Subject: book club meeting: Thu 10/3

Sorry I did not emphasize the change in meeting time from
6:30 to 7:00, so Beth missed us.  Sue and Peter were the only
ones to make it this time, and we snacked on the Jerusalem
Artichoke tubers Peter brought.  They were pretty good, if
you avoided the older parts of the tuber.  We discussed the
2 short books by Alvin and Virginia Silverstein, "Life in a
Bucket of Soil" and "A World in a Drop of Water"; we felt the
Soil bokk offered many insights into that world.  For example,
I have never seen the brood pouch of wood lice, or the nest of
millipedes; something to look for next time you go digging.
However, the authors do seem to be off by a few orders of
magnitude when they claim there are 350 miilion beetle species
that have been discovered.

Our next meeting will be Thu, 12/5, 7pm.  Last time we proposed
the book "Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West", by
William Cronon.  But it turns out to be a hefty read: 390 pages
of small print in a fairly large paperback, plus 80 pages of
notes and 33 pages of bibliography.  So we settled on "Thornapples:
The Comings, Goings, and Outdoor Doings of a Naturalist."  The
bookstore can order it for us at $16.95 with, hopefully, a 20%
discount, but I found we can order online from buy.com
(http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=30713027) for $10.67.
Lemme know if you want me to order a copy for you from buy.com,
it should arrive by the end of this month.

Peter
http://www.wideopenwest.com/~peterwchen/book.html