MN

A friend loaned me this book recently. The layout is extremely helpful for quick reference and useful information. I look forward to taking it with me when I go to the garden center. The book is organized alphabetically, readily showing the most important information including hardiness zones, sun requirements and a synopsis of the plant's habit. In addition, there is a photo reference with clear and distinct photos of the plants described. I own quite a few garden books, but this is the one I will be taking with me when I go to buy plants, and the one I will use when browsing catalogues.

To my knowledge this veteran author of SF and Fantasy classics has written three books of true poetry, although many of his stories have a lyrical quality that comes to poetry. His first collection; WHEN ELEPHANTS LAST IN THE DOORYARD BLOOMED I haven't been able to find, but this collection, and his third book of poetry,THE HAUNTED COMPUTER AND THE ANDROID POPE. This exploration in verse by Bradbury is fascinating and enjoyable, especially for those who are Bradbury fans to begin with.

I will not claim Bradbury to be the most brilliant poet, but there are many gems among these pages. "Byzantium I Come Not From" is a wonderful example of the richness of memory and boyhood summers. His subject matter ranges from childhood memories to popular movies. From heartbreak to The Nefertiti-Tut Express. From ghosts to rocketships and robots. The author brings his lyrical skills, love of sound and word to these themes and more. Anyone who has read Bradbury's books will recognize his themes from books expanded in verse.

For anyone who is a wonderer, with a fascination in the what if? the macabre, the fantastic worlds of paranormal side by side scientific and the melding of all these elements, if you can discover a copy of this, read and enjoy. There's nothing quite like them I've found anywhere else.

The information seems pretty thorough, but Fizzell has organized the book mainly by types of plants -- vegetables, annuals, perennials, trees, and so on -- and then month-by-month under each group. So when you're trying to figure out what to do in May, you have to look up "May" under "Annuals," then "May" under "Perennials," then "May" under "Trees" .... I'd much rather he'd used the months as main categories, and each type of plant as a subcategory of those.

And Fizzell is pesticide- and herbicide-crazy! Forget it if you're an organic gardener. (I'm still looking for a book on organic gardening in Michigan.)

"Month-By-Month Gardening in Michigan" is split into chapters on types of plants, e.g. Annuals, Bulbs, Herbs, Houseplants, Lawns, etc. Each chapter is then split into the following subchapters: "Introduction", "Planting Chart", "January", "February", ... "December". Here is how to use this book:

Suppose you live in Michigan and want to know whether to prune your climbing roses in March. Turn to Chapter 7, "Roses" and the subchapter called, "March". This subchapter has sections on "Planning", "Planting and Transplanting", "Rx Care for Your Roses", etc. In the section entitled "Pruning", the author recommends, "Prune climbing rose plants to fit their supports. Remove thin canes, and pinch back overly vigorous canes to force branching."

This book is very easy to use, as you can see from the above paragraph. I used to live in Winter Hardiness Zone 3 near Cadillac and am now a Zone 6 gardener down near Lake St. Claire , so I know from experience that you might have to adjust Fizzell's time-table of recommendations by as much as three or four weeks, depending on your specific zone.

Organic gardeners probably won't want to use some of the author's "Rx Care" suggestions (Fizzell recommends actual products such as "Orthene" and "D-Con"), but other than that, "Month-by-Month Gardening in Michigan" should prove useful to all of us who garden in this state, whether it be the 'helpful hints', the planting charts, or the month-specific instructions for tending to your water garden.

This is a handy reference for any Michigan gardener (like myself) who needs an occasional reminder not to start her pepper plants in January.

This is a useful guide in an easy to follow format. Month by month comments and useful advice especially for Michigans' unique gardening needs.

This book is a pretty good introduction to the main results that caused a flurry of excitement in the mathematical community in the mid 1990's. The mathematical constructions involved here are interesting mostly to those in the area of the differential topology of 4-manifolds. The Seiberg-Witten invariants as they are now called, have been widely discussed since then, but mostly now in the context of symplectic geometry. After a brief overview of spin geometry and Clifford algebras, the author discusses the complex spin representation. This sets up the discussion of spin bundles in the next chapter, and, even though it is really not the place for it, the author does not prove that a principal SO(V) bundle lifts to a principal Spin(V) if and only if the second Stiefel-Whitney class is equal to zero. There are many different proofs of this in the literature, but I have not discovered in any of these proofs any real, sound insight as to why this result is true. The chapter continues its very formal treatment with an overview of spin bundles and the Dirac operator. The next chapter then moves immediately to the Seiberg-Witten equations and they are viewed as nonlinear generalizations of elliptic partial differential equations in the sense that the linearization of both the Seiberg-Witten equations and the gauge group action is shown to be an ellipic complex. The next chapter shows that the moduli space of solutions to the Seiberg-Witten equations is compact. This is the most technical of the chapters and requires attentive reading. The Seiberg-Witten invariant for complex spin structures is discussed in the next chapter. Again one must pay close attention to the details of the arguments. The actual calculation of a Seiberg-Witten invariant is performed in the context of Kahler manifolds in the last chapter of the book. This sets up the reader nicely for the current work on symplectic manifolds. The book will be of interest to mathematicians wanting an understanding of this area of four-dimensional topology and to high-energy physicists who are interested in the low energy behavior and duality in SU(2) supersymmetric gauge theories. The constructions of Seiberg and Witten in quantum field theory are what led to the invariants outlined in this book. All in all a fascinating area of mathematics and its consequences are sill being worked out with diligence.