The books below are due on March 1, most have a kinship with some subject recently discussed on this board. If anyone has an interest in any of these books send me a PM and I was give you my opinion in depth.

Words and Rules: the ingredients of language.
Steven Pinker 1999.
An investigation of the mind through the incident of irregular verbs.
Pretty good. Most mavens of the board show signs of haven read it.

Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from Tennyson to Plath.
Editors: Elise Paschen & Rebekah Presson Mosby 2001
Narrated by Charles Osgood, three CD’s accompany this large book. Tennyson, Browning, Whitman, Yeats, Frost, Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, Carlos Williams, Pound, Eliot, Dorothy Parker, ee cummings, Ogden Nash, Auden, Anne Sexton, Dylan Thomas, Lowell, Ginsburg, Bly and Plath, and twenty-five other dead poets read two or three of their own poems. The text adds comments about the poems read, as well as a short biography.
I intend to shell out the $49.95, and get my own copy.

Aquariums of Pyongyang: ten years in the north korean gulag
Kang Chol-Hwan and Pierre Rigoulot
First person narrative of the quaint North Korean custom of sending the entire family to concentration camps for the offense of of one parent
Read this book and you will be better able to understand the “lights of the Earth” post.

Bird Brains: The intelligence of crows, ravens, magpies, and jays.
Candace Savage 1995 a Sierra Club Book.
A coffee table book with well considered descriptions of black bird behaviour.
Great photographs, interesting comments.

The Time Machine: ice cores, abrupt climate change, and our future.
Richard B Alley 2000
Ice cores from the ice pack in Greenland correlate remarkably well with other methods of measuring temperature changes over the last 100,000 years.
I re-read this book because of Wordwind’s post about glaciers. I’m glad I did, the science is understated, but foreboding in consequence.

In the Kingdom of Gorillas: fragile species in a dangerous land
Bill Weber and Amy Vedder 2001 Co-founders, Mountain Gorilla Project
Bill and Amy study with Dian Fossey then start a movement to help save the mountain gorilla on their own.
Bless them and may God help them. When I look into the eyes of a gorilla I turn my head in shame.

Genesis Revisited: a revolutionary new solution to the mystery of man’s origins.
Glenn G. Strickland 1979
A spotted, but well thought and original, examination of the origins of human traits.
This little book is well worth reading. Strickland sure can construct.

Excavating Jesus: beneath the stones, behind the text.
John Dominic Crossan & Johathan L. Reed 2001
A summary of archaeological finds at the time of Jesus.
Interesting. Simply written. Enjoyable.

The Day Dixie Died: southern occupation 1865-1866.
Thomas and Debra Goodrich 2001
The social disintegration of southern culture after the Civil War.
Carefully researched and written with impact. A textbook lesson on what not to do when war is won. Recommended.