Insect Diversity Conservation Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is alright, especially considering there are few compilations available on insect conservation, but it is not as comprehensive as I hoped it would be. Several chapters are poorly organized or poorly written, and more importantly, the studies cited are frequently not the most appropriate examples. Many, if not most, of the literature cited comes from the author's own studies, and the book is therefore surprisingly narrow in focus. For example, few accounts of conservation efforts in the USA are given, and the Endangered Species Act is scarcely discussed, if it is even mentioned at all. Still, it gives a good overview of the goals and special challenges associated with insect conservation.

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Product Description:
Reviewing the background and ethics of insect conservation as well as current threats to insect diversity, this book explains the reasoning behind, and the techniques used, to maintain and protect insect diversity. Insect conservation has recently become a significant component of conservation biology because insects make up such a large proportion of total species numbers and biomass.

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At My Father's Knee Review

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(More customer reviews)This book was a great read.The story was a wonderful one. Though fictitious, this book addressed important issues that really made me think.We take so much for granted. I loved Ashtonie and Ashborne from the very beginning and enjoyed following their lives in beautiful Stellaland.It was an incredible journey, it wasn't predictable and I was able to enjoy it without figuring it all out. I highly recommend this book!

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Nicolas Sinclair is a man on a mission to hold fast to his moral and religious beliefs. With the backdrop of his efforts to save the magnificent island of Stellaland, his growing passions for Ashtonie, and a powerful need to have overturned archaic laws regarding childhood sexual abuse, Nicolas is thrown into a battle of conscience that deeply tests his religious beliefs.

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The Myth of a Gentile Galilee (Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series) Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a well-researched book by a Cambridge scholar on the religious and ethnic make-up of the society that Jesus lived in. There are two common conceptions - the less educated one stresses that Jesus grew up in Hicksville; the other, more scholarly one, that he would have been exposed to a great deal of foreign culture because trade routes passed through Galilee, Gentiles lived in the area, there were Roman soldiers there, etc.

Chancey refutes the scholarly opinion by looking at the archaeological and literary evidence. First of all, although trade routes went through Galilee, they were not the major ones and were probably used mostly for intra-Galilee purposes. Second, archaeology has turned up extraordinarily little evidence anywhere in the interior of Upper and Lower Galilee that would prove that there was a pagan influence. It appears to have been almost exclusively Jewish, even in the cities, until you reach the borderlands. And third, Roman soldiers weren't present until after the Jewish Revolt in 70 CE.None of that is to say that Jesus did grow up in Hicksville - Sepphoris, the previous capital of Galilee, was just an hour from Nazareth.

He researches towns, villages and cities in Upper and Lower Galilee, giving any evidence of what that town specialized in, its character, archaeological evidence, etc. in the Hellenistic and Roman eras. I wish he had gone into more detail regarding the trade of some of them - the book was short and it would have added a lot to it, especially in the case of Kefar Hananyah (it produced a lot of the pottery used in Galilee). Similarly for Capernaum I would like a description of what made the town tick - more on the fishing industry, the tax collection that went on there, the results of being a border town with Philip's territory, etc. But since it was already $40, I might not have bought it in that case!

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This investigation of Galilee during the time of Jesus demonstrates that, contrary to the perceptions of many New Testament scholars, the overwhelming majority of Galilee's population were Jews. Utilizing the gospels, the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus, and published archaeological excavation reports, it traces the historical development of the region's population and examines in detail specific cities and villages. It is the only book-length treatment of this subject and is the fullest synthesis available of archaeological and literary evidence for first-century CE Galilee.

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Parasites and the Behavior of Animals (Oxford Series in Ecology and Evolution) Review

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(More customer reviews)Moore's book was written for professional biologists but the writing is so good and the subject matter so, um, interesting that I can recommend it for lay readers as well. If you don't know much about invertebrate zoology you can breeze past a lot of the taxonomic terms and focus on the juicy stuff - of which there is plenty (and the parasites love it!).

Most of us don't spend a lot of time thinking about the critters that share our bodies with us. In the case of humans they are mostly on a scale between benign and beneficial, but sometimes they are nasty and even fatal. Elsewhere in the animal kingdom it is much worse. Organisms unlucky enough to get infected are often completely at the mercy of their parasites.

Moore's focus is on the behavioral changes that parasites induce in their hosts, some of which are spectacularly gross. My favorite is the marine isopod (related to those grey pill bugs found under rocks) that sucks the blood from a fish's tongue until the tongue shrivels away, at which time the isopod happily lives in the fish's mouth, attaches itself to the stub of the tongue muscles, and functions in place of the tongue. (It's Cymothoa exigua if you must know.)

There are plenty of "eww, that's disgusting" moments in Moore's book, but its real beauty is the insight it provides into the variety of life on Earth and the incredibly detailed and sophisticated ways in which organisms have learned to take advantage of each other. And she's a funny writer.

Unfortunately this is a very expensive book and no one is likely to buy it for casual reading. This is too bad, but maybe the interested lay reader can find it at a library.

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When a parasite invades an ant, does the ant behave like other ants? Maybe not-and if it doesn't,who, if anyone, benefits from the altered behaviors?The parasite?The ant?Parasites and the Behavior of Animals shows that parasite-induced behavioral alterations are more common than we might realize, and it places these alterations in an evolutionary and ecological context.Emphasizing eukaryotic parasites, the book examines the adaptive nature of behavioral changes associated with parasitism, exploring the effects of these changes on parasite transmission, parasite avoidance, and the fitness of both host and parasite. The behavioral changes and their effects are not always straightforward.To the extent that virulence, for instance, is linked to parasite transmission, the evolutionary interests of parasite and host will diverge, and the current winner of the contest to maximize reproductive rates may not be clear, or, for that matter, inevitable.Nonetheless, by affecting susceptibility, host/parasite lifespan and fecundity, and transmission itself, host behavior influences parameters that are basic to our comprehension of how parasites invade host populations, and fundamentally, how parasites evolve. Such an understanding is important for a wide range of scientists, from ecologists and parasitologists to evolutionary, conservation andbehavioral biologists:The behavioral alterations that parasites induce can subtly and profoundly affect the distribution and abundance of animals.

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Natural World of Bugs and Insects Review

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(More customer reviews)This is an infuriating book.If you want it just for the coffee table it is beyond praise, stuffed with stunning and fascinating pictures of a vast variety of arthropods, including myriapods, arachnids and insects.They are variously colourful, weird, frightening, endearing, agile, streamlined, camouflaged, armoured, bumbling or helpless, adapted to many niches, and generally haunting to the thoughtful viewer and entertaining to the idle time killer.
If what you want is a source book of pictures, this is a most impressive collection.The visuals are of excellent quality and amazing variety.They also are generally well composed and informative to the trained eye.To anyone with a biological background these are impressive virtues.The accompanying text is generally clearly written, cheerful, and sound, though it tends to be rambling and bitty, which is understandable in such a book.
Then what am I complaining about?Most of the attributes I have mentioned so far are beyond price, even in this day of hordes of competitive biological photographers.Heaven knows how many hours it took, of persistence in the face of boredom, illness, discomfort and danger, to accumulate the collection from which this compilation was drawn.What more could I want?
The trouble is that with so little more, without spoiling the book for either the ten-year-old, the browser or the stressed inhabitant of the waiting room, the book could have been a classic.It could have been treasured by generations of biologists, not only entomologists.It draws material from many ecotypes and most of the continents (I am not sure whether I saw anything about the very high latitudes, but in any case one can't have everything.)
But firstly, text falls between stools, and falls with a sickening thud.I don't know who is likely to read it.It is too technical for anyone using this as a picture book, insufficient for anyone trying to pick up much useful information as a layman, and frustrating to any entomologist who seeks serious information about the pictures.Most of the names used are common names.To a non-biologist this might sound like a pretty luke-warm criticism; after all, what is the point of all those Latin and Greek words that pretentious professors use?Plenty!Firstly having a scientific name permits one to look up information about the creature, anywhere in the world and in any language. Common names mean practically nothing, or are actively misleading; the same common name applies to many animals and many common names apply to the same animal, and the common names of one region are so much gobbledegook or directly contradict the use of the same names in other regions, let alone other countries or languages. Then again, many of the so-called common names have been coined by amateur biologists; even in English, they mean no more to the layman than the most obscure Greek or Latin might.Professionals can of course identify most specimens to some useful, informal level, but that leaves the most interesting cases begging.It is the ones you DON'T know that you needed the proper labels for.The book has pictures where I don't even know the family and can't guess it from the text!
In some cases you can guess say, that "darkling beetle" mean Tenebrionid; a few pictures are more helpfully labelled say, Nymphalid while in other cases you just have to take the picture as meaning hardly anything at all. This kind of inconsistency carries over to the index.A book such as this one, which is organised mainly around a number of regions in some chapters, and around biology in others, needs something special in the design of the index.This index is by no means special.
It is not as though the authors believe that no one will buy the book if it contains no scientific names; sometimes they specify them right down to the species.(Mind you, there are a few items where the editors had spectacular finger trouble with the spelling!)When I want anything in this book I most often resort to paging through it!Obviously this reduces its usefulness!
I do hope that the authors will produce a follow-up edition, slightly supplemented.It should not be difficult to tidy up the text and embellish it with a reasonably coherent thread of discussion and much more coherent terminology.I would have no objection if the technical terms were segregated to a table of illustrations or the like.I could cheerfully forgive a few labels that amount to "don't know!"That is simply how things happen in this field.Personally I should love a volume twice the size; these pictures must have been drawn from a collection may times as large and it could do no harm to make the showcase a bit more comprehensive; it would not even scare off the coffee table browser.
What this book needs is either a great deal more text, enough to make it coherent, or a companion volume of text, keyed to the pictures.Alternatively it could be keyed to discussions of each picture, by keying it to such standard a text book as say, Imms' General textbook of Entomology, or possibly some rival classic.
Oh, and I don't like the book's title."Bugs & Insects" indeed!In civilised speech, bugs are hemipteran.Yes, yes, I know, but I still don't like it!I realise that that is my problem, rather than the authors' but I still, still don't like it.But that is not the basis of my criticism!If the title were my only problem, this review would be a rave, not a whine.
Meanwhile, I seldom take the book off the shelf.The frustration is bad for my blood pressure.

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Product Description:
The number of species that make up insects, arachnids, and myriapoda (centipedes and millipedes) is uncountable and has evolved to fill every possible ecological niche. This visual encyclopedia is a fascinating and informative study of these tiny and amazing creatures.Written by two brothers who have devoted their careers to investigating bugs and insects, this book even features a species never before documented!

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Mark Antony: A Biography Review

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(More customer reviews)I read this book for a graduate course in Roman history.

Eleanor Goltz Huzar's very insightful biography of Mark Antony described him as a great general who was also chivalrous but politically outwitted and trapped.Within hours of Caesar's murder, Mark Antony moved to grasp the reins of power.However, Mark Antony was politically caught off guard by Caesar's will.The will named Caesar's grandnephew Octavian his heir apparent.Mark Antony, who was twenty years Octavians' senior, decided that this eighteen-year-old boy would be a minor nuisance and would not pose much of a threat to the leadership of the Caesarean party.Mark Antony, who learned well from Caesar, realized that if he wanted to keep political control in Rome he needed the support of the army.Mark Antony moved quickly to buy 6,000 veterans as a bodyguard and a nucleus to build an army.In the meantime, Octavian was shrewdly making political moves of his own.

Huzar viewed Octavian as a young revolutionary full of ambition.Octavian courted leaders of the Caesarian party as well as the rich supporters of Caesar.Octavian also made good on Caesar's promise in his will to give every citizen a payment of 300 sesterces.Octavian did this by hocking all his processions since Mark Antony had kept Caesar's monetary inheritance from him.Within three months, Octavian effectively raised a bodyguard of his own from Caesar's veterans and brokered a compromise with the Senate to gain their support as well.Octavian also learned well from his education and from Caesar how to gain and maintain power.Thus, Mark Antony, like Pompey, severely underestimated his rival.
Octavian made the first overture to Mark Antony and Lepidus and offered to share power.The three men agreed, and in 42 BCE they formed Rome's Second Triumvirate.With their proscription on their political enemies of between 100 to 300 senators and possibly thousands of knights, the Triumvirate not only began a political revolution but a social revolution in Rome as well.This Triumvirate was to last for five years.They divided control of the Empire as well as sixty legions among themselves, with all three men possessing a portion of Italy.The triumvirs defeated the last vestiges of the Roman Republic in the battle of Phillipi.

With no common enemy, the triumvirs would start to turn on themselves.Mark Antony had just started his amorous affair with Cleopatra, the Queen of Egypt.She supported Mark Antony's ambitions to rule Rome, which would solidify her political ambitions for Egypt as well.Huzar called Mark Antony's marriage to Cleopatra a mere "ritual marriage" even though she gave birth to his twin children.Huzar claimed that, "there is no sign of infatuation here," and that their marriage "left no political consequences" and that "Mark Antony was compelled to stand by Cleopatra to the end by honour and by principle as well as by the necessities of war." When one considers Mark Antony's many years spent in Cleopatra's court, his actions in Egypt which led up to his defeat at the battle of Actium in 31 BCE, and his ultimate suicide, he was either in love with Cleopatra or she truly was a "siren" as Roman propaganda described her.In either case, it meant that she duped Mark Antony.Regardless, the Roman Empire could not suffer by having one of its leaders under the spell of a foreign queen.Mark Antony's defeat and suicide meant Octavian would become Augustus and become Rome's first Emperor.

Recommended reading for those interested in Roman history, military history.

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Mark Antony: A Biography was first published in 1978.In a chronological/topical approach, Professor Huzar recounts the details of Mark Antony's life and his role in the history of Rome and the Roman Empire. The book serves as an excellent introduction to the shifting alliances, the feuds, and the ambitions of the rival politician/generals who held the fate of the Roman Republic in their hands. As Caesar's lieutenant, Octavian's rival, Cicero's murderer, and Cleopatra's lover, Antony led an exciting life, and this biography, written in a lively, readable style, reflects the excitement. But more than just a good story, the work provides a reappraisal of Antony's career. Octavian, who won the power struggle for control of the Roman Empire, also won the propaganda war which resulted in what the author regards as a distorted image of Antony as presented in the various histories. Professor Huzar reveals that Antony was an honorable Roman, an effective general, and an able diplomat as well as a lover of women and good times.The book is illustrated with maps and halftones, as well as a chart of the political sympathies of the primary Antony sources.--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Lunaria Day Journal 2008 Review

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(More customer reviews)Normally I'm horrible about keeping a calendar; I've had date books, the calendar up on the fridge, electronic ones via my blackberry, etc.I just can't get them to work with me.

But this one - I'm about to order the 2008 version today, and this will be my third year with this system.Unheard of for me!

The calendar is organized into moon months.Each week is on the right side, Sunday to Saturday. Each day includes four lines to write your plans, shows the current phase of the moon, times of rise and set, the moon signs and stuff that I don't understand.What I like about this calendar though, is that even though it gives you a bunch of info, it doesn't dominate the space.I use about 1/2 the info given to me, but don't mind the extra stuff.The front section does explain those pieces, if you're curious.The left page is blank but lined - I use it to capture the feelings/activities of the week.In between moon months are black and white drawings with a poem or a book excerpt.

Everything goes into my day journal.I use it as my calendar and as a mini-journal.A few paragraphs each week to remind myself years from now what a great weekend I had.

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Product Description:
Spiral-bound weekly planner contains all the useful information of the wall Lunaria with plenty of room for notes and a facing blank page to journal or sketch. It is the perfect tool for charting one's cycles or developing a personal awareness of lunar and astrological influences. - the perfect size for purse or backpack.

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