Science in The Books Store

In this perfect companion to London: The Biography, Peter Ackroyd once again delves into the hidden byways of history, describing the river’s endless allure in a journey overflowing with characters, incidents, and wry observations.

Thames: The Biography meanders gloriously, rather like the river itself. In short, lively chapters Ackroyd writes about connections between the Thames and such historical figures as Julius Caesar and Henry the VIII, and offers memorable portraits of the ordinary men and women who depend upon the river for their livelihoods. He visits all the towns and villages along the river from Oxfordshire to London and describes the magnificent royal residences, as well as the bridges and docks, locks and weirs, found along its 215-mile run. The Thames as a source of artistic inspiration comes brilliantly to life as Ackroyd invokes Chaucer, Shakespeare, Turner, Shelley, and other writers, poets, and painters who have been enchanted by its many moods and colors.

In his signature entertaining and informative manner, Ackroyd allows the reader to dip into chapters in his own spirit, or to follow the Thames from source to sea.
Illustrated with maps and photographs, THAMES is a vivid, highly original mosaic of life by and on the water.

Your Inner Fish is my favorite sort of book--an intelligent, exhilarating, and compelling scientific adventure story, one which will change forever how you understand what it means to be human.

The field of evolutionary biology is just beginning an exciting new age of discovery, and Neil Shubin's research expeditions around the world have redefined the way we now look at the origins of mammals, frogs, crocodiles, tetrapods, and sarcopterygian fish--and thus the way we look at the descent of humankind. One of Shubin's groundbreaking discoveries, only a year and a half ago, was the unearthing of a fish with elbows and a neck, a long-sought evolutionary "missing link" between creatures of the sea and land-dwellers.

My own mother was a surgeon and a comparative anatomist, and she drummed it into me, and into all of her students, that our own anatomy is unintelligible without a knowledge of its evolutionary origins and precursors. The human body becomes infinitely fascinating with such knowledge, which Shubin provides here with grace and clarity. Your Inner Fish shows us how, like the fish with elbows, we carry the whole history of evolution within our own bodies, and how the human genome links us with the rest of life on earth.

Shubin is not only a distinguished scientist, but a wonderfully lucid and elegant writer; he is an irrepressibly enthusiastic teacher whose humor and intelligence and spellbinding narrative make this book an absolute delight. Your Inner Fish is not only a great read; it marks the debut of a science writer of the first rank.

(Photo © Elena Seibert)

A Note from Author Neil Shubin

This book grew out of an extraordinary circumstance in my life. On account of faculty departures, I ended up directing the human anatomy course at the University of Chicago medical school. Anatomy is the course during which nervous first-year medical students dissect human cadavers while learning the names and organization of most of the organs, holes, nerves, and vessels in the body. This is their grand entrance to the world of medicine, a formative experience on their path to becoming physicians. At first glance, you couldn't have imagined a worse candidate for the job of training the next generation of doctors: I'm a fish paleontologist.

It turns out that being a paleontologist is a huge advantage in teaching human anatomy. Why? The best roadmaps to human bodies lie in the bodies of other animals. The simplest way to teach students the nerves in the human head is to show them the state of affairs in sharks. The easiest roadmap to their limbs lies in fish. Reptiles are a real help with the structure of the brain. The reason is that the bodies of these creatures are simpler versions of ours.

During the summer of my second year leading the course, working in the Arctic, my colleagues and I discovered fossil fish that gave us powerful new insights into the invasion of land by fish over 375 million years ago. That discovery and my foray into teaching human anatomy led me to a profound connection. That connection became this book.

Introducing the most dramatically revised edition of Harrison's ever!

Now with NEW bonus DVD with 37 chapters and more than 500 brand new images and video clips!

MORE THAN TRUSTED, BEYOND ESSENTIAL . . .

The #1 selling medical textbook worldwide, Harrison's has defined internal medicine for millions of clinicians and students. The new 17th Edition retains Harrison's acclaimed balance of pathobiology, cardinal signs and manifestations of disease, and best approaches to patient management, yet has been massively updated to give you an innovative array of bold new features and content. If ever there was one must-have resource for clinicians and students -- this is it!. .

UNMATCHED EXPERTISE AT YOUR FINGERTIPS

As an unprecedented amount of medical information bombards you and your patients, where do you go to sort it out and make sense of it all? When your patients request clarification on something they've �printed off,� where do you turn for expert explanations? The same trusted resource physicians and students have turned to for more than fifty years: Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine. Now more than ever, trust Harrison's to filter and clarify the exploding knowledge base, to highlight the breakthroughs, and to deliver a clear, balanced distillation of the best and most current information on which to base clinical decisions.

THE MOST EXCITING AND EXTENSIVELY REVISED EDITION EVER!

Here are just a few of the reasons why the new 17th Edition of Harrison's is the best edition yet:

• Bonus companion DVD featuring:. 37 new �e-chapters�; over 500 brand-new radiological, laboratory, and clinical images, including complete atlases; state-of-the-art video clips; an Image Bank of nearly all the illustrations contained in the parent text, and much more.
• Expanded, modernized illustration program with more than 800 brand-new, additional illustrations--a 60% increase over the previous edition.
• Dozens of brand new chapters on vital topics in medical education and clinical practice: Global Issues in Medicine: Patient Safety and Health Quality; Health Disparities: Atlas of EKGs; Clinical Management of Obesity; Atlas of Hematology; Atlases of Chest, Neurological, and Cardiovascular Radiology; and much more! Also included is a complete new section on biological foundations and emerging clinical applications of regenerative medicine!. .
• Brand new, reader-friendly text design optimizes the full-color format .
• An expanded, innovative focus on global health.
• NEW Global Advisory Board comprising 11 prominent medical experts from Asia, India, Europe, and South America .
• Revision of the popular On Line Learning Center, which offers more skill-sharpening self-assessment questions and answers, plus additional case studies for helping you apply Harrison's content to the daily care of patients .
• Harrison's related products are available in a full suite of formats to meet all your educational and clinical needs. Harrison's Practice of Medicine is a complete database of more than 700 clinical topics formatted for use at the point of care. . The Harrison's Manual of Medicine is one of the most popular and heavily used handbook-sized resources in internal medicine. The Harrison's Self-Assessment and Board Review features more than 1000 board-type cases and questions and highlights the use of Harrison's as a great board prep resouce.

Alcohol Can Be A Gas! contains 640 8-1/2 by 11 pages, with 514 charts, photos, and illustrations to reinforce the information-dense text. The book is geared for the nonscientific reader, but its 473 endnotes provide the technical foundation behind the accessible prose. A 700-word glossary and a 6300-entry index extend the book's usefulness.

This book is the distilled essence of the most pertinent information ever assembled in one place on alcohol fuel, the technology that can help us finally become producers of almost limitless energy, instead of extractors of finite resources. How we produce our energy from here on out will determine how we govern ourselves and how we relate to nature and the environment; it will also create a sea change in where wealth concentrates. It will determine if the future is ruled by a small number of armed dictatorships backed by military and industrial interests (a cabal author David Blume likes to refer to as MegaOilron or the Oilygarchy), or if energy, and therefore power, is held by a diffusion of democratic entities, based on their ingenuity and ability to gather a portion of their daily solar income.

As Blume writes in the Introduction to Alcohol Can Be a Gas!: "Various prospective publishers argued that putting all of this material into one large volume might scare off readers who just want a recipe book of how to make alcohol. They said, 'All this history and politics is fascinating, but aren't you afraid that including it in your how-to book would scare away some buyers?' 'Put it in a separate publication,' their marketing experts said. But in the final analysis, I decided that this book should be a complete tool kit to revolutionize our transportation energy system, combining a broad, sweeping vision with intricate detail.

"I spent four years working on this book with a small team of researchers. I traveled all over the United States in search of the most up-to-date information. In frozen South Dakota, I talked to Orrie Swayze and his farmer and VFW buddies who are taking on the oil companies, and to alcohol combustion engineer and alcohol aviation expert, Jim Behnken. I went to Decatur, Illinois, to see the largest alcohol plant in the U.S., Archer Daniels Midland's 200-million-gallon-per-year plant. My travels also took me to Brazil to document the world's largest alcohol fuel program.

Excerpts from Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America
Click on each image below to see a larger view

Colorful songbirds with heavy, seed-crushing bills, cardinals and grosbeaks are popular at feeders.

In North America, the Orchard and Baltimore Orioles are fairly widespread in the East; Bullock's is widespread in the West; and the Spot-breasted Oriole is limited to South Florida.

Peterson sometimes painted over figures on a plate and sometimes even cut them out. Canyon Wren was missing from the original art. Michael O'Brien painted a new Canyon Wren for inclusion in the new field guide.

The Orange Bishop is native to Africa but has been introduced in California. Peterson had not painted this bird for his field guides, so Michael O’Brien painted this one.