helpful.

One of the most comprehensive wildlife books to date. Really gives a good inside look into urban wildlife problems and how to deal with them in a humane manner that even a novice could follow

Beautiful pictures, touching and moving story. About the restoration of the wolves.

Beautiful pictures illustrates the many different wolves that were restored to yellowstone (#10, #9etc...). Illustrates the effort the yellowstone had to put in to restore the wolf to its natural habitat. Very interesting to the average wolf lover and those who are interested in what happened in the 1995 restoration of the wolves to yellowstoen.

This book brings you right into the experience of bringing the wolves back to Yellowstone where they belong! Find out the behind the scenes activity that brought the sight and sound of the wolf back after an absence of over 60 years. You'll never be the same after reading this. Excellent!!

Quinn, who grew up in one of the small suburban towns that dot the meadowlands, really captures the essense of this wilderness in the middle of the megalopolis. I never knew about how many people used (and still use) the meadowlands for hunting, trapping, fishing, etc.

While other authors deal with the cultural significance of something like the meadowlands, Quinn takes the position of a passionate naturalist and friend of the meadowlands, describing in detail wildlife, regional ecology and geology, history of the area and the many pressures the meadows face today.

A must if you're a fan of urban ecology, New Jersey, or just well-written nonfiction.

To all caring and compassionate environmentalists out there, Fields of Sun and Grass, the latest offering by gifted naturalist, writer, and artist John R. Quinn, is a glorious cry of victory via a remarkable portrayal of some of the most durable and stubbornly determined survivors in the faunal and floral kindgdom.

The setting is the New Jersey Meadowlands, a wild and reedy tract located a mere six miles west of New York's Times Square. It is considered by many as nothing more than a "toxic wasteland," but is in fact home to a dazzling array of often overlooked plants and animals. While there is little doubt that many of the life forms that once thrived here are long gone, many others remain, and these are the primary focus of this book. Many, many species are discussed; far too many to list here. Suffice it to say Quinn leaves no stones unturned.

The book has three central parts, respectively called "Yesterday," "Today," and "Tomorrow." Each covers a different time period in the ecological life of the Meadowlands. There also is an "Introduction," a "Starting Point," an "Epilogue," a bibliography, an index, and an interesting sort of "hands-on" chapter called "Exploring the Meadowlands." This will be of particular interest to anyone who lives within traveling distance of the region. It gives helpful and experienced advice on enjoyed the Meadowlands firsthand through boating, fishing, hiking, and the visiting of local parks.

Quinn's text is thorough, complete, and offered in a beautifully poetic yet pragmatic prose, making the read that much more pleasant and inviting. A memorable example can be found right at the beginning of the introduction-"Six miles-and ten thousand years-to the west of Manhattan's Times Square lies one of the grandest environmental paradoxes on Earth. Here, beneath a sun often obscured by smoky industrial exhalations, a river of many bends makes its way to the sea." It is peppered throughout with the occasional personal anecdote, like the touching retelling of an experience an eight-year-old Quinn had with his beloved grandfather in the summer of 1946 called "Grandpa and the Red Herring" (page 36). The paperback version is 348 pages in length, and much to Quinn's credit, a great deal of it is made up of his thoughtful and well-researched text.

The author's artwork is perhaps the aspect of the book that most effectively haunts you. It is simple black-and-white ink sketches, but there is an emotional complexity to each that is hard to describe, yet easy to appreciate. Quinn's clever focus on the wildlife while making sure to almost always include some image from man's industrial intervention does a marvelous job of hammering the book's point home. A glaring example of this can be found on pages 124 and 125, where we see a lone kestrel perched on the peak of a weed, while in the background looms the vague but unmistakable figure of a pair of tractors and a group of hard-hatted workers. Somehow the lack of colorization adds to the feeling of both positive and negative, of humankind's destructiveness (both intentional and inadvertent), and of the wildlife's determination to go on.

John Quinn is no stranger to the region, having been born and raised in the Village of Ridgefield Park, which rests on the Meadowland's northern edge. According to the author bio, he has published ten other books on nature and science. A potential reader can be comforted and assured by the fact that Quinn's experience and sincerity are deeply invested into every word and every drawing. In this age of the slipshod, assembly-line product, here we find an honest and lovingly crafted work by a man who genuinely cares about what he's doing.

As a proud and concerned naturalist myself, I strongly urge you to pick up a copy of Fields of Sun and Grass.

The first time I met John R. Quinn was a few years ago he was deeply involved in the gathering of stories that make up the Soul of the New Jersey meadows. His journalistic background was in control and he wanted to present as complete a picture as possible regarding the current controversey surrounding the future of the Meadowlands. At the time I was assisting the New Jersey Audubon Society by providing boat rides to conduct a migratory bird habitat inventory of the Meadowlands( published by NJAS and available to the public). We invited John to join us for a day on the River and he honored all of us by chronicling the trip in Fields of Sun and Grass. Now I can relive the personal experiences of that glorius day any time I want thanks to Johns eye for detail and his skill at turning a day of field research into a story about our adventure in the Urban Wilderness. Putting controveresy and advocacy aside I recommend this book to teachers througout the Hackensack River Watershed Everytime I take their students out on the Boat or go in to their classrooms to "talk to the children". As Riverkeeper I am contacted frequently by people who are requesting information about the Meadowlands thanks to John I have a ready reference and I have learned a lot about the estuary of the Hackensack that allows me to be a more effective advocate and a better Riverkeeper Captain Bill Sheehan Hackensack Riverkeeper Inc.

Despite the work focusing on Poland and Czech, this work is useful regardless of geography. Its premise is simple: States that are both democratic AND have market economies can still have sound environmental policy if they accept the principle of sustainable development. That is a lesson for all of Europe and this hemisphere. The data assembled in this work is fascinating and the interpretation of the very technical by the author (whose background is probably the social sciences) is nothing short of remarkable. He has blended the hard sciences and the social sciences together in a way that marks the best effort to have true environmental analysis.

I have seen Dr. Sutherlin speak in Europe in different conferences over the past four years. This exceptional work reflects a true dedication to undertanding sustainable development and environmental policy making in Poland and the Czech Republic. There is no work in print that captures the research and analysis of Sutherlin. This work should be required reading for all interested in Central European environmental issues.

As a member of the environmental movement in Central Europe, I was most pleased to find someone from the West that really understands what has happened in Poland and the Czech Republic since 1989. There is no comparison to what Sutherlin has accomplished in this directly written book. I hope that he follows this work with similar efforts. This book is useful for those in classes, in environmental organizations or those wanting to understand policy making in Central Europe.

This book has been a continuing source of information and guidance for 18 years now. Students and researchers in many different fields have used this book due to its breadth and detail of coverage. The book does require a fairly advanced mathematical background, but the authors do include a glossary for the reader lacking this.

Chapter one is an overview of differential equations and dynamical systems. All the concepts needed for a study of such systems are discussed in great detail and also very informally, stressing instead the understanding of the concepts, and not merely their definition. Some of the proofs of the main results, such as the Hartman-Grobman and the stable manifold theorems, are omitted however.

This is followed in Chapter 2 by a very intuitive discussion of the van der Pols equation, Duffings equation, the Lorenz equations, and the bouncing ball. Numerical calculations are effectively employed to illustrate some of the main properties of the systems modeled by these equations.

A taste of bifurcation theory follows in Chapter 3. Center manifolds are defined and many examples are given, but the proof of the center manifold theorem is omitted unfortunately. Normal forms and Hopf bifurcations are treated in detail.

Averaging methods are discussed in Chapter 4, with part of the averaging theorem proved using a version of Gronwall's lemma. Several interesting examples of averaging are given, along with a discussion of to what extent the bifurcation properties of the averaged equations carry over to the original equations. Most importantly, this chapter discusses the Melnikov function, so very important in the study of small perturbations of dynamical systems with a hyperbolic fixed point. A full proof that simple zeros of the Melnikov function imply the transversal intersection of the stable and unstable manifolds is given.

Chapter 5 moves on to results of a more purely mathematical nature, where symbolic dynamics and the Smale horseshoe map are discussed. The proofs of the stable manifold theorem and the Palis lambda lemma are, however, omitted. Markov partitions and the shadowing lemma are discussed also but the latter is not proven. The authors do however give a proof of the Smale-Birkhoff homoclinic theorem. A purely mathematical overview of attractors is given along with measure-theoretic (ergodic) properties of dynamical systems.

The (local) bifurcation theory of Chapter 3 is extended to global bifurcations in the next chapter. A very detailed discussion of rotation numbers is given but the KAM theory is only briefly mentioned. The main emphasis is on 1-dimensional maps, the Lorentz system, and Silnikov theory. The authors give a very detailed treatment of wild hyperbolic sets.

The book ends with a discussion of bifurcations from equilibrium points that have multiple degeneracies. The discussion is more motivated from a physical standpont than the last few chapters. But some interesting mathematical constructions are employed, namely the role of k-jets, which have fascinating connections with algebraic goemetry, via the "blowing-up" techniques.

The concepts in the book have proven to have enduring value in the study of dynamical systems, and this book will no doubt continue to serve students and researchers in the years to come.

Guckenheimer is one of my favourite book in nonlinear science. Another absolute reference. This books deserved to be milestone in nonlinear dynamics.

This book has clearly withstood the test of time in over 15 years of continuous publication. On my bookcase, it stands among my most treasured and well-worn classics of fluid mechanics and differential equations--Hirsch and Smale, Birkhoff and Rota, Chandrasekhar, Bachelor, Lamb, Landau and Lifschitz... It changed many of the unquestioned assumptions of many fields besides my own. It redefined the terms of many scientific debates. And, it changed my life.

I obtained Guckenheimer and Holmes' classic when it first came out in 1983. It was so clear, concise and intellectually engaging that it inspired me to wonder whether the system of equations I was studying for my Ph.D. research at the time--the governing equations of thermal convection at infinite Prandtl number (which govern plate tectonics in the earth's mantle)--might have a chaotic solution. Guckenheimer and Holmes outlined a clear methodology to find out the answer.

My advisor at the University of Chicago thought not. Only steady solutions could be admitted in the absence of external forcing due to the lack of momentum transfer--this belief was widely held at the time, despite certain oscillatory solutions found by Fritz Busse (then at UCLA) and chaotic solutions found in certain limiting cases by Andrew Fowler at Oxford.

In despair, I left my studies at Chicago to work as a Unix sysadmin at my undergraduate alma mater --Cornell, where (unbeknownst to me when I took the job) John Guckenheimer had just relocated from UCSC. Delighted to find him there, I sat in on his courses. Later, with his help, I wrote a proposal to NASA to support the completion of my thesis--with him and Donald Turcotte serving as my advisors.

The 3-year fellowship was approved, and during this time I demonstrated and published that thermal convection at infinite Prandtl number--a condition that pervades many planetary interiors including our own--is indeed chaotic in the absence of external forcing.

Prior to this, planetary convection codes primarily looked for steady state solutions. Since, numerical analysts in the field have upgraded to time-dependent models. The source of chaos at infinite Prandtle number I identified--the heat advection term--is now widely accepted as the source of what is now called "Thermal Turbulence" in planetary interiors.

The defense at Chicago was quite an event. Since my new advisors were flown in from Ithaca, you might say my thesis--The Nonlinear Dynamics of Thermal Convection at Infinite Prandtl Number--passed with flying colors. Someone at Chicago might disagree, but his opinion is irrelevant.

Demonstrating the many possible solutions to a single set of equations and showing how the choice of solution depends very sensitively on the rather poorly-constrained initial conditions of the earth--does render mantle modeling itself rather superfluous and indeed, scientifically suspect. However, many important professors who stayed in the field nonetheless continue to run their time-dependent mantle convection codes, and never cease to wonder at the fact that they all get different results. It's rather amusing, really.

When all that too has passed away, the truths so beautifully put forth in Guckenheimer and Holmes will remain. Like I said, it's a classic. Furthermore, being number 42 in its series, it's got to be the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. Was for me, anyway.