Wintergreen
Rambles in a Ravaged Land
-
- $20.99
-
- $20.99
Publisher Description
In the Willapa Hills of southwest Washington, both the human community and the forest community are threatened with extinction. Virtually every acre of the hills has been logged, often repeatedly, in the past hundred years, endangering both the land and the people, leaving dying towns as well as a devastated ecosystem. Weaving vivid portraits of the place and its inhabitants—animal, plant, and human—with the story of his own love affair with the hills, Robert Michael Pyle has written a book so even–handed in its passion that it has been celebrated by those who make their living with a chain saw as well as by environmentalists. As he writes, 'My sympathies lie with the people and the woods, but not with the companies that have used them both with equal disregard.
In his vivid portrayal of the land, plants, people and animals of the Willapa Hills of Washington State, Bob Pyle makes the modest patch of land he writes about a metaphor for the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Zee's exposition of the intuitive use by modern theoretical physicists of the concept of symmetryessentially an esthetic conceptin order to fathom nature's laws is superb scientific reading. The book, in a sense, celebrates the triumph of Einstein, whose last years were thought tragic by physicists because they saw him wasting time trying to marry his ideas on gravity with quantum theory's probabilistic picture of the universe. But now, phenomenology has yielded to his "pure thought'' approach with its boldly imaginative thrusts at what physicists call GUTs (Grand Unification Theories). This is challenging reading even for initiates, but Zee is both scientifically accurate and intriguingly personal in describing, with quips, insights and analogies, such ideas as multidimensional spacetime, ``string'' universes, supergravity and moreideas bound together by symmetries not imagined until recently. The author is affiliated with the Institute of Theoretical Physics at Santa Barbara, California. Illustrated. First serial to the Baltimore Sun.
