Author Susan Casey spent five years following waves, surfers and ocean scientists. The result is her compelling nonfiction work "The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean," which conveys how it feels to be in the grasp of a sea monster. It is a sequel to her best-selling "Devil's Teeth," about white sharks that terrorize the Northern California coastline. After taking readers into the cold, clear danger beneath the surface, Casey now chases another oceanic phenomenon in a riveting tale that packs the narrative power and dexterity of Richard Preston's "The Wild Trees." She picks up where Sebastian Unger's "The Perfect Storm" ends by blending scientific mysteries with extreme-sport "why-do-they-do-this?" Casey gets closer than any spectator would dare, witnessing famous surfers in action from photographers' vantage points just yards away. Eventually, at a celebrated Maui break, she also shoots down the face of a colossal wave on the back of a Jet Ski.
[A] copy of the new "Bird Songs Bible," a visual and audio treasure trove of the 747 breeding birds in North America. The hefty tome comes with a nifty digital audio player that quickly fills your ears with an amazing range of bird songs and calls, including the rarely heard shearwaters, who only vocalize at sea. What are shearwaters? The "Bird Songs Bible" (Chronicle Books, 536 pp.) will tell you that, too, in addition to having lovely illustrations of all the birds and maps of their habitats. The field recordings are from the esteemed Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the book is edited by Les Beletsky, a noted bird biologist. I quickly found it's great fun to flip through the book and then punch in the number in the audio player for any bird that caught my eye. It took about two seconds for my cats to start walking all over the book, looking for the birds.
Read that full San Jose Mercury piece here. NPR's All Things Considered also did a full story on the book and author.
There's a new book out that is unlike any other — it features characters with names like Hawaii creeper and bufflehead — and strangest of all: it tweets. And it doesn't tweet in the 21st century, social media sense, but in the good, old-fashioned bird-call sense. The Bird Songs Bible is a massive volume that comes with a built-in audio player featuring hundreds of bird songs. The 10-pound, $125 tome was edited by bird expert Les Beletsky and features recordings from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It is billed as "The Complete, Illustrated Reference for North American Birds." "I think 'bible' really says it all," Greg Budney, audio curator at Cornell, tells NPR's Robert Siegel. "It covers over 728 species of North American birds including birds of Hawaii."
A coalition of Peninsula cities and organizations Monday sued the California High-Speed Rail Authority in another bid to derail its $43 billion bullet train project.
The project has been controversial in some mid-Peninsula cities, where residents and officials worry the bullet trains will be noisy, divide neighborhoods by running atop elevated tracks and force the seizure of dozens of homes along sections of the Caltrain corridor.
Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Atherton -- along with three environmental groups, two citizens groups and a San Mateo resident -- filed the lawsuit in Sacramento County Superior Court.
The suit alleges that the rail authority's environmental assessment doesn't adequately describe the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco project, fails to fully explore all its negative impacts and gives short shrift to other alternatives, such as running the trains over the Altamont Pass and up the East Bay instead of over Pacheco Pass and up the Peninsula.
“Earth (The Book)” is a mock textbook by writers for “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” — or “the authors of the popular television program ‘The John Daly Show,’” as they put it in a fake Wikipedia blurb on the book’s back cover. It is conceived as a handy guide for extraterrestrials who arrive on this planet after humanity has become extinct, in case those extraterrestrials want to know what they missed.
, Women Invent!: Two Centuries of Discoveries That Have Shaped Our World
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