As a born North-Sea-coast birder and knowing the work of Lars Jonsson since 1977,(his famous five smaler volumes "Birds in the wild" I realised that preparing for North Africa could not be a mistake in buying this book,even if there is the extra weight of all the North European birds described in the book and not to bee seen in Marocco. His marvelous illustrations are a pleasure for all everyone and the book a must for all foreign birders visitting Europe. As a Belgian , I own a big library with a lot of field-guides, especially Petersons' , but this book rivals them all.

Patrick

If ever you feel to publicise this letter,bee free to correct my english .Thanks.

...however, the option of four and a half was not offered, and I'm not sure this guide rates a perfect score. I was very impressed with it. It is well-written (and well-translated, I guess); covering the points of identification well, and very nicely illustrated. The fact that range maps for species on one page are occasionally placed on the following page may be a minor irritation to some, but range maps, in my view, are largely placed in guides for their interest value. Birds fly, and will turn up outside of their normal range, thus, range maps are not important for field identification (at least not during migration of migratory species; and probably as a general rule), and the necessity to turn a page is not a major problem with this guide. This is, overall, an excellent guide, and I can't wait for the opportunity to use it on the home ranges of the species it covers, in stead of on the occasional vagrant.

I have used this guide in Europe, a region with which I am not (in terms of avifauna) particularly familiar, and I find it informative and useful. I have heard varying opinions on the artwork - some rave about it, others say it is too artificial/unnatural/etc. I align myself with the former camp - intracacies and details of field marks are well illustrated and easily discernible - yes, perhaps more so than they would be in the field, but I have trouble with those who fault a guide for showing features not readily visible in the field - any experienced birder should know this is an eternal pitfall to *any* guide.

The text is excellent - well-written (I of course have only used the English translation, I have seen translations in other European languages as well) and concise. I do have two critiques, however: one, I would like each species description to be subdivided by keywords in boldface to make finding important features such as size, habitat, etc. easier to find in a pinch, and two, the criticisms I have read of the layout are mostly well-founded. It is not always clear to which drawing/painting a given species description applies - range maps are not always on the same page as the text or illustration, etc. This is inexcusable and would have been easily remedied if only by use of large, boldfaced numbers a la Simpson and Day (Aus.) or Grimmett et al. (India/Subcontinent).

As for the size, I almost always carry either a buttpack or daypack into the field - so it doesn't bother me a whit. I can't imagine *not* carrying a pack, in fact, so I disregard this criticism entirely - but those who feel otherwise might want to borrow a copy to see how it works for them. For any birder, however, I would say the use for which this guide is most well-suited is as a prep guide - the book to pore over en route to your birding site, soaking in as much of the extremely informative text as possible. It is by no means without fault as an in-the-field guide, but very good nonetheless.

The story is basic, and a little boring, about a little girlbeing in her aunt's wedding. I didn't care for the illustrations. Iended up returning it, and it's box. I ordered the little ring bearer, but it took so long to deliver, I canceled it.

I bought this book (and it's companion book, "The Ring Bearer's Big Day") for our Flower Girl and Ring Bearer. They absolutely loved the story(s). Just perfect for our 5 year old Girl, and 7 year old boy. They really prepare the kids for all the fun of being in a wedding. Thank you for having it in stock!! It was a little hard to find, but WELL worth the effort.

I tried to read this book, I really did. I just gave up when it finally almost bored me to tears. Please, if you decide to buy this book, remember that you were warned. Maybe I'm just not old enough (I'm 13--shut up) for it, but I really hated it. The kind of langauge in this book, also! I can't believe I found this in my school library!

[This review is severely out of date...]

I must admit, sometimes I lost track of what was going on. I think this book seems a little incoherent and stiff at times because it wasn't written in English, it was translated from Swedish. Translated books always seem to have a certain stiffness to them, and this is no exception. But in general My Life as a Dog was pretty interesting. When he starts going a little crazy around the end is the best part...

The characters are wonderfully written and the book is compelling. I was sad when I finished reading it!

I heartily recommend this book to anyone who has no choice but to read it. It is great for those times when you are just forced to read "Far from the Madding Crowd". I give it an A for "Falling into the Forced Labor Category".

As for the Cliff Notes, I haven't read them. I'm just wasting your time.

Although the book was indeed long, the storyline was interesting and the detail and description broadened my vocabulary. If you are still in high school, you probably ought nought to read it, simply because you are not mature enough to appreciate Hardy's brilliance.

I was forced to read this in my English class. I read both the book and the Cliff Notes. The book was too drawn out. I really don't care about a bunch of stupid sheep and pastoral scenery. The plot, however was really good. I read the book first and almost died of boredom, but when I read the Cliff Notes, I was swept up in the story line. I guess I just needed something to get over Hardy's long-winded style to see the wonderful story beneath. But, even with the stupid stuff removed, I still wanted to slap Bathsheba. (How can she be so incredibly BLIND!) If you read the book (or better yet, the Cliff Notes), you'll understand. The most annoying part of this book was that the person who got the high on the test only read the Cliff Notes.

Although this book provides excellent coverage of certain quantum mechanics based facts, it lacks the broad overview required by any scientist of repute. Therefore, I must condemn this book and strongly advise anyone interested in physics to stay away from it.

I obtained (a pre-print form) of this book in my final undergraduate year, as a text book in a course on Mathematical Methods in Physics.

The purpose of the book is to study waves using the theory of distributions. Overall the book does an excellent job of explaining distributions. Along the way both Fourier analyses and Green functions are explained in more complete way than most textbooks do. What I felt missing was more extensive examples of how this formalism helps to study waves in varioius sub-fields of physics. Instead the authors opt to use the formalism to study a wide range of phenomena, without going into details. As an example the treatment of surface gravity waves could have been made more interesting with the addition rotating fluids.

During my graduate studies I would often encounter fluid dynamics problems where the methods learned through this book were applicable and usually required less effort than more pedestrian methods being peddled in fluid dynamics text books.

In short I think the material in this book served me well as background for my graduate studies.