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Best Books of the Year So Far
Looking for something great to read? Browse our editors' picks for 2015's Best Books of the Year So Far in fiction, nonfiction, mysteries, children's books, and much more.
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Best Books of the Month
Want to know our Editors' picks for the best books of the month? Browse Best Books of the Month, featuring our favorite new books in more than a dozen categories.
A big, beautiful coffee table book with gorgeous pictures and intriguing text. With so much damage being done to our oceans -- and environment overall -- this book shows us what is almost invisibly beautiful, and important, about life under the surface of the sea. The book is a heavy, substantial one, with good quality paper and high-quality reproductions. Spineless is an odd title, but it fits all the strange, unique, and rare "animals" that are featured throughout the book. Readers won't be disappointed with the phenomenal sights.
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Wow, this is really, really, an incredible book. The best part: the catalog at the end with thumbnail photos of every entry in the book and then an essay regarding each entry. Sometimes the entries are short; sometimes very, very long. I bought this for my 11-y/o granddaughter who wants to be a marine biologist -- she loves it, as I expected she would.
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Wood worker's magazines have advertisements for "woodworkers' porn sights" web sites that feature pictures of the highly figured woods they offer for sale (at highly figured prices) "Whooo boy, look at the grain on that tiger maple." "Spineless Portraits of Marine Invertebrates, the Backbone of Life" has page after page of equally exquisite pictures of luscious, naked marine invertebrates. The portraits are gorgeous, truly gorgeous. At first glance I thought they were drawings not photographs. They are photographs and at the end of the book Susan Middleton the author and photographer describes how she took the pictures. Her subjects were collected, put in small glass tanks which were placed on a white or black background and photographed. This method is not new .I used a roughly 6' by 6'by2 inch chamber to photograph invertebrates 45 years ago on the Sea Isle Sholes off New Hampshire's miniscule Atlantic coastline. She has refined the system to perfection. Even small amounts of silt scatters light, a finger smear blurs, an off-angle shot distorts. Nothing like that is in her pictures; they are clear, undistorted and beautiful. The animals are labeled both as Genus specie as well as their frequently amusing common names-Minor Venus's girdle Velamen parallelum or Curly Head Spaghetti Worm Thelepus crispus. Sylvia Earl has written an introduction and the book includes four essays by the author. She discusses the ongoing and probably never ending (even with DNA typing) taxonomic augments over which creature belongs where. Her comment on the effect of evolution on taxonomy is pithy "After the theory of evolution took hold, classifications became genealogies. "She describes basic animal symmetry spherical, radial and bilateral and its effect on classification. Then too there is an ecological undercurrent of climate change and over utilization flowing through the essays. Spineless is lucid and illuminating and, did I mention, gorgeous.
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Gob-smacking beautiful photo book about the neglected 3/4ths of life on this planet! Enough Prose to make you understand the life ways of the critters.
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Beautiful pictures. I bought this as a gift for my daughter who teaches biology. We were more interested in the pictures than the text, to be honest. The one complaint I would have is that the captions for the pictures were confusing as to exactly which picture the caption went with--especially for overlays. This would be a great book for a budding marine biologist.
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