To purchase any of these books, just click on the title. Via the miracle of cyberspace, you will be transported to Amazon's cyberstore for a more detailed description of the book and instructions for purchase.

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Books on Science and Nature

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The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love Kristin Kimball (about $17 new hardback) - From Publishers Weekly: Kimball chucked life as a Manhattan journalist to start a cooperative farm in upstate New York with a self-taught New Paltz farmer she had interviewed for a story and later married. The Harvard-educated author, in her 30s, and Mark, also college educated and resolved to "live outside of the river of consumption," eventually found an arable 500-acre farm on Lake Champlain, first to lease then to buy. In this poignant, candid chronicle by season, Kimball writes how she and Mark infused new life into Essex Farm, and lost their hearts to it. By dint of hard work and smart planning--using draft horses rather than tractors to plow the five acres of vegetables, and raising dairy cows, and cattle, pigs, and hens for slaughter--they eventually produced a cooperative on the CSA model, in which members were able to buy a fully rounded diet. To create a self-sustaining farm was enormously ambitious, and neighbors, while well-meaning, expected them to fail. However, the couple, relying on Mark's belief in a "magic circle" of good luck, exhausted their savings and set to work. Once June hit, there was the 100-day growing season and an overabundance of vegetables to eat, and no end to the dirty, hard, fiercely satisfying tasks, winningly depicted by Kimball.

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The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer Siddhartha Mukherjee (about $17 new hardback) - This was one of the NY Times ten best books of 2010 and included in included in Amazon's Best Books in November 2010. From Amazon: "In 2010, about six hundred thousand Americans, and more than 7 million humans around the world, will die of cancer." With this sobering statistic, physician and researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee begins his comprehensive and eloquent "biography" of one of the most virulent diseases of our time. An exhaustive account of cancer's origins, The Emperor of All Maladies illustrates how modern treatments--multi-pronged chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery, as well as preventative care--came into existence thanks to a century's worth of research, trials, and small, essential breakthroughs around the globe. While The Emperor of All Maladies is rich with the science and history behind the fight against cancer, it is also a meditation on illness, medical ethics, and the complex, intertwining lives of doctors and patients. Mukherjee's profound compassion--for cancer patients, their families, as well as the oncologists who, all too often, can offer little hope--makes this book a very human history of an elusive and complicated disease. --Lynette Mong

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The Incomplete Guide to the Wildlife of Saint Martin [Paperback] Mark Yokoyama ($30 new) - From Amazon: This guide features hundreds of species of animal from both sides of our island. It includes mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects and other invertebrates with over 400 color photographs. Mark Yokoyama was an avid entomologist throughout his childhood, culminating in a single term as president of the Oregon Entomological Society at the age of fifteen. His interest in zoology was largely dormant until he co-founded the world’s first extreme shallow snorkeling team, Les Fruits de Mer, in 2008. He currently resides on the island of Saint Martin, where he has explored a significant portion of the island and surrounding waters. From Barbara Cannegieter: This book by Mark Yokoyama is a fascinating book with wonderful pictures. Mark has hiked all over the island of St. Martin/St. Maarten and has taken beautiful pictures of wildlife on the island from mammals to birds to insects. I live on St. Maarten and he has documented species I didn't know existed. He did an excellent job and this would be a book that any nature lover would appreciate.

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Goat Song by Brad Kessler ($16 new) - From Publishers Weekly: Novelist (Birds in Fall; Lick Creek) Kessler's account of tending a small herd of milking goats in Vermont captures both the lush, poetic paradise of rural life and the raw, unrelenting drama of dairying. Kessler, a Saab-driving ex-Manhattanite, purchases two Nubian goats, breeds them and helps his wife, Dona, a trained doula, attend to the birth of four goat kids the following spring. The amusing zoomorphic and anthropomorphic descriptions, where goats forage as if they were at a sample sale and milk-fed kids stagger like street junkies, dissipate as Kessler endures a season of goat wrangling, haying and hunting coyotes. Kessler gives the legal aspects of unpasteurized cheese a cursory inspection; his devotion centers on a budding relationship with animals, the earth and goat cheese. He's a back-to-the-land naturalist, who supports his detailed personal observations with extensive research as he explores the cultural, historical and biological aspects of pastoralism. While the tome's lengthy poetic journal entries on animal husbandry and cheese making hardly qualify as a comprehensive manual, the observant, unsanctimonious read is bound to inspire hobby farmers and consummate cheese lovers.

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A Field Guide to Coral Reefs : Caribbean and Florida (Peterson Field Guides) by Eugene H. Kaplan, Susan L. Kaplan (Illustrator), Roger Tory Peterson - About $15 - If you dive or snorkel, you need one of these books.

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Reef Fish Identification: Florida Caribbean Bahamas by Paul Humann, Ned Deloach (Editor) - About $28 - If you dive or snorkel, you need one of these books.

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Reef Fish Identification: Florida Caribbean Bahamas by Paul Humann, Ned Deloach (Editor) - About $40 - This is the CD version.

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The Way Nature Works by Jill Bailey, Editor - ($19.96)
Reviewed by Amazon.com:
How do birds fly? How are sedimentary rocks formed? How have animals adapted themselves to living in caves? Drawing on a series of questions that children might ask, a team of scientists proposes answers in this manual for adult readers. They address large issues such as atmospheric phenomena, ecosystemic relationships, and animal communication with brief essays, each well illustrated with charts, diagrams, and photographs. Their work yields an invaluable resource that will be especially helpful to science teachers. --Greg McNamee

Synopsis:
Combining the most accurate information with abundant illustrations, "The Way Nature Works" explains every aspect of how our world operates. Through comprehensive essays and easy-to-understand diagrams, the book covers such areas as the shaping of the planet, evolution, reproduction, the search for food, movement and shelter, and senses and communication. 900 color illustrations. 100 color photos.

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Field Guides