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| The Smaller Majority | 
| Author: Piotr Naskrecki
Publisher: Belknap Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $14.98
You Save: $9.97 (40%)
New (37) from $14.98
Avg. Customer Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 285576
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.8
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 9.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0674025628
Dewey Decimal Number: 590
EAN: 9780674025622
ASIN: 0674025628
Publication Date: October 31, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
Awesome macrophotographs March 16, 2006
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
The photographs are outstanding and the text behind gives a good idea of the threats that many of these small creatures face. Thanks to our societies that will lead most of the animals to extinction!
Other worlds February 15, 2006
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
The things one notices in life often depends on our point of view. In some cases, this is literally true. For humans living in the modern world of concrete and steel, we are often oblivious to the ecosystems that occur in other locales on different scales of space. This book opens a window to this world through beautiful photographs and wonderful text. Focusing on those environments lying within the tropics: deserts, tropical rain forests and African savannahs, the author uses incredible photography to show the beauty and intricacy of life among smaller creatures.
The author presents the life forms of each environment using exquisite photographs, with accompanying text that describes the lifestyles, habitat, and life cycle of each, and how they interact with their fellow denizens. All the various animals are covered: crustaceans, spiders, scorpions, lizards, frogs, katydids, beetles, etc... The author also goes out of the way to show those species that are the rarest of their kind, and gets them in their native environments. Hence the reader can test himself by trying to locate the camouflaged butterfly sitting on a treebark, or the walking stick swaying among leaves and branches. The book also gives a good background of how man affects the different species, and how many of these ecosystems can be measured in square footage.
Overall, a great book to read, or just to flip through. The text is simple enough for non-scientists to appreciate, yet it contains enough illustrations and facts to intrigue any nature-lover. I highly recommend this book.
Great work Dr. Naskrecki !! February 6, 2006
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I have been sincerely amazed by this work. Pictures are excellent and very innovative (great use of wide angle!) and the text extremely intriguing. It's not a specialistic book and will be a wonderful read for any nature lover. Hope this nice product will put, at last, bugs and other small creatures in good light.
Francesco Tomasinelli, Italy
Great Animal Lovers Book January 23, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
If you don't already have this book, get it. It will not be a duplicate of something you already have. My wife and I saw critters we didn't know existed, and we're both passionate about critters. The author has a great writing style, the photography is excellent, the book covers a broad diversity of fauna. It's not a field guide, not a biology text, it's fun and it's top notch. I envy a previous reviewer that has been out on field trips with this guy.
Inspiring January 21, 2006
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
I'm a friend of the author and have been with him in the field for some of the shots in this book. I can say Piotr is a driven man - at the end of a long day of hiking, entomologizing, and shooting - when it's time to quit he invariably pushes on, stretching his words "just 5 more minutes!" into another hour or so. Of course, it's in those last 5 minutes of that extra two hours that he gets the shot he wants - which he will invariably describe as being merely "OK". (He's also terribly humble).
I've been learning macrophotography from Piotr which has given me an insider's perspective on his work. For example, I once spent 8 hours trying to replicate a photograph he had taken 4 years earlier (of the dolichopodid fly on page 165). His photograph is simply perfect - the light, the resolution of detail - and those flies are both very small and very flighty! My efforts were often frustrated by slight breezes that would ruin my shot (moving the leaf the fly rested on). After the day of shooting (hundreds of shots) my best shot was simply not close to matching the quality of Piotr's. Sometimes he gets lucky with a shot, but most of the photos in this book are the result of incredible effort, patience, knowledge, and vision.
Often books of such great photography have little to offer in the text, The Smaller Majority is an exception. Piotr has written about the subjects of his photographs with authoritative detail. He has also included anecdotes describing some of his experiences with these animals. These explain his passion, for Piotr is first and foremost a biologist. His masterful photography grew out of his scientific love of biodiversity.
The photographs are stunning but, as Naskrecki explains in the text, it is the animals themselves and their habitats that are truly incredible - and it is these priceless works of evolutionary art that our species is exterminating - due in large part to ignorance. This book is thus less of a collection of surperb photographs and more of an effort to inform, inspire, and remind people that we have ample reasons to keep on sharing our planet with all of its myriad life forms.
This book is perfect in every important way - the photos and text are plainly awesome, but the quality of the printing, the paper and even the price are simply remarkable.
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Wildlife, nature and the Environment
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