Encyclopedias are an Endangered Species
593704
I was lucky to get this Encyclopedia as they are not being produced anymore.  Free, on-line searches are putting the Encyclopedia makers out of business but I don't want to have to go on-line everytime I need a bit of information.  Sometimes you can't go on-line (airplane flight... foreign destination, lake cabin... etc_)  It's nice to have this on my laptop so I can investigate history or subjects where ever I happen to be while I wait for that flight connection or appointment.  This DVD is the equivalent of a 20 volume set of enclyopedias full of editorials, pictures and little videos.
2773662
The publishing companies will not see the next decade unless they come to terms with new technology.  Pricing an ebook more than the hardcopy is not the right start.
3991764
This is a very fine encyclopedia but boy did I blow it.  I thought this was an updated edition of the single volume concise encyclopedia.  Instead this ISBN is for the single volume 10 of the set.

If you have limited funds buying one volume at a time may be the solution.
787136
You can easily see that a creature is a bird because it has feathers, a beak, wings and two legs.  There are birds all around the world, but some are in trouble and are endangered.  Endangered means that these animals are in danger of dying out.  There are photographs of a Philippine eagle, a California condor, a crested ibis, a Bali mynah, and other birds that are endangered.  The crested ibis is endangered because its habitat has been damaged.  Some birds like the Bali mynah are endangered because too many of these birds were caught to sell as pets.

There are other birds which have become extinct.  The word extinct is a word used to describe an animal or plant that has already died out.  The Confuciusornis is a bird that was discovered when fossils were found and studied.  A fossil is the hardened remains of animals or plants.  Another extinct bird is the dodo, which became extinct much later in the 1600s.  Another unusual bird that died out less than seven hundred years ago was the giant moa.  Youll learn all about a variety of endangered birds and extinct ones, including the recently extinct Atitl&aacute;n grebe.

This is an excellent book to introduce young students to the world of endangered and extinct animals.  The focus is on birds, however the reader will learn to differentiate between the two terms endangered and extinct.  The layout is vibrant and the pages are filled with full-color photographs and artistic representations of now extinct birds.  Newly independent readers will be able to work through this book with assistance with more difficult words such as scavenger.  As a beginning nonfiction book, students will learn about the basics of endangered and extinct species and will be encouraged to further explore the concepts.  In the back of the book is an index, a glossary, a What You can Do section, a brief vignette on the bald eagle, and additional recommended book and website resources to explore.

ANIMALS IN DANGER:

<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Endangered-and-Extinct-Amphibians/dp/1467713325/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Endangered and Extinct Amphibians</a>
<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Endangered-and-Extinct-Birds/dp/1467713309/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Endangered and Extinct Birds</a>
<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Endangered-and-Extinct-Fish/dp/1467713317/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Endangered and Extinct Fish</a>
<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Endangered-and-Extinct-Invertebrates/dp/1467713333/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Endangered and Extinct Invertebrates</a>
<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Endangered-and-Extinct-Mammals/dp/1467713295/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Endangered and Extinct Mammals</a>
<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Endangered-and-Extinct-Reptiles/dp/1467713341/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Endangered and Extinct Reptiles</a>

This book courtesy of the publisher.
721002
This book is copyrighted in 2000.  In five years the internet has changed so much that this book is of little use.  Many of the URLs listed in the book are outdated (the sites are no longer there!).  Google is now the number one search engine, and what little information the book has on it is outdated.  For example, keywords and titles have NO effect on your Google rating.  This book should either be updated or discontinued so that buyers don't waste their money!
1803729
Thanks to companies like Lulu.com, which made this particular piece of rubbish possible, anyone with a computer can now publish whatever they'd like with a few clicks of the mouse (or track pad). The results are the existence of a plethora of poorly created and nonsensical books that one has to dig through in order to get to anything serious. Sometimes they are mundane. Sometimes they are dangerous. Most often they are just ignored.

I'm all for a free exchange of information and opening "the press" to the entire population. The old monopoly held by the publishing giants benefited no one but the giants themselves. Unfortunately, in this profit-oriented society, a large part of the population does not receive the sort of education that would prepare them for genuine examination of the world around them. In conditions like these, and with no viable movement toward an alternative to this society in existence, even those opposed to the status quo are likely to fall into all sorts of bizarre superstition and conspiracy theory. Some then turn to self-publishing operations to spread the good word, and just maybe put a few dollars in their pockets.

With millions of poor and working "people of color" turned off to an "official leadership" that has done no better for them than the "white power structure," it's not difficult to figure out why all sorts of sects have developed.

"Supreme Mathematic African Ma'at Magic" [sic] has the same relation to mathematics as "scientific racism" has with science.
1272337
There is a wealth of information including probably over 100 charts and illustrations in this book. For many people, this and the accompanying text will make the book worth having.  However, if you are going to write a 543 page book and promise some significant conclusions about important subjects, you need to do better than this book. This is more like a textbook that labors to cover all of the issues in a scholarly way but never really comes up with any new or useful ideas or solutions to the important problems of the world. Sachs is assuming his name and reputation will sell this book and convince people to go to the trouble of reading it and recommending it to others. There are better books:

Cronon, William, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, W. W. Norton & Company, 1996

Freinkel, Susan, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011

MacKay, David J. C., Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air, UIT Cambridge Ltd, 2009  FREE ON INERNET

Manning, Richard, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization, North Point Press, 2005

McDonough, William, Michael Braungart, President Bill Clinton, The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability--Designing for Abundance , North Point Press, 2013

McNeill, J.R., Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World, W. W. Norton & Company, 2001

Montgomery, David R., Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, University of California Press; With a New Preface edition, 2012

Orlov, Dmitry, The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors' Toolkit, New Society Publishers, 2013

Stolzenburg, William, Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators, Bloomsbury USA, 2009

Weisman, Alan, Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?, Back Bay Books, 2014

Worster, Donald, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Studies in Environment and History), Cambridge University Press; 2 edition, 1994

Midwest Independent Research
http://mwir-improvements.blogspot.com/
3444377
Save your money. If you actually care about the history of the Assyrians there are many other books to purchase that are far more in depth. This is nothing than an encyclopedia entry sold for more than $10.
3714343
It's a sad time for America and the world when a book like this gets on the bestseller list.  The scientific evidence for humans' destruction of our natural environment and the environmental response is not only established (read a reputable science magazine for evidence rather than a doctored political diatribe), but was called by highly educated scientists decades ago, as well as other highly educated people like the famed economist of his time, E.F. Schumacher.

By this loony's estimation, anyone interested in the public interest or in nature is a commie terrorist - this would include luminaries who have changed our world, like John Maynard Keynes (whose criticism of the prevailing unregulated/laissez-faire economy predicted the 1929 crash, and whose work helped get America out of the Great Depression), George Washington Carver, EF Schumacher, and Albert Einstein.

Maybe we ought to close all our universities - they're clearly producing trash!  Scientists are all liars, possessed by the Devil.  And, about the hundreds of millions of years scientists say it takes to produce oil - surely with a world less than 6,000 years old, we can make our own!  Or even better, let's pray, and see what materializes!
386753
The Encyclopedia of Heavy Metal is a well-researched (at times) compilation of the important bands that have existed throughout the history of Heavy Metal. Also included are some fantastic full-page photographs, top 10 lists, classic stories, and even some light hearted material such as an article on Heavy Metal Fashion.

There will always be some groups that a left out altogether, which is unfortunate. Bathory, Angelwitch, Cynic, Dusk, or Impetigo have been left out, while some questionable acts have been included. I was also disappointed at the overlooking of the grind-core genre, which has now seeped deep into the traditional metal mentality (bands like A.C., Hemdale, Dead Infection, Dead Horse, Cripple Bastards, the widely accepted Pig Destroyer, or even just one of the above). Many fans of the extreme underground are surely to be disappointed, but in all honesty, we could never be satisfied by an encyclopedia of mainstream appeal anyway. This is still a book that anyone could find useful knowledge in, and even a fella like me who loves his metal will still learn something new by browsing through it.
4262677
Adrienne Mayor tries to solve evolutionists' dilemma of many ancient legends and images from around the world describing and depicting living dinosaurs, pterosaurs, mammoths and other extinct creatures by suggesting that the ancients and the American Indians were experts in paleontology. She claims they engaged in extensive excavations and reconstructing the extinct animals. Based on this sophisticated knowledge they created primitive and false accounts and depictions of live animals, with some details than were known until recently even to our paleontologists, who are armed with computers, microscopes and hundreds years of experience.

Oddly, Mayor writes about convictions widely hold by American Indians, that bones should be avoided and excavating them is bed medicine. She mentions Indians opposing the paleontologists for removing bones from the ground, which they consider disrespectful to the past (see p. 131, 134, 249, 289). However, in face of their legends and accurate descriptions about the extinct animals, she makes these people who traditionally abhor bones and have been at odds with paleontology, skilled at digging up bones and reconstructing lost animals.

Mayor herself contradicts this flawed thesis on more than one occasion. For example, she provides information that Indians (as well as Chinese or Nordic people) possessed knowledge about soft body parts such as mammoth's trunk or about scales on dinosaurs, which cannot be deduced from bones alone. For this reason our scientists until recently assumed wrongly that skin of the dinosaurs was more like that of elephants. How come Indians knew better? They have known about scales, habits and diet of the dinosaurs. How did they know about crest and featherless, bat like wings of the pterosaurs? There is no way to deduce it from bones alone. How did they know about the color and look of the mammoths? How did they come to knowledge about habits of extinct burrowing beavers?

Mayor's thesis may look pleasing for a casual eye but it is deeply flawed. When one looks close at the details Indians or Chinese or Nordic people knew about the look, habits, diet of pterosaurs and dinosaurs, which she admits, her thesis falls apart.

The book is well researched for which Mayor should be commended. However, it begs a question why such well educated and intelligent lady makes such rediculous conlusions going against much of her own research? Was she paid for it or just blinded by philosophical assumptions. Princeton University Press publishing thesis illogical and contradictory to the data presented in the book makes a statement on how uneasy evolutionists feel about the growing evidence for human coexistance with dinosaurs. Their camp must be desperate to support another silly solution to the dilemma, after Carl Sagan's idea about dinosaures preserved for 65 billion years in reincarnated memory by dreams.

If you are looking for a more logical approach to this dilemma I recommand reading "Dragons or Dinosaurs" by Darek Isaacs.
2922108
This book is a disaster, but interesting. The editor should be flogged.

Essentially this is a chronological glossary of scholars, translators, philosophers and scientists from the greek through arabic to renaissance era.

No figure gets more than say 3 paragraphs for the most part. It is an interesting tour de force of the subject. But there is no story, there is no tracking of specific ideas of how the science transmitted. Just a series of chronological people and what they achieved simple stated.

Now I did enjoy the wander through history and figures and put some into my own knowledge frame of reference. But by the 2nd chapter I had to will myself to keep reading.

What a mess and a tragedy given the extensive knowledge inside the covers so unimaginiatively constructed. Definiately a bad move by the editor to let this go out.
3982662
This is a fascinating subject but you aren't going to learn much about it from this book.  Poorly written and, even worse, poorly edited.  Descriptions of plans just come to an abrupt end without conclusions, as if someone who didn't know anything about the subject was told to cram 10 pages of description into 3 or 4 pages.  There is a one page bibliography with just 22 references quoted.  Of those, 4 are encyclopedias and 1 is a dictionary.  A summation of a encyclopedia with pictures, that describes this work.
3231693
Nothing encyclopedia about this book. It is more like a dictionary where several topics are simply defined. Only buy if you want a general idea of the topics. If you need any more depth or detail, this is not the book you want.
4909836
I teach history classes for homeschool junior high students and use this book as the spine of our program.  The paperback's font is way too small-- I recommend the hardcover.

The book is divided into 4 sections: prehistoric, ancient, medieval, and modern.  The Ancient and Medieval sections are available as stand-alone volumes from Usborne.  But, you have to purchase this thick encyclopedia if you want the first and fourth sections.  For my kids, we purchased the large hardcover and had our local Kinkos slice the spine off the book and spiral-bind the four sections into 4 different books that were much smaller and more manageable.

I give it only 4 stars.  It's the best history encyclopedia available, but I hope something better will someday be available.

PROS: great review of ancient and medieval history, great illustrations, good readability.  Internet links are fun and easier than googling.

CONS: Insufficient coverage of 20th century and *WAY* too much time spent on prehistoric life.  I'm not anti-evolution (I haven't yet made my decision on this topic).  I simply feel the the information would be better suited to an earth science book rather than a history book. It's simply a waste of money for parents to pay for 1/4 of a book not even used in the majority of history studies.  I suppose Usborne wrote the book from the perspective of "Earth's History" rather than the history of just humans on the earth.
1277840
Haywood created a very nice reference book here, but it is quite austere. You shouldn't expect a 'richly illustrated' or 'visually compelling' coffee table book for kids to enjoy looking at.

This project is composed of two alternating sets of double page spreads: first a well-executed world map, showing what is going on in every region of the world at a particular date in history (states, empires, nomadic hordes), which gives a nice sense of what is happening in, say, modern-day Ecuador at the moment that the Roman Empire is at its zenith. On the next spread, you will find illustrated timelines for the epoch, showing important historical developments.

It's an excellent visual historical reference and learning work, within this format, nothing more.
24657
The books include much usable information but are incomplete as an encyclopedia.  A lot of historic motorcycle competition information is included which might be usable for some, but as a serious history of motorcycles, the collection is lacking.