Customer Reviews

Mythic Woods: The World's Most Remarkable Forests

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Great fron cover an internal cover, but that is where all the fun stops with this book, unfortunately. The rest of the book consists of strangely chosen and bad quality photographs with lots of huge text. I do not recommend this book for anyone who is looking for a great photograhic book on forests - it is very deceiving!

Approximately one third of the earth's land area is covered by forest habitats. Some are well-known, but there are magnificent forest areas that have not gained major attention. Mythic Woods explores the individual character of both familiar and unknown forests on all continents, revealing new worlds of majestic beauty. The forests include:

The Amazon
Black Wood of Rannoch
Sudarban mangrove forests of the Ganges delta
Cloud forests of the Andes
Blue Cedar forest of the Atlas Mountains
Taiga of Northern Russia
Valley of Giants, Tasmania
Mediterranean Maquis and Garigue
Petrified forest of Arizona
Sherwood Forest
Kauri Pine Forest of New Zealand
Baobab woods of Madagascar
Great Bear rainforest of Canada
Ancient rainforest of Cape York Peninsula

The engaging text comes alive through the breath-taking full colour photographs and the book concludes with a Forest Fact File that lists factors such as the Area, Rainfall, Temperature, Access and the most interesting trees and animals for each forest. The absence of maps in a book of this nature is baffling, though. Besides that omission, Mythic Woods is a classy and informative guide to some of the most impressive forests of the world.

I bought this book with the expectation there would be many more detailed photographs in it. Though the photos that were there were stunning to be sure, there were too few of them! More photos, maps to said forests, etc. would have caused me to give this a full five stars.

I enjoyed the pictures and most of the text. A significant amount of the text in each section is devoted to bemoaning the impacts of chain saws and livestock grazing. I think those comments are appropriate to include in the forward, but I wish there had been more descriptive material about the forests. An emphasis of the book was the impact of man's activities. Various conservation groups were mentioned in the text. For those wishing to support forestry conservation projects more information might have been included in an appendix. I learned some facts about the forests, but the print was large so the factual material was limited. I wondered why the section about Californa kelp had been included instead of sections on trees such as Alceres or Araucaria or the Black Forest. The kelp section did give the author a forum to switch the antagonist from loggers to oil drillers. Maybe that was the purpose for its inclusion. I bought the book to add to my knowldge of trees, and I did, but not as much as I had hoped.