This book is usefull to birders and listers in delineating how to seek out some of the more unusual avian visitors to the US. At times though you wonder if the information provided would truly help you "get" the bird.

While there is something here for everyone, there is also info that people won't want. The choice of limiting the scope of the book to the lower 48 is interesting. It makes all the locations (relativly) accessable. It also means that some birds which are included (like Ross' Gull) are difficult to pin down in the lower 48 (they can point to no pattern of occurence) but are definitly finadable in North America (Churchill, Canada in this case).

The rarity of the 100 birds varies greatly. There are many birds which are so rare that no pattern of occurence can be given, while others are quite regular in certain areas (ie Pacific Golden-Plover). The book is most usefull for the rare birds which show clear patterns of occurence (like Tuffted Duck in the San Fransico Bay Area or Cook's and Stejneger's Petrels of the California coast). This book is just usefull for listers. Each description includes information on ID, which can be very difficult to find on some of these rare species.

Is this book a must have? No. But for many birders, who seem to lust after every bird book on the planet, this book is a usefull addition to a personal collection.

This book should be called "College majors in the environment". I am a college graduate with a social sciences degree, and the book was not of any help to me. It does not cover the job search, and gives only a few, obvious contacts (such as the EPA). Each chapter is written for a specific degree, and what can be done with that degree, all of which are life or physical sciences. Im sure the book is very helpful if you have a degree in biology, forestry, chemistry, meteorology, etc. But for those of us with less scientifically specific degrees, this book is not too helpful unless you are willing to go back to school for four more years after reading it.

Covers all types of careers, plus includes detailed job forecast information, salary data and each section includes a summary of how to obtain addional career information as well as the education required. The book also includes extensive reference material such as professional organizations for each job.

If you had to pick one volume to capture some of the greatest thinking on wilderness, this is probably your single best choice. Almost all of the key ideas and influential writers are included. In fact, for most readers, there is probably too much here ! Over 40 wonderful, dense, and thought-provoking articles from all eras of wilderness thought !! 7 of the contributions are new to this volume.

The title of the volume refers to the recent challenges to the idea of wilderness, and therefore the book starts with the received notion of wilderness. There are wonderful selections from well known U.S. wilderness writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Bob Marshall, and Aldo Leopold. There are also important ideas from Jonathon Edwards, Teddy Roosevelt, and Sigurd Olsen -- each representing important components of the wilderness idea such as spiritualism, redemption, sacred american virtues of the frontier, etc.

Then J. Baird Callicott, William Cronon and an assortment of postmodern and postcolonial scholars take this 'romantic' notion of wilderness to task. The idea of wilderness is seen as dualistic, ethnocentric, racist, and an attempt to 'freeze frame' nature. Defenders of the wilderness idea then include Reed Noss, Dave Foreman, and others. To some this debate is now a little weary, but it was a high profile and contentious discussion that is still doing the rounds today.

There are also some hidden gems in this volume, and it is to those that I return most readily. Some examples are Fabienne Bayet's story from the Aboriginal communities of Australia, Jack Turner's call for the wild, Gary Snyder's more recent reflections on Turtle Island, and Tom Birch's piece on the incarceration of wilderness. These are cutting edge ideas that are taking many of today's wilderness thinkers beyond the postmodern debate into tackling questions of ecological restoration and the role of wilderness management.

In summary, a solid and thorough discussion of the idea of wilderness. For those of us living and working in the U.S., wilderness is a crucial part of what it means to be American - the ideas in this volume deserve a large readership. But, don't expect to read from cover to cover - this is a collection to which you will continue to return and find great insight and delight.

This is a useful sampler of wilderness philosophy. It's well balanced account of American debate of wilderness and what "wilderness" and "natural" really mean. It contains influential authors such as Aldo Leopold, William Cronon and John Muir. It also has some important reports relating to the history of wilderness management like the "Leopold Report". I've been using it as a starting point for research and it has been a good spring board for finding good authors and diversity of opinion.

How did the Quakers (intentionally or not) and the major foundations (quite intentionally) create a disrupted Catholic church in the 1960s? Dr. Jones uses his significant research ability and powerful writing skills to craft a very convincing argument. Rich foundations, working under a 501(c)(3) cloak, funded research into an "aesthetically acceptable" contraceptive to market to Catholics. This issued in the estrogen-progesterone pill, which was shilled by a Catholic physician, John Rock. At the same time, Fr. Hesburgh and other academics, hungering for the foundations' research money, set up Notre Dame and other universities as centers of dissent from traditional Christian (not just Catholic) teaching on artificial contraception.

The description of the destruction of Philadelphia's inner city by block-busting, intentionally engineered by East-coast liberals, is worth the price of the book.

How did Charles Curran disrupt Catholic U? Why was block busting so effective in our inner cities? Why do we have so many gross movies? What ever happened to the Legion of Decency? How did we change from a nation under God to one where the only thing that government can't promote is religion? Where did the Supreme Court get its ideas? Where was the Catholic Church during the culture battles of the '60s? E. Michael Jones, the editor of Culture Wars magazine, went into archives of the Philadelphia archdiocese, focused on the role that John Cardinal Krol played in many of those battles, and based largely on primary sources, comes up with insightful answers to show how the revolution of the '60s transformed this country.

... but let's face it, that's over 20 years ago now. Back then you had to look _really_ hard to find anything with even a glimmer of a hint of tips on picking, or (gasp!) practical uses.
Michael's later books in the "Medicinal Plants of the" -series got steadily better, with the "Medicinal Plants of the Pacific West" being the crown of the trio, beating _all_ the other practical guides out there with a very wide margin.
Sure, buy this one, if you live in the Mountain West - as likely as not you won't find anything else as good on the plants in _your_ region.
Buy it, too, if you're a die-hard Michael Moore -fan. His writing was entertaining back then, too.

But if you don't live out there, or don't yet know Michael Moore's writings, go get the Pacific West book instead. And wait for the revision of this, his oldest book. It _should_ be out one of these years.

I've got to say that although I've never read the book and am at a loss to explain what it is about, this is a monumental achievement in the field of bookwriting, specifically bookwriting about plants that are medicinal, and it is the definitive book about plant medicine for people in the mountain west and a must have for all botanists and other plantpeople, whether or not you know anything about medicine, plants, the mountains, or the west, and you should buy this book as soon as you possibly can, for your life may depend on it, because if you are out in the wilderness and get sick you need to know how to heal yourself, and since there are no pills in the woods you need this book to tell you how to make them out of the plants that surround you, for if you don't, you could die of the sickness you have, but if you are in the east or in the west but not in the mountains you should seek out another book as well because this one is specific to medicinal plants of the mountain west, meaning that it only mentions plants that are medicinal that grow in the mountains of the west, but this is a wonderful book for all ages to learn more about nature and medicine at the same time, and I highly recommend it.

This book does have good pictures. ....I bought this book hoping for much more. I am a huge fan of the womens game in America, and I know many of the players, but this book does not do them justice. The player biographies are about half a page for most, and they are not all profiled in-depth. The superstars are, but the lesser known players barely have a paragraph. ....It is only about 15 pageas of reading, the rest of the 48 pages are pictures.

The photographs of the women from the American World Cup are awesome! There is a summary on each player which is really cool! I especially liked Kristine Lilly's story because she's my favorite player. I loved the signatures of each player on the inside cover!

Each of these essays slows down time while fishing for steelhead, condenses time in a Lake Superior fall bird migration, turns on the time-lapse camera of glacial time and rekindles the time-suspended fun of playing in the waves. Van Stappen's naturalist eye and poetic style draws his reader in. A writer for Wisconsin Outdoor Journal and 1996 Pippistrelle Best of the Small Press Winner, Van Stappen's collection of Lake Superior essays puts this achievement in the osprey's nest: high above and easy to spot. In his essay about blueberry picking, his dry wit can be found: "After all, our opposable thumb and forefinger didn't develop just to flick coins into vending machines. We were berry pickers before we were tool users and are still berry pickers today." Each essay is also accentuated with paintings by Kate Wright. Wright is obviously inspired by Van Stappen's writing. The paintings interact superbly with each essay. In his essay, "Ephemeral Like Clouds", Van Stappen writes about clouds of mayflies (Aurora ephemeralis) appearing everywhere in his hometown, Washburn. He writes, "They didn't spread themselves evenly like some insectile fog, but instead clustered in discrete, cloud-like swarms resembling miniature thunderstorms. Within each swarm there was a continuous circulation of mayflies rising and falling as if in updrafts and downdrafts." Wright's painting depicts the whirligig desires of mayflies, flocking to a lit cabin window. Hunters, birdwatchers, cabin owners, and fishermen will love this book. Vacationers heading for Northern Wisconsin and Lake Superior can enhance their trips with it. Residents of the region will find these essays a warming balm in the long winter nights. With it's sense of timelessness, "Northern Passages", will hopefully make it into the shelves of libraries and family favorites.

Northern Passages: Reflections from Lake Superior Country by Michael Van Stappen

Reviewed by Matt Welter

If there is one word the sums up Michael Van Stappen's collection of nature essays, it is "timelessness". Each of these essays slows down time while fishing for steelhead, condenses time in a Lake Superior fall bird migration, turns on the time-lapse camera of glacial time and rekindles the time-suspended fun of playing in the waves. Van Stappen's naturalist eye and poetic style draws his reader in. A writer for Wisconsin Outdoor Journal and 1996 Pippistrelle Best of the Small Press Winner, Van Stappen's collection of Lake Superior essays puts this achievement in the osprey's nest: high above and easy to spot. In his essay about blueberry picking, his dry wit can be found: "After all, our opposable thumb and forefinger didn't develop just to flick coins into vending machines. We were berry pickers before we were tool users and are still berry pickers today." Each essay is also accentuated with paintings by Kate Wright. Wright is obviously inspired by Van Stappen's writing. The paintings interact superbly with each essay. In his essay, "Ephemeral Like Clouds", Van Stappen writes about clouds of mayflies (Aurora ephemeralis) appearing everywhere in his hometown, Washburn. He writes, "They didn't spread themselves evenly like some insectile fog, but instead clustered in discrete, cloud-like swarms resembling miniature thunderstorms. Within each swarm there was a continuous circulation of mayflies rising and falling as if in updrafts and downdrafts." Wright's painting depicts the whirligig desires of mayflies, flocking to a lit cabin window. Hunters, birdwatchers, cabin owners, and fishermen will love this book. Vacationers heading for Northern Wisconsin and Lake Superior can enhance their trips with it. Residents of the region will find these essays a warming balm in the long winter nights. With it's sense of timelessness, "Northern Passages", will hopefully make it into the shelves of libraries and family favorites.

Pyle grew up near an irrigation canal running through Denver and Aurora, Colorado. He has returned to this canal throughout his life, and in this book he tells their stories. Urbanization leaves these pockets of unclaimed land behind, and this book is a durable guide to one example. Coloradans will find Pyle's work especially relevant. At times, the author strays into a didactic zeal as he warns of the need to protect such places, but this is by far the lesser part of The Thunder Tree.

Starting from a personal viewpoint (but in no means limited by it) author Robert Michael Pyle eloquently writes of the importance of nature and of making a personal connection to the land and the natural world. Never preachy, he manages to gently urge the reader to look more closely at the local landmarks, wildlife and little details that make up their most familiar landscapes. I saw the landscape in my area with new eyes after reading this book.

This book has excellent photography, and a decent text. The writing does suffer somewhat from a flowery style in some (not most) parts. The book is not very long, there is a lot of white space on each page, and the excellent photography takes up a lot of space. Still worth reading. At the end is a good annotated bibliography. Geist is extremely respected in this field, and he does a good job of sharing his expertise.

I found this book "by chance" while searching through websites for an organization that promotes the idea of furthering human spiritual evolution through actions of respect,compassion and cooperation for and between all living beings.

The book gave me some foundation for my ideal, but (probably due to his profession) the author's style is wordy and, sometimes, over-thoughty. I do recommend it as valuable to people who understand and celebrate the connections of the human-animal-plant kingdoms, but with the caution that it is a demanding read.