Once, all barrier islands were natural places where sand dunes and sea grasses, water birds and beach creatures flourished, undisturbed by human development. Matagorda Island still is. Part of a chain of five major barrier islands that shelter the Texas coastline from the Gulf of Mexico, Matagorda Island is the only one completely under public ownership. This guide to the island seeks to acquaint first-time visitors and seasoned naturalists alike with the natural wealth and ecological fragility of Matagorda. The book also tells the human history of Matagorda - the Karankawa Indians, European explorers, Civil War-era settlers, lighthouse keepers, and the U.S. Air Force, which used Matagorda for a bombing range during the 1940s and 1950s. There are appendices on plants, wildflowers, and birds as well as maps and line drawings

Once you own this book, give it a home on your nightstand so that you may leaf through the pages each night before drifting off to sleep. This will ensure you of dream-filled hours soaring over the villages, pastures, and beaches of Prince Edward Island.

If you're lucky enough to have ever visited P.E.I., you simply must have this book!

If you're one of the few who still have a trip to P.E.I. on their "to-do" list, once you view this book, P.E.I. will immediately occupy your #1 position.

I bought this book to use in my classroom as research material. It provides an excellent overview for student use in the upper level elementary school and middle school. Information covers a broad spectrum of topics, is very well organized and written at a level for the lay reader. The photographs, diagrams, and drawings are of excellent quality and provide a range of subject matter that will keep young people turning the pages. The book is printed on excellent stock, and appears to be able to withstand handling. I would highly recommend this book to other educators who want a reasonably priced refence book for the classroom.

If anybody asked me--describe St. Louis--I can now just hand them a copy of this book. Beginning with Pere Jacques Marquette and concluding with Gerald Early, 300 plus years of St. Louis are illustrated through various memoirs, stories, poems, essays and plays as told by St. Louisans (both well known and lesser known).

Not just mere public relations ad campaign for the region, the collection also confronts issues head-on that have plagued the region for quite some time. However many selections also remind us how many great aspects there are in this region to offer its citizens.

The introductions and bios for the individual authors also provide great context and insight to the pieces, as well as including many interesting tibits of information that even the most knowledgable St. Louisian wouldn't know. Kudos to Lee Ann Sandweiss and everyone at the Missouri Historical Society for assembling an anthology very worthy of anyone who "seeks St. Louis."

This book covers every aspect of Dendrobium culture, from the plant origins, biology, conservation, cultivation and hybridization.

The chapter on cultivation goes into great detail about growing Dendrobiums from seed including flasking and caring for the seedlings.

Approximately 175 pages are then devoted to photos and detailed information on 413 species of Dendrobium.

The Dendrobium family is very large and hard to generalize, making this book a big help in locating information about your specific orchids.

This book really help me to identify Dendrobium species and its relative like Epigenium and Flickengeria, almost all popular Dendrobium species from India, S.E Asia and some Pacific island included. Good color plate and description about plant origins and distribution. A must have book for Orchid lover.

Having grown orchids for more than 20 years, this book is outstanding in it's treatment of the genus Dendrobium. There are lots of superb features which are helpful the novice and the scientist. Particularly useful are the tables denoting geographic distribution, sectional division of like-groups of Dendrobs, and individual color-plates with information on hundreds of plants.

Must have for any serious grower. Can be a great coffee table book as well. Why did I just by one for a gift?... James Roberts --- Roberts Orchids

This book was written in 1979. The text and photographs were excellent, although the range maps were so small as to be useless, and the common names were the awkwardly academic types used in the first half of the last century. Supposedly, this book was updated in 1997. The text is still good, as are the photographs, but the common names still have not been corrected, the range maps are still too small, and over 70 new species that are now recognized from North America are missing from this book. This Audubon Guide is out-dated. Time to write a new one, with standard common names, modern taxonomy (drop the subspecies), and maybe some new photographs. Not recommended. Get the Peterson Guide. It may be a decade old, but its newer than this book.

The photos which illustrate this book are organized in such a way that one does not have to be familiar with reptiles and amphibians to make resonably accurate field identifications. For instance, the photographs of striped snakes are grouped together so that you can easily check for that matches the animal you have found.

The text and range map section gives much valuable information as to habitat and behavior as well as breeding and the size of neonates as well as adults.

This field guide is really interesting!!! It shows all reptiles and amphibians of North America! The photos are in full color and I've identified several herps with this guide without any difficulties!!! Although this field guide was made a while ago, it still looks it's been made in these days! It's good as national audubon society field guide to birds of western region, which is one of my favorites. I've had this book for nearly 2 years, and it still looks new as ever. The informations are very interesting if you read them. It's easy use, colorful and interesting. So if you're interested in American herps, get this guide right now.

A follow-up to the author's FIELD GUIDE TO GERMS, this is an introduction to all the unseen entities lurking in our environment and how we know what we know about them. The discussion of various chemical pollutants and disease organisms could have gotten really depressing if not for Biddle's quirky sense of humor. The alphabetical listing even includes such unquantifiable invisibles as God and Zeigeist. A surprising lot of science in an easy to swallow package. What more do you want?

Wayne Biddle deserves tremendous credit for this fun little book. In a highly readable and often highly amusing format he catalogues a "who's who" of "invisible" objects, organisms, ideas, and forces at work in every day life from allergens to burps, from carbon monoxide to dust, from gravity to mites, ozone to pheromones, quarks to wind.

Each entry gets a few paragraph to a few pages, often with intersting quotations from famous people on the subject, the history of the subject, and lots of other useful and often amusing information, though sometimes disquieting too. Did you know that some foods are "hot," that they are naturally more radioactive than others (Brazil nuts, thanks to the gamma-ray rich soil they are grown in, are 14,000 times more radioactive than most other fruits)? Did you know that 10% of our body weight is made up of bacteria? That cigarette smoke contains 1% carbon monoxide by volume (10,000 parts per million)? That a single transatlantic flight will expose a person to so much cosmic rays as to equal a whole-mouth dental X-ray series? That prions, small subviral "germs"," "can withstand boiling temperatures, X-rays, ultraviolet radiation, and sundry chemcial insults, like ten years in formaldehyde?" Oh yeah. What a wonderful world.

Not all of it is scary stuff though, and much of the invisible world, including such subjects as quarks, neutrinos, photons, water vapor, comet tails, and krypton are quite harmless to humans. Learn such interesting facts that the pheromones of the silkworm's moth is so powerful that a male moth can detect as little as one trillionth of a millionth of a gram per one thousandth of a liter! That quarks, the most basic bit of matter that can exist, are "point-particles," meaning they have no volume, and have a kind of charge, but negative or positive obut called "color" and having nothing to do with light! That of the four fundamental forces - electromagnetic force, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, and gravity - gravity is arguably the weakest, yet unlike the others perhaps there is no known way to switch it off, shield from its effects, reverse, release it, or otherwise mess with it! Neat stuff. Maybe it IS a wonderful world after all.

All in all a fun and informative book, highly recommended.

It is a heartwarming book about the many viruses, bacteria, and pests that have made life for homo sapiens interesting for thousands of years. Herein you can read all about mumps, measles, and malaria (if you want to read about the pleasant diseases) or plague, anthrax, and rabies (if you want to read about the unpleasant ones). Each has a fascinating story to tell.

What can you do with this book? Well, you can read aloud the descriptions of gastrointestinal diseases at the dinner table. You can describe the diseases that cause hives with someone who is itchy. Or you can cheer up an old friend suffering from a disease by describing several diseases that are worse. This book is a barrel of laughs, I tell you. Get yours today.

For witty and informative science writing on a scary topic, you can't beat this little book. This entertaining as well as very informative little guide is about all the nasty little bugs that feed on us humans, written in a darkly humorous and even satirical style. You wouldn't think that a writer could make so many nasty diseases entertaining and even fun to read about, but Biddle has managed it in this great little book.

Besides the usual tropical diseases such as malaria and sleeping sickness, there are essays on things you've never heard of, and after reading about them, probably won't want to hear about ever again, such as Kala Azar, o-nyong-nyong, shigella (also known as dysentery), schistosomiasis, and many others.

Biddle also is adept at turning a phrase. For example, here is how he describes malaria: "The life cycle of the malaria trypanosome is one of nature's darksome wonders." A reviewer here mentioned another good one. Writing about the microbial fungus, candida albicans, he says "Even the most squeeky clean athlete has a lot in common with a rotten tree trunk."

The book consists of short essays, usually a page or two in length, on the natural history and pathology of bacteria, viruses and microbial disease-causing and other parasitic organisms. Although I was a biology major in college and took courses in microbiology and even virology, I still found this to be an interesting and informative book despite it's being aimed at the general reader. In fact, this is one of the most enjoyable pieces of science writing I've ever come across by chance.

This book is well worth your time and money, although it's certain to turn you into a hypochondriac. At the very least, you'll never want to set foot in the tropics or outside the borders of the U.S., with its 5-star sewage and plumbing, ever again.

"A Field Guide to Germs" is a mordantly funny series of one or two-page essays on the microscopic life forms that can make our lives nasty, brutish, and short. This book is organized like a field guide to birds, but instead of browsing through a description of the shy and spritely wren and its habitat, you will read about the not-so-shy and spritely 'Candida albicans', its description and habitat (the human mouth, baby bottoms, etc.). In fact it is in the 'Candida albicans' section where Wayne Biddle maintains that, "even the most squeaky-clean aesthete has a lot in common with rotten tree trunks."

The essays are in alphabetical order, so yeasts are jumbled together with other fungi, viruses, and bacteria. You may be able to read some of essays with a superior smirk on your face ("I don't think I have to worry about catching chikungunya or o'nyong-nyong."). This inevitably sets you up for a bruising in a following essay, in this case the "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome."

Did you ever wonder where monosodium glutamate, aka MSG comes from? According to Biddle, this Chinese restaurant stalwart is a byproduct of 'corynebacterium glutamicum', a kissing cousin of the diptheria germ.

Let's hope you don't find a mutated version in your egg foo yung!

"A Field Guide to Germs" is very funny and easy to read - the very antithesis of a textbook - but it is not recommended for the weak-of-stomach or the hypochondriac.

I would suggest this book for anyone entering the woods, no matter your experience.... in other words, it was very good, got straight to the point, and no useless info found here!

I purchased this book in hardback... over 15 years ago. At the time, I was very interested in outdoor survival. Of the 15 to 30 books I read on the subject, this one was the most clear and practical. It addressed many facets of the wilderness survival with out a lot of jargon. The author focuses mainly on low tech solutions to survival situations, but gives some suggestions of more technology-based solutions as well. An example would be including Chapstick in a survival kit for its morale value and low cost in weight. It covers the basics of survival in any environment and then branches out to specific details for each environment. It covers much practical information, but also includes detailed information about where to learn survival skills, other survival books and what is covered in them and addresses for suppliers of equipment.

This is one of the best suvial books i have ever read. The book is very clear and easy to understand.It has everything you need for a basic camping trip to any adventure in the outdoors.

As long as it sticks to New World vultures, this is a good reference. When it comes to Old World vultures, though, this guy simply doesn't know what he's writing about. He claims, for example, that the Bearded Vulture is incapable of carrying tortoises aloft (which it does regularly), and that the Asian Black Vulture is the largest vulture in Africa (it is the second smallest, out of nine species). I find it disturbing (if not surprising) that the Sierra Club would fund such a poorly researched and blatantly inaccurate volume. Anyone looking for an excellent reference on Old World vultures should check out The Vultures of Africa, by the South African Vulture Study Group.

Why judge a book by the standards of something it is evidently not? 'Vulture' is the most gorgeous collection of photos of these birds that I know. The book itself is beautifully laid out and designed. This is an ode to vultures rather than a comprehensive work of reference about them, and although it is regrettable that there are some errors in the text, they are few in number and are compensated by Grady's obvious love for his subject and his writing skills. But buy this book for what it is: a celebration of the beauty of a much-misunderstood group of birds.

I learned much about my favorite bird-of-prey. Giving information about Of both types of vulture (Genus Accitciprid and Cathardiae). Many people have discouraged vultures, not knowing that there smaller cousins had the same habit. Mr. Grady gives plenty of detail for these large scaengers of the air.