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Read Reviews of Raven Editions Natural History Guides
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Critics, writers and readers have offered praise for our unique trailside companions.
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"Imagine a well-ordered field guide that readily enables you to identify the key plants and animals of a region, AND tells you useful and endearing information about them. Imagine all this detail in a book that weighs just over a pound, easily earning its place in a backpack. Finally, imagine that this same book could sit at your bedside, and would reward you if you just read it cover-to-cover, like a great novel. Cascade-Olympic Natural History is all of these things. Daniel Mathews distills masses of technical detail into crisp descriptions, aided by precise drawings and generous color plates. But any good field guide does that. Mathews goes further, "digressing" from his descriptions of a tree, plant, or rock to concisely describe (a) how it's interconnected to various other beings in ways you'd never expect, (b) it's history and likely future, (c) it's uses to Native Americans, (d) its role in the timber/mining economy of the post-Contact era, and above all, (e), his personal affection for it. For some of the signature species, or personal favorites of his, Mathews slides briefly into memoir, sharing his own perception of the essence of this being, and all the vivid ways it has struck his senses." — Jarrett Walker, posted online as Urbanist, at epinions.com. |
| "Wow. Sets the standard for nature guidebooks. If every nature writer put this much love into their topics, the trails would be overrun with enthusiastic hikers."
— "thomask," posted on amazon.com |
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"To cap it all, I laud the high quality of the book's production: excellent layout and typography to match the superb quality of the illustrations. The author matches an engaging, delightful style with pithy and well-turned descriptions of our Northwest wildlings.
— Dr. Arthur R. Kruckeberg |
| "I'm kind of an old hand with nature-guides, since I've been backpacking and climbing for a long time. … But within a week of starting to use the Cascade-Olympic, it became my favorite—the standard to beat… What blows me away is the fusion of literacy, personality, and information.
— ecology author and poet David Oates |
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"Reading Mathews' book is a lot like having an entertaining naturalist along on a hike. Other field guides and manuals will still have a place in my knapsack, but none of these can rival Rocky Mountain Natural History for sheer variety of natural history factoids and wit… The quality of the photos is first rate."
— Walter Fertig. |
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"If I could own just ten books for the rest of my life, this guide to love of nonhuman neighbors would be one of them." —David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K and My Story as Told by Water |
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© 2004 Raven Editions
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