Marine Life of the North Atlantic, 3rd Edition: Canada to New England

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Good Pictures and Info

An excellent guide to Marine Life

Useful field guide to marine life of the region

An excellent photo identification guide.

This book has many outstanding pictures.

Marine Life of the North Atlantic, 3rd Edition: Canada to New England
Andrew J. Martinez
Manufacturer: Aqua Quest Publications, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Microscopes & Microsocopy | Experiments, Instruments & Measurement | Science | Subjects | Books
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Marine Life | Oceans & Seas | Nature & Ecology | Science | Subjects | Books
Natural History | Nature & Ecology | Science | Subjects | Books
Reference | Outdoors & Nature | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 1881652327

Book Description

This invaluable reference for biologists, divers, and aquarium enthusiasts identifies over 200 species of fishes, invertebrates and plant life.

Customer Reviews:

Good Pictures and Info.......2006-11-10

This book is set up really well and provides space for someone to record when and where they found the different species included in the guide. The photographs are nice and very helpful. If your looking for a guide with good pictures and not much text this is a good guide to buy. If you need more detailed descriptions and information I'd suggest you buy the peterson guide.

An excellent guide to Marine Life.......2004-09-09

There are many reason why people take up scuba diving and those who do come from all countries and all social backgrounds. Having taken up the sport, there are those decide to specialise in; Teaching, shipwrecks, cave diving, photography, video, technical diving and so forth. In fact, there is no other sport on earth which offers such a diversity of different interests within that single activity.

Having learned to dive and having leaned towards a specific aspect, however, there is one single interest which continues to bind all divers together. That interest is the marine life which divers encounter wherever they go.

Neither sky divers, pot-holers nor mountaineers get as close to a whole new range of creatures as scuba divers do - on each and every dive. Those creatures may be static (fixed) and yet still classed as animal, they may be free swimming, shy, hard to find or easy to pick up. And, if those creatures are found in the North Atlantic between Canada and New England, they are also found in this book.

Marine Life of the North Atlantic is a paper-back book measuring 9" x 6" (23cm x 15cm) containing 272 pages of solid information on marine life from Algae to the Spiny Lumpsucker fish. Each species is portrayed by colour photography (often more than once) with details of it's Latin name, common name, identification (description) habitat, range and comments. Alongside each photo is also space for the owner of the book to note down each personal sighting and add notes etc.

In short, if ever you are diving in the area covered by this book and are interested in what you may see underwater, then this book is an essential addition to your kit bag and is one which will allow you to note each sighting as your diving progresses.

Please note, the pages of this book are not waterproof and easily stick together when damp. Otherwise, an excellent product.

NM

Useful field guide to marine life of the region.......2000-05-04

I bought this book during a trip to the Gulf of Maine, and found it to be an extremely useful guide to the invertebrates, vertebrates, and algae of the NE coast of North America.

Photos in the field guide are composed well and show detail needed to figure out what you are looking at. Each photo in the book is accompanied by a brief summary of identifying characteristics of the organism itself, a description of habitats where they are likely to be seen, the geographic range for the organism, and brief comments that will help you look in the right kinds of places to see things.

Though not a comprehensive guide to marine life of the region, this book provides a great introduction to marine biota. The author even provides room in the book for you to write down where and when you saw each entry. There is also room for brief comments.

I highly recommend this book, especially if you are planning a trip to New England or the Maritime Provinces.

Good stuff!

An excellent photo identification guide........1999-05-22

This book has many outstanding pictures. This book is a great picture identification guide with a lot of clear descriptions of subjects and their habitat. It has a place beside each picture to keep track of when and where you saw each subject making you want to find more and more of the featured subjects. It covers from seaweeds to sharks and everything in between. It shows all the ocean life you are likely to find as a diver, snorkeler or beach comber.

This book has many outstanding pictures........1999-05-17

This book is a great picture identification guide with a lot of clear descriptions of subjects and their habitat. It has a place beside each picture to keep track of when and where you saw each subject making you want to find more and more of the featured subjects. It covers from seaweeds to sharks and everything in between. It shows all the ocean life you are likely to find as a diver, snorkeler or beach comber.

Book Description

Colorado has five different life zones, each growing its own garden of wildflowers. Some wildflowers even grow in many of the different life zones. Look carefully and you'll find everything from the delicate king's crown to the spiny prickly pear. In Colorado Wildflowers you'll discover that even the most common flowering plants have interesting stories to tell. For example, did you know... Blue flax has been used as a salve to treat burns. Native Americans made chewing gum from the stalks of pussytoes. Shrubby cinquefoil is used by wildlife biologists as an indicator of game populations. Learn this and much more in Colorado Wildflowers, one of a series of state wildflower guides for aspiring naturalists. Other books in the series feature the wildflowers of Arizona, California, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oregon, and Texas. With them, you'll learn to appreciate the blossoms that decorate your favorite corner of the world.

Book Description

Distilled from the huge Encyclopedia of Japan and updated in every field it covers, The Japan Book is a pocket almanac: a compilation of brief, useful information on every facet of the country.

Until its present worldwide publication, this book was used by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a general introduction given to foreign visitors. Now, anyone-whether a businessperson needing facts-at-one's-fingertips for a quick visit, a diplomat taking up a new post, a tourist wanting
basic information without too much detail, or simply the curious reader not knowing much about Japan-can take advantage of this handy manual.

Among the subjects covered are: geography, history, government and diplomacy, economy, society, culture, sports and lifestyle. It also contains hundreds of color photos, and comes equipped with maps and charts.

The Japan Book is a shortcut to a wealth of useful facts and figures.

Book Description

The cumulative death toll from AIDS has reached 16.3 million individuals, and more than 33 million persons are currently living with HIV-1. Although it is one of the most-widely studied viruses, many mysteries remain about this pathogen. In this comprehensive two-volume set, HIV-1: Molecular Biology and Pathogenesis, leading investigators in HIV research present a timely picture of the molecular mechanisms which guide HIV-1 expression and replication and provide the most current clinical strategies for combating this virus. Twenty-six teams of experts unravel structure-function interactions of HIV-1 with host cells and the resulting pathological consequences, review strategies fo treatment, and describe ongoing progress in developing animal models and prophylactic vaccines.
The two volumes, covering viral mechanisms and clinical applications, respectively, are written by an international collection of AIDS expers from North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia.

Key Features
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* Clinical Applications:
* An updated review of current chemotherapeutics for HIV
* New concepts in the discovery and design of novel anti-HIV drugs
* The latest developments in HIV-vaccine research

Book Description

In recent years, the use of illegal substances has increased, particularly 'designer' drugs which have rapidly become part of youth culture. The need for all involved in drug control to have up-to-date information about the subject has never been greater. This book helps meet this need by providing a chemical background to the legal controls on drugs of abuse. Although focussed on the UK, some of the provisions of the Misuse of Drugs Act derive from international treaties; the discussion of technical aspects is therefore of wider relevance. Apart from the Act itself, the book also deals with certain aspects of the Misuse of Drugs Regulations. There is detailed coverage of 'designer drugs' and the generic legislation that was introduced to tackle them. The more recent addition of 35 'Ecstasy'-like substances is covered in depth. The significance to the legislation of terms such as salt, base, stereoisomer, ester, ether, derivative, homologue and isotope are described, and the text is supplemented by 23 Tables and over 80 chemical structures. There are eleven Appendices covering topics such as precursor chemicals, related legislation, stated cases, sentencing guidelines and the chemical characteristics of commonly-abused drugs. Up-to-date lists of controlled drugs, with cross references to their status in UN treaties, are provided and a number of pending and other possible changes to the Act are included together with a guide to nomenclature and synonyms. Although primarily aimed at forensic scientists, this book will be of great benefit to all bodies concerned with drug control, including the police, customs officers, lawyers and government departments.

Book Description

The aim of this book is to describe the methods leading to mechanical and numerical modelling of the linear vibrations of elastic structures coupled with internal fluids (sloshing, hydroelasticity and structural acoustics). It is characteristic of the problems under consideration that they are multidisciplinary involving structural and fluid representation and related numerical aspects. The problems are solved by direct resolution of the coupled systems by finite element methods and modal reduction procedures using the eigenmodes of elementary subsystems. The numerical methods described in this book have applications in various engineering disciplines such as the automotive and aerospace industries, civil engineering, nuclear engineering and bioengineering.

Book Description

An actor, recently divorced, at loose ends in New York; a woman, no less lonely, perhaps even more desperate than the man: they meet by chance in an all-night diner and are drawn to each other on the spot. Roaming the city streets, hitting its late-night dives, dropping another coin into yet another jukebox, these two lost souls struggle to understand what it is that has brought them, almost in spite of themselves, together. They are driven—from moment to moment, from bedroom to bedroom—to improvise the most unexpected of love stories, a tale of suspense where risk alone offers salvation.

Georges Simenon was the most popular and prolific of the twentieth century's great novelists. Three Bedrooms in Manhattan—closely based on the story of his own meeting with his second wife—is his most passionate and revealing work.

Customer Reviews:

Set Your Dogs And Wolves On Me .......2005-05-02

Though neither a crime nor a detective novel, Georges Simenon's Three Bedrooms in Manhattan (1946) nonetheless takes place in the lonely, desperate, claustrophobic, and paranoid world of most of the author's other books--of which there are hundreds. The story of a recently divorced French actor, Francios, who takes up solitary residence in Manhattan until he encounters and becomes dependent upon an unattached woman who is also of foreign birth, Three Rooms In Manhattan is a dark examination of a crippled human psyche. Simenon had few peers when it came to writing psychological fiction, and despite a hopeful if slightly improbable ending, the novel is gripping and seductive. Simenon also excelled at recording the vicissitudes of human emotion under stress, and his earnest depiction of Francios, who is crippled by jealousy, delusion, and rage, is superb.

Early in the novel, Simenon shrewdly depicts Kay, the object of Francios's obsession, as a listless, calculating mythomaniac, so much so that during the book's first 50 pages, Kay seems like one of the permanently wounded, misplaced female protagonists found in Jean Rhys' five novels. But readers are seeing Kay through Francios's blighted eyes, and Kay eventually manifests on the page in quite a different fashion. Nonetheless, Three Rooms In Manhattan revels in the grim, the sordid, and the violent, and an ugly fog of sadomasochism continually hangs in the air. Few 20th Century writers, with the exception of Denis De Rougemont, Jean Genet, and Vita Sackville-West, in her diaries, have had the courage to depict the cruelty and desire for domination and submission that lies just beneath the surface of passionate love.

Appropriately, the book takes place in mid-autumn, when the New York City weather routinely shifts between the transcendent and the unpleasant. The novel's first half revolves around a sometimes nightmarish schedule of endless, compulsive, and directionless walks which the couple takes through the city. Stopping only to drink and smoke in bars, and occasionally to eat, Francios and Kay are two lost souls seeking solace in one another, and both incapable of being apart and unable to be alone, except for the briefest of intervals. All the while, unspoken suspicions, recriminations, and phantoms from the past hang in the air.

Modern readers may find Francios misogynist in the extreme, as he spends a great amount of psychic energy spewing volleys of hatred towards Kay in his imagination, even while he walks calmly beside her through the haunted city streets. The idea of taking active revenge against all of the women who have wounded him--especially against his ex-wife, who has left him for a much younger man--through Kay is never far from his consciousness. But Simenon superbly reveals how it is the ostensibly subservient and masochistic Kay, and not Francios, who is the stronger of the two. Accepting even physical abuse, Kay manages to remain perceptive, objective, and resilient, while her lover repeatedly collapses in bouts of tears, humiliation, and self hatred. For Francios, passion and deep anxiety are synonymous; unable to live independently, he discovers that love is a stifling, suffocating trap too.

The mood of fatalism that suffuses Three Rooms In Manhattan was somewhat prescient; Simenon, upon whom Francios was based, eventually married Denyse Ouimet, the woman who inspired the character of Kay. But Ouimet later "lapsed by degrees into psychosis," and the child of their union, Marie-Jo, committed suicide.

Most of Simenon's non-detective fiction has been long out of print in America; New York Review Books is to be commended for bringing this and several other classic Simenon novels back into circulation.

classic.......1999-04-06

one of the best true to life love stor

Customer Reviews:

So... What about John Hancock?.......2007-01-07

Everything you need to know, if you read it from this book. I personally think this is one of Jean Fritz's best short American history books. The biggest and first name on the Declaration of Indipendance, If America lost, He would be the first one to die. Full of information, this book is a great learning tool and biography of this American Patriot. Look for other titles like " And then what happened, Paul Revere?", and " Can't you make them behave, King George?" also by Jean Fritz.

Nice little biography.......2003-08-19

John Hancock was a true American patriot. This is a well-researched biography of the first signer of the Declaration of Independence outlining his childhood, all that he did for himself, and what he did for Massachusetts and his new nation. Once the richest man in New England, Hancock also wanted to be liked by everyone. However, when King George started issuing taxes to America, he refused to pay them. He went on to become the president of the Second Continental Congress. A very colorful and flamboyant character, he signed his name nice and big on the Declaration of Independence so King George could read it without his spectacles!

A Fun Book to Stimulate Interest in History.......2002-01-31

This is a fun book that should help your youngster develop an interest in American History. It is easy to read an has great illustratiions. You will not be disappointed with this purchase. Look for others by the same author.

It is a good biography of his life........1998-12-10

It is a good biography of his life. It shows good times and bad times and what happened when and little odds and ends that happened in his life. It has good stuff in it.

Average customer rating:

Will You Sign Here, John Hancock

Manufacturer: Coward Mc Cann
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 0590412035

2 Titles By Jean Fritz : Will You Sign Here, John Hancock? - Where Was Patrick Henry On the 29th of May?

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2 Titles By Jean Fritz : Will You Sign Here, John Hancock? - Where Was Patrick Henry On the 29th of May?
Jean Fritz
Manufacturer: Scholastic
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000WH1OD8

Product Description

multiple books ship as one item. save on shipping/handling charges.

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Will You Sign Here, John Hancock?

Manufacturer: Weston Woods Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio CD
ASIN: 0439767504

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Will You Sign Here, John Hancock?

Manufacturer: Weston Woods Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio Cassette

General | Books on Cassette | Audiobooks | Formats | Books
ASIN: 1560082178

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, published by Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, Inc. on September 1, 1994. The length of the article is 1008 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Submarine Detection From Space: A Study of Russian Capabilities.
Author: Gerald E. Marsh
Publication: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Refereed)
Date: September 1, 1994
Publisher: Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, Inc.
Volume: v50 Issue: n5 Page: p58(1)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Book Description

Rules for the World provides an innovative perspective on the behavior of international organizations and their effects on global politics. Arguing against the conventional wisdom that these bodies are little more than instruments of states, Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore begin with the fundamental insight that international organizations are bureaucracies that have authority to make rules and so exercise power. At the same time, Barnett and Finnemore maintain, such bureaucracies can become obsessed with their own rules, producing unresponsive, inefficient, and self-defeating outcomes. Authority thus gives international organizations autonomy and allows them to evolve and expand in ways unintended by their creators.

Barnett and Finnemore reinterpret three areas of activity that have prompted extensive policy debate: the use of expertise by the IMF to expand its intrusion into national economies; the redefinition of the category "refugees" and decision to repatriate by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; and the UN Secretariat's failure to recommend an intervention during the first weeks of the Rwandan genocide. By providing theoretical foundations for treating these organizations as autonomous actors in their own right, Rules for the World contributes greatly to our understanding of global politics and global governance.

Customer Reviews:

Why International Organizations Fail.......2005-12-18

International relations theory has long ago identified a subfield that deals specifically with the existence of international organizations - IOs in the jargon. This field has yielded relatively few insights, and is of little use to the practitioner. Scholars have proposed complex theoretical constructs - "international regimes" - to explain cooperation among states, but they have tended to treat international organizations as mere servants of states' interests, not as actors in their own right. They have very seldom opened the black box to describe what IOs are really like.

Now Barnett and Finnemore want to revive the subject by going back to basic questions - what do international organizations do, how do they work - and by using the tools of another discipline, sociology, which has much to say about the behavior of organizations. They begin with an obvious starting point: international organizations are bureaucracies and, as such, they exhibit many of the pathologies that we associate with these large impersonal organizations - their lack of responsiveness, their taste for red tape, their tunnel vision, their mission creep. But bureaucracies also have qualities for which they do not always get credit but that make them an indispensable component of our modern world: their capacity to manage complex tasks in a rational way, their predictability and fairness in the application of general rules, their expertise in the use and production of knowledge, their legitimacy in the pursuit of the common interest.

The two authors then lead the reader through a crash course in organizational behavior, starting with scholarly debates about IOs' autonomy, power, dysfunction and change, then moving to the characteristics of modern bureaucracies (hierarchy, continuity, impersonality, expertise) and to the effects of bureaucratic rules (rules as operating procedures, rules as lenses through which problems are defined and classified, rules as creating a world amenable to the intervention of experts, rules as the basis of an organizational culture). Rules of experts "construct" the social world, they help create the world as it is: this is the basic tenet of the "constructivist" school of thought from which this book derives.

The authors distinguish between four types of authority that international bureaucracies can wield in their relations with states and other actors: delegated authority, when international organizations act on behalf of states; moral authority, when they represent the interests and values of the international community; expert authority, when knowledge yields power; and rational-legal authority, which is the hallmark of bureaucratic power. These four types of authority - delegated, moral, expert, and rational-legal - have the twin effects of putting IOs "in authority" and of making them "an authority": IOs are often the actors empowered to decide if there is a problem on a particular issue, what kind a problem it is, and whose responsibility it is to solve it.

After having developed this theoretical framework, Barnett and Finnemore then move on to present three case studies of international organizations, focusing on their autonomy from states, the way they exercise power, their change processes, and how they sometimes produce inefficient and self-defeating outcomes. They first examine the IMF and the way its economic expertise made ever-increasing intervention in domestic economies seem logical and even necessary to states that had explicitly barred such action in the organization's Articles of Agreements. They then describe how the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) used its authority to expand the concept of refugee and later developed a repatriation culture that led to violations of refugee rights. Finally, they look at the UN Secretariat, the bureaucratization of peacekeeping, and the development of a peacekeeping culture that led the institution to turn a blind eye when crimes against humanity were committed in Rwanda.

The book is not exempt from verbose jargon that sometimes makes it a hard read, and from approximations that lead the authors to couch some controversial statements without substantiating them (on the "failure" of IMF programs, for instance). They mostly keep a bird eye's view on the bureaucracies that they study, and fail to describe their inner workings in a meaningful way. They spend too much time discussing chicken-and-egg problems, such as the autonomy of international organizations vis-à-vis the states, and too little on important issues such as leadership or accountability. Their last proposition, that the promotion of democracies and liberalism is more and more dependent on organizations that are neither liberal nor democratic, would in itself have deserved a single volume. Despite its shortcomings, this book is a valuable addition to the field, and one hopes that it may spur further empirical studies on the bureaucracies that increasingly provide rules for the world.

Out-of-control international bureaucrats.(Rules for the World International Organizations in Global Politics )(Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore)(Book ... : An article from: Finance & Development

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Out-of-control international bureaucrats.(Rules for the World International Organizations in Global Politics )(Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore)(Book ... : An article from: Finance & Development
Miles Kahler
Manufacturer: Thomson Gale
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

General | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

General | Politics | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Finance & Development, published by Thomson Gale on March 1, 2006. The length of the article is 735 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Out-of-control international bureaucrats.(Rules for the World International Organizations in Global Politics )(Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore)(Book review)
Author: Miles Kahler
Publication: Finance & Development (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 1, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 43 Issue: 1 Page: 54(1)

Article Type: Book review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Book Description

In 1960, the Aral Sea was the size of Lake Michigan: a huge body of water in the deserts of Central Asia. By 1996, when Tom Bissell arrived in Uzbekistan as a naïve Peace Corps volunteer, disastrous Soviet irrigation policies had shrunk the sea to a third its size. Bissell lasted only a few months before complications forced him to return home, but he had already become obsessed with this beautiful, brutal land.

Five years later, Bissell convinces a magazine to send him to Central Asia to investigate the Aral Sea’s destruction. There, he joins forces with a high-spirited young Uzbek named Rustam, and together they make their often wild way through the ancient cities—Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara—of this fascinating but often misunderstood part of the world. Slipping more than once through the clutches of the Uzbek police, who suspect them of crimes ranging from Christian evangelism to heroin smuggling, the two young men develop an unlikely friendship as they journey to the shores of the devastated sea.

Along the way, Bissell provides a history of the Uzbeks, recounting their region’s long, violent subjugation by despots such as Jenghiz Khan and Joseph Stalin. He conjures the people of Uzbekistan with depth and empathy, and he captures their contemporary struggles to cope with Islamist terrorism, the legacy of totalitarianism, and the profound environmental and human damage wrought by the sea’s disappearance.
Sometimes hilarious, sometimes powerfully sobering, Chasing the Sea is a gripping portrait of an unfamiliar land and the debut of a gifted young writer.

Customer Reviews:

The worst book I have ever read.......2006-09-27

Tom Bissell's journalistic instincts and writing talent are perfectly suited to a career flipping burgers. He spent a few months as Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) in Uzbekistan but couldn't hack it so he left after a few months. He went back a few years later, a transparently pathetic attempt to erase his earlier failure. He fails again.

He meets an actual PCV named Alice who completely torpedoes everything he thinks he knows. He doesn't take her more learned views to heart, nor does he seem to notice the criticism when she says "most of the people who quit are, from what I've heard, completely embarrassed about it." Obliviousness is perhaps the author's most notable trait.

The author believes himself to be witty, well-read and adventurous. On page 17 he writes "A troubling paradox of travel is how consistently superior one feels toward foreigners while at the same time wishing desperately to be accepted by them as unrepresentative of the qualities that make one foreign in the first place." He doesn't realize he's describing himself, not other travelers.

Aside from Uzbekistan, it seems Bissell hasn't traveled at all. "Within stall after booth after stall, confident-looking proprietors hawked Kodak film, pirated CDs, notebooks pens, sausages, soda, and mineral water in at exactly the same price as the kiosk next to them. " Anyone who has traveled in third world countries has noted the odd custom in markets and bazaars everywhere for vendors selling similar wares to group together.

He later observes that "Uzbekistan was the only country I had ever visited where you could walk through a hazardous construction area and no one would stop you or even look at you." How many countries has he visited? In how many of those has he walked through hazardous construction sites? This is ignorance parading as knowledge.

He later mentions "non, a tasty discus of bread of huge cultural and dietary importance in Uzbekistan." Can he really be this clueless? Non, or naan, as we Americans know it, is a staple of diets throughout Asia. He apparently never even been to these places - or even his local Indian or Thai restaurant!

His transliteration of "non" instead of "naan" brings up a bizarre section in which he goes postal on another author, Robert Kaplan. Kaplan's "Balkan Ghosts," in which he predicted the breakup of Yugoslavia, is a classic. In "Soldiers of God" Kaplan recounts his travels with the Afghan mujahidin during their fight against the Soviets. And so on. He has lived and traveled around the world. To say that Bissell and Kaplan are both travel writers is like saying Ben Affleck and Ian McKellen are both actors.

Bissell throws a tantrum because he takes Kaplan's observations of Uzbekistan personally: It "does have its ethnocultural problems, as does every nation. Occasionally they have been violent. That said, Uzbekistan's culture is, in my experience , basically tolerant."

Do we believe the man who has spent decades reporting from around the world or the smarmy pretender who quit after a few months?

This is worth mentioning because one of Kaplan's many sins, in Bissell's eyes, is that he transliterates the currency as "soms [sic]." Bissell uses "sums." Big difference, eh? And yet Bissell uses non, not naan. Later he writes "Nebuchadrezzar (misspelled by the Bible as Nebuchadanezzer)." Someone should let him know that the Bible is not a person and thus is not capable of misspelling a name, nor was it written in American English.

Bissell's guide is Rustam, a young man who studied in the US. He begins every sentence with "Dude" and/or ends it with "bro." He makes trenchant cultural observations such as "Dude, I like all chicks." (I swear I am not making this up.) Bissell includes every "dude" and "bro," unaware that this undermines his bona fides as an "adventure journalist," as he describes himself. He seems more like a frat boy on spring break.

The author's choice of company further undermines his credibility. So does this admission: "What I wanted foolishly, was to write about The World. Given my unremarkable credentials, only the Peace Corps could give me that chance ... every MFA program I applied to turned me away." So he became a PCV because he wasn't good enough to become a writer, but when he failed in the Peace Corps he became a writer. He joined the Peace Corps because he had no other options. He failed as an adventurer AND as a writer but now he is an "adventure journalist." What a country.

Literally every page contains a word used incorrectly, an inaccurate metaphor or a comment made out of ignorance. It irritated me at first but I turned it into a game, to find his most egregious offense against the language. I dog-eared nearly every page.

If he doesn't know the correct word, he'll make one up. The list includes abominations like "glass-ceilinged," which he uses as a verb, "guessery," "emotion-mangling," and, my personal favorite, "rubbishing." Rubbish, the noun, is a synonym of trash, but while trash is a verb, rubbish is not. Somebody buy the guy a dictionary, for crying out loud.

There are spectacularly bizarre non sequiturs where he throws in information he finds interesting that doesn't fit anywhere else: "It was useful to remember that, with all of the ecological damage centralized Soviet planning had inflicted upon its colonized lands, Eastern Europe possessed three times the wolves of Western Europe and Romania alone had a larger bear population than all of Western Europe combined." HUH??!!

His presumably weighty observations are gibberish: "Soviet culture was, finally, a culture of suicide - politically, ethnically, ecologically, morally."

There's this nugget of wisdom: "But then Ayn Rand wrote in English, a language not well known for providing philosophers with wings. No, what we had in English was not philosophy but social criticism. This English did very well. If Orwell had written in, say, French, he would no doubt be recognized as a great philosopher, like Camus." And this: "American imperialism was a virus; Soviet imperialism was an entry wound." (No elaboration is offered.)

Moving on from failed attempts at grandiosity to simple ignorance we find him describing a man with "eyes as small and black as a mako's." A mako is a 10-12 foot shark and thus its eyes are small only in comparison with those of a bigger shark. There's a truck with "one of its headlights hanging out of its frame as though it were a popped retina." The retina is the back of the eye.

"Indeed, the crevice between identifying needs and creating solutions ..." A crevice is a crack. What he means is crevasse, which is a chasm. "[T]he fever had cleansed my spirit of its grout." Grout is the mortar that binds tile. It is something to be cleaned, not removed by cleaning. And how about this redundancy: "dumbfounded astonishment."

A leader "did much to scaffold public relations between Uzbeks and Tajiks." Someone who has spent as much time wandering through construction sites around the world should know that a scaffold is not a support or bridge.

His cultural ignorance knows no bounds. As he ponders atrocities that have occurred in Uzbekistan's past he wishes he could ask his guide, in his italics, "What the f--- is wrong with you people?" He seems to think cruelty is a peculiarly Central Asian phenomenon. His ignorance of Genghis Khan is criminal. His broadside against the conqueror shows, at least in his uninformed mind, that he's more informed than the rest of us by calling him, "as we know it, Jenghiz Khan."

Idiocy. The most common English transliteration is, of course, Genghis Khan. (The "soms" comment comes back to mind.) "But Jenghiz was at heart a crude shepherd catapulted into geopolitics," and also a "thug" in the author's estimation.

Wrong. Set aside the fact that Genghis Khan lorded over one of the world's greatest empires. Would a crude shepherd create a constitution which even he was compelled to obey? Or an alphabet? Or a currency and system of measurement to standardize commerce throughout his realm? But Bissell positively foams at the mouth. Genghis Khan's "savagery was without precedent."

Tamerlane was a "psychopath." Bissell wanted to spit on his grave! Of Tamlerlane he writes, "Occasionally, his fondness for the blasphemous became cinematically insane." What does that mean?! Is it fair to expect conquerors from 500 years ago to have been more enlightened than we are in the age of Darfur? His analysis crumbles under the most basic inspection and reveals itself as ethnocentrism.

I finally realized that I was taking too much pleasure in the author's incompetence. I reached a point where, perversely, I was reading a book, not in spite of how bad it was, but because it was so bad. I finally called it quits at page 200." There were so many more examples I could have given. Please don't read this book.

A good book, not great, not terrible.......2006-09-26

This book has sure stirred up a bit of acrimony, based on the other reviews here on amazon.com. No doubt, there are many personal agendas behind both the fiercely positive and fiercely negative reviews. I have no agenda.

To be brief, this was an enjoyable read if you are simply looking for a travel book about Central Asia. I would agree that the title is not the most appropriate as the Aral Sea does seem to take a back seat to other areas of Uzbekistan. And that's okay, if you know going into the read that you are going to get a travelogue and not a scientific treatise.

Mr. Bissell is an interesting writer, but at this point seems to lack a bit of maturity. I am not sure why he felt he needed to slam Robert Kaplan in his book. And I could sure do without all the "dudes" and "bros" and the frat boy references to women. I've no doubt that in twenty years he will look back at some of what he wrote with a bit of maturity and embarrassment himself.

(As an aside, I was a bit disturbed to know that the former Peace Corp Volunteer, Jerod, taught his interpreter to refer to women as bitches!)

That said, read the book. It is going cheap in the used section.

Chasing ghosts, yes - Aral Sea? Not so much........2006-08-20

If you're interested in Central Asia in general and Uzbekistan in particular, you will enjoy this book. Especially true if you enjoy history, as various short history lessons are thrown in as the author visits places with long historical pasts.

But this book is not as it portrays itself. The author seemed to feel he needed a "hook" beyond documenting his travels and adventures to a exotic, far away land, so he attempts this overlay of the Aral Sea and the ecological disaster that is has become. While he does eventually get around to that topic, it is not really the centerpiece. What is more central is the author's own ghosts from his past, and he bounces around Uzbekistan looking to exorcise something . . . I'm not sure even he knows what. Neither the head fake about the Aral Sea, nor the author's own self-absorbed quest for finding release from some inner demons, nor even the author's occasional too self-conscious style of "I am writing a travel book" keep this from being a fascinating book. You get to be a passenger with a window seat in a part of the world that is tragic, dripping with history, harsh climate, harsh geography, beautiful in an austere way, where hospitality and a knack for trading surive somehow through the generations - in other words, a fascinating place to read about, but where I would not actually care to go myself!

For general purpose readers who don't have a particular interest in Uzbekistan, I would give this book a lower rating.

A travel story about Uzbekistan........2005-12-30

I like this book, although I disagree with some of the politics and attitudes of the author. His wit and story telling give this book much of its appeal. The one thing that is not good about this book is the short focus on the Aral Sea. The sea and the tragedy of its evaporation should be one of concern for the whole world.
The one thing that I dislike about this book is its condescending attitude toward the natives. Even Tom's Peace Corps family is savaged by his wit. This must have been a stab in the back to them if they ever read his book. I appreciated his wit, but some other readers might not.
The book flows amazingly well. It took me some time to read this book, but I liked the stories of his concerning Bokhara and the other cities. After reading some of the other reviews, I was a little concerned about his sources. However, this is a great read from a little known author. I rate him better than Robert Kaplan.

Just enjoy the book you haters.......2005-05-16

i read this book in a neat two hours, skipping all filler about Uleg bek and Timurlane and the Aral sea, plenty of which I learned as a PCV in Uzbekistan. All literary criticisms aside, I enjoyed the book for its reminders of a bizarre alternate universe where sitting on marble renders one infertile. I do get the sense from the book (and the reviews) though that the author easily irritates people, but I'll bet a lot of those critics are fellow volunteers. He's right about one thing, Uzbekistan can certainly cause mental illness and hallucinatory diarrhea, and mutual love and disgust of one's fellow Americans. Highly suggested read.

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