I spent my mornings from April 2001 to April 2002 reading each days entry in this book. I certainly learned quite a bit from it. I felt like Cliffy from Cheers some mornings at work. I enjoyed the book, but not every day was a winner. The story about the Crocodile attack on the Japanese troops in World War II was amazing.

The only disappointment was the neglecting of King Solomon, the bible mentions him as one of the greatest Natural Historians ever. Oh well, I'm pretty sure the author is an atheist anyhoo.

This is a sweeping theme. Plants have been of immeasurable importance all through the existence of mankind. The book is nicely printed with quite good photographs (although these fall short of being superb). The pictures are supported by brief texts, that touch on a wide body of classical, nordic and celtic mythology. A book of this kind needs an author that either has a superb command of language or an excellent grasp of the topic. Neither seems to be the case here.

A clear error that I spotted is with the "even ash". As the reader will know ash has leaves that are "odd pinnate compound". Finding a rare aberrant leaf (even pinnate) is counted to be lucky. The author quotes a verse that starts "Even ash, I do thee pluck, Hoping thus to meet good luck" but apparently failed to read this himself, instead coming up with the ... explanation "that plucking an ash leaf brings a boon". This sort of error does not inspire confidence in an author.

I must agree with the first reviewer, I too purchased this book with much anticipation and was sorely disappointed with it's lack of hard training fact. There is decent info from a few athletes but much of the training info of the more secretive elites are nothing but short biographies and anecdotal evidence akin to the dry packaged responses you get in most running mags.

Having been a running affectionado for 25 years, I eagerly anticipated this book. Sandrock has a great idea, running with and interviewing many distance greats from our time. He does manage to get "inside their heads" and that's of value. But much of this seems to be blatantly plagiarized out of old "Track and Field News" issues. No surprise T&FN does not include this in their book selections

I would agree with the other reviewers that this is by no means a training manual (ala Daniels or Coe). However, that doesn't change the fact that it is a very enjoyable book to read, covering legends of the past as well as more recent champions. If you are interested in marathoning, this book is particularly good, as most of the runners covered are marathoners.

Whilst the training plans will be of little use, I find this book a great motivator, and that's what every runner needs!

This book is good for one so out of date. However, it mentions two pioneers in the field of paleontology (Joseph Leidy, E.D. Cope), yet does not mention the fact that they worked for The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. The first dino skeleton ever displayed by Leidy (hadrosuarus foulkii) was displayed at the Academy. It is a sad day when you dicuss the history of paleontology yet neglect to mention the Academy.

This book is 16 years old and needs some updating but it also contains a large amount of valid and valuable stuff. It is interesting to compare it with newer books about dinosaurs and see how much more we know about our reptilian predecessors than in 1984. Dino fans, give this one a chance!

Most of the photographs are good and the distribution maps fair but somewhat dated. The editing is atrocious with many mistakes in spelling and grammar. The information on the species contained is dated, incomplete, or false. Even one of the photographs is misidentified. Book is overpriced for the quality