The most fascinating aspects of coral reefs relate to how corals and reef residents meet the challenges of survival and live together.

The focus of this book is on how a coral reef functions—the jobs of individual residents and how they collectively create a sustainable community. The author explores how solar energy powers the reef, how raw materials are used efficiently and waste is recycled, why biodiversity is security, and how everything is connected. There are also many insights into the more personal lives of reef residents—some are as strange as any science fiction. By viewing coral reefs in the context of a human city, one can more easily appreciate the creative ways reef communities operate; they neither undermine their own survival nor that of other communities elsewhere. In other words, a variety of species collectively enhances the survival of the entire community.

Dr. Murphy sees reef communities existing in a dynamic equilibrium where forces of competition, destruction, and decay are balanced by cooperation, repair, and rejuvenation.

There are lessons for those of us who are concerned about making our own communities more sustainable. The subject matter is serious, but it is not taken so seriously that it isn’t fun.

Now in Paperback!

Dive in and discover the watery world covering most of our earth and the amazing wildlife in its depths in Eyewitness: Oceans. Through images, maps and informative text learn about life on the shore to the darkest depths of the ocean floor, including predators and prey, gas and oil exploration, products of the ocean, brave explorers and what the human race can do to help preserve one of the earth's most valuable resources.

For over 25 years, DK's Eyewitness books have been the most trusted nonfiction series in classrooms, libraries, and homes around the world. In summer 2014 this award-winning series will get a fresh new look both inside and out. The introduction of paperback editions, eye-catching jackets, and updated interiors ensure that the Eyewitness series will continue to be relevant in the ever-changing world of education and remain the go-to source for homework help, research projects, reluctant readers, ESL students, and, as always, to satisfy the minds of curious kids.

Supports the Common Core State Standards.

The creation and maintenance of a thriving, well-balanced aquarium can be challenging, but the rewards of keeping fish are enormous. Practical Fishkeeping will tell you all you need to know to set up a tank: from beginner's basics like light, temperature and water control, to the selection and care of the fish themselves, and even the creation of an exotic coral reef at home.

Keeping live corals has been likened to "Bonsai for the Cousteau generation" and "the ultimate underwater gardening experience." Beautiful, bizarre, and among nature's most colorful creations, living corals are now being successfully kept and grown in tens of thousands of home saltwater aquariums.

For the first time, master aquarist Eric Borneman offers an authoritative, comprehensive, and fully illustrated guide to appropriate aquarium species, including a diversity of soft corals, as well as popular and rare large-polyp and small-polyp stony corals. World-class photographs and text reviewed by leading coral biologists and coral keepers guides the reader through the selection and husbandry of hundreds of species.

The Marine Aquarium Handbook is the bestselling saltwater aquarium book of all time, selling more than 250,000 copies since first published in 1982 and launching aspiring aquarists into the marine aquarium hobby. Out of print since 2006, this indispensable resource is now available in a completely updated and redesigned third edition that includes world-class color photography to help guide the reader through setup of their first marine aquarium and then progresses to reefkeeping and breeding of marine fishes. Written by an acclaimed marine biologist and pioneering fish and invertebrate breeder, the book provides sound advice in a clear, readable, and engaging voice. New content exclusive to this edition includes recent advances in biofiltration and energy-efficient lighting, brand new chapters on marine foods and refugia, greatly expanded coverage of fish species and hardy invertebrate species, and information about those species best suited for breeding. Each featured fish has a species profile, behavior notes, native range, maximum size, and essential feeding and husbandry advice. The Marine Aquarium Handbook covers everything a marine hobbyist needs to know to get started and be successful, including aquarium choices, water chemistry, filtration, biological filtration and live rock, setup and maintenance, fish selection, and identification and treatment of common diseases.

Brilliant photography by the world's best underwater photographers and leading international aquarists highlights detailed profiles of more than 500 species of reef aquarium fishes in this new title in the Microcosm/T.F.H. Professional Series.

Organized by family for easy reference, each profile includes all essential care, feeding, and husbandry advice. The species profiles include all available reef aquarium choices, with scores of seldom seen, rare, and recently discovered species.

Written by the world's most-read, most-respected expert on marine fishes for the home aquarium, PocketExpert(tm) Guide to Reef Aquarium Fishes is a must-read for any fish enthusiast.

Tom Taylor's life was screwed from go. His father created the Tommy Taylor fantasy series, boy-wizard novels with popularity on par with Harry Potter. The problem is Dad modeled the fictional epic so closely to Tom's real life that fans are constantly comparing him to his counterpart, turning him into the lamest variety of Z-level celebrity. In the final novel, it's even implied that the fictional Tommy will crossover into the real world, giving delusional fans more excuses to harass Tom.

When an enormous scandal reveals that Tom might really be a boy-wizard made flesh, Tom comes into contact with a very mysterious, very deadly group that's secretly kept tabs on him all his life. Now, to protect his own life and discover the truth behind his origins, Tom will travel the world, eventually finding himself at locations all featured on a very special map — one kept by the deadly group that charts places throughout world history where fictions have impacted and tangibly shaped reality, those stories ranging from famous literary works to folktales to pop culture. And in the process of figuring out what it all means, Tom will find himself having to figure out a huge conspiracy mystery that spans the entirety of the history of fiction.

Our lives, our half century.

Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.

Don DeLillo's mesmerizing novel opens with a legendary baseball game played in New York in 1951. The glorious outcome — the home run that wins the game is called the Shot Heard Round the World — shades into the grim news that the Soviet Union has just tested an atomic bomb.

The baseball itself, fought over and scuffed, generates the narrative that follows. It takes the reader deeply into the lives of Nick and Klara and into modern memory and the soul of American culture — from Bronx tenements to grand ballrooms to a B-52 bombing raid over Vietnam.

A generation's master spirits come and go. Lennny Bruce cracking desperate jokes, Mick Jagger with his devil strut, J. Edgar Hoover in a sexy leather mask. And flashing in the margins of ordinary life are the curiously connectecd materials of the culture. Condoms, bombs, Chevy Bel Airs and miracle sites on the Web.

Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep clear detail and in stadium-sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of the Cold War. It is a novel that accepts every challenge of these extraordinary times — Don DeLillo's greatest and most powerful work of fiction.

Prose and Poetry of the American West is an extraordinarily comprehensive collection of short stories, poems, and essays about the American West that represents the extensive contributions of all its people: men, women, natives, and immigrants.

The more than fifty authors included are listed according to their birth-dates; and their production, spanning four and a half centuries, is divided into four periods. Work defines each period and shows how selected authors exemplify it. Among those representing the Emergence Period (1540–1832) of explorers and pioneers entering the American West (and a new state of consciousness) are Pedro de Castañeda, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Jedediah Smith, and Walt Whitman. The Mythopoeic Period (1833–1889) is represented by, among others, Helen Hunt Jackson, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Andy Adams, Owen Wister, Black Elk, Luther Standing Bear, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, and John C. Neihardt. In the Neo-mythic Period (1890–1914), such authors as Thomas Hornsby Ferril, Man Sandoz, Frank Waters, Dorothy Johnson, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Wallace Stegner, Wright Morris, and William Stafford begin revising the old myths of the American West. Finally, in the Neo-western Period (1914 to the present) Edward Abbey, Gary Snyder, James Welch, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and others demonstrate how the land west of the ninety-eighth meridian has shaped the creative consciousness. This admirable anthology, filling a need long felt by readers, shows writers singing about the American West, the land of dreams; then recording great deeds in it; and finally turning to examine their thoughts about it.

While father and son fishing trips can be the stuff of American legend, they can also turn out to be the stuff of anger, love and self-discovery.  In his memoir of a fishing trip through the Alaskan wilderness, Lou Ureneck brings to life the struggle to reclaim the trust of his teenage son, Adam, following his divorce. Told against the backdrop of the Alaskan wilds, Backcast is the remembrance of a fishing trip that carried a father and son from the mountains of Alaska to the Bering Sea.  Along the way, nature transforms from friend into foe, and their struggles are played out against the poignant emotional battle raging between the two as they descend the river headed toward confrontation. On their journey, the two encounter nature's dangers — bears, violent river currents and ruthless, punishing weather — as well as the hurts that exist between them, the reasons for divorce, the absence of a father and the withheld love of a son.  Dipping his hand into the river of his own life, Ureneck recounts his own fatherless childhood, the influence of his mother's boyfriend who helped him learn to fish, and the realization that he himself had done the one thing he always promised himself he would not do: He ended his marriage in divorce. Part adventure story, part reconciliation with life's unexpected turns, and part commentary on the healing power of nature, "Backcast" explores the world of a man confronted by the hard choices divorce can bring to create a moving meditation on fatherhood.

Although the 1653 world of Izaak Walton was far different from our own, his advice on fishing has never gone out of style. For those who fish or just love the outdoors, this classic of English literature, loved for the character of its author as well as the lore he imparts, is a treasure. Includes a new Introduction by Thomas McGuane and charming illustrations throughout by the great Arthur Rackham.

Covering over 500 species, this authoritative reference offers the most up-to-date information on marine invertebrates, including helpful advice on captive care and feeding. With all newly-authored text by a recognized authority on these beautiful and bizarre marine animals, this complete comprehensive guide is essential for aquarists of all levels, from beginner to expert.