Bound to become a must-have app for tech-savvy birders.
Peterson’s Field Guides were made to be taken, quite literally, into the field to help birdwatchers and nature lovers quickly identify specimens that often appear and disappear in a matter of seconds. It remains to be seen whether Appweavers’ new iPhone and iPad app of the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt classic will improve on the book’s utility, but several of the app’s features, however, suggest they might.
Perhaps the most dramatic advantage this format has over the book is the audio feature, which includes countless samples of bird calls. Just as dramatic, if not as obvious, is the apps’ employment of the content as a database searchable in a variety of ways: by group, taxonomy and species, for example. The search function, moreover, allows the user to combine any two or more variables—state, time of year, habitat, nest location, etc.—to narrow down the list of likely suspects. In browsing mode, as in the book, like species are grouped together on the faithfully reproduced illustration pages; unlike the book, the text entry for each species can be quickly accessed with a single tap of the text icon. The app also makes it a snap to keep lists of bird sightings—no more need to cram notes in the blank end pages of the book. Articles on feeding birds at home and stalking them in the wild are informative, if a little difficult to read on the iPhone (though easier on the iPad).
Bound to become a must-have app for tech-savvy birders.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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