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Pathless ForestCondition: BRAND NEW ISBN: 9781802062427 Format: B format paperback Year: 2025 Publisher: Penguin UK Description: An acclaimed botanist reveals our 'plant blindness' when thinking of conservation, with his obsessive search for Rafflesia in the rainforests of SE Asia As a child, Chris Thorogood dreamed of seeing Rafflesia the plant with the world's largest flowers. He crafted life size replicas in an abandoned cemetery, carefully bringing them to life
Condition: BRAND NEWISBN: 9781802062427
Format: B-format paperback
Year: 2025
Publisher: Penguin UK
Description:
An acclaimed botanist reveals our 'plant blindness' when thinking of conservation, with his obsessive search for Rafflesia in the rainforests of SE Asia
As a child, Chris Thorogood dreamed of seeing Rafflesia - the plant with the world's largest flowers. He crafted life-size replicas in an abandoned cemetery, carefully bringing them to life with paper and paint. Today he is a botanist at the University of Oxford's Botanic Garden and has dedicated his life to studying the biology of such extraordinary plants, working alongside botanists and foresters in Southeast Asia to document these huge, mysterious blooms.
Pathless Forest is the story of his journey to study and protect this remarkable plant - a biological enigma, still little understood, which invades vines as a leafless parasite and steals its food from them. We join him on a mind-bending adventure, as he faces a seemingly impenetrable barrier of weird, wonderful and sometimes fearsome flora; finds himself smacking off leeches, hanging off vines, wading through rivers; and following indigenous tribes into remote, untrodden rainforests in search of Rafflesia's ghostly, foul-smelling blooms, more than a metre across.
We depend on plants for our very existence, but two in five of the world's species are threatened with extinction - nobody knows how many species of Rafflesia might already have disappeared through deforestation. Pathless Forest is part thrilling adventure story and part an inspirational call to action to safeguard a fast-disappearing wilderness. To view plants in a different way, as vital for our own
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4.2 ★★★★★
Based on 14 reviews
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Product Reviews
★★★★★ 5
A clear and concise book
Format: Hardcover
Fascinating book. Berntsen provides some interesting insights and recommendations on how we should fix problems at the CIA and in the national security apparatus. At a time when most critics want to destroy the Agency, Berntsen provides some plain spoken sanity. Human Intelligence, Counterterrorism and National Leadership needs to be read by anyone entering into defense, foreign affairs or intelligence - and anyone else with an interest in how the CIA works.
It is a fast and enjoyable read.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2008
★★★★★ 4
Skimming the Surface
Format: Hardcover
The essence of this book is to succinctly explain the role of CIA's National Clandestine Service (Directorate of Operations) in formulating and more importantly executing a coherent counter-terrorism strategy. Gary Berntsen is a retired CIA intelligence officer (clandestine service) with an impressive record of field assignments to his credit. He also clearly knows the ways of Washington D.C. in that this book is designed for those suffering from attention deficit disorder. While he raises several interesting point in the book, he also reveals an astonishing narrowness of view and tendency to reduce everything to its simplest terms.
In his introductory `background' chapter Berntsen makes the dubious claim that the collection of intelligence from human sources (HUMINT) is the "primary mission of CIA." Apparently he is unaware that CIA was originally founded to produce all source finished intelligence and that the National Intelligence Council (NIC), until recently under CIA, was the final word in the U.S. Intelligence System. Nothing reveals the sorry state of CIA's Directorate of Intelligence better than this claim. In the same manner Berntsen is apparently oblivious to the availability and uses of intelligence collected by technical means. To his credit he does recognize that the best intelligence is more often available from open (non-classified) sources than from secret sources. Yet he neither expands nor follows up this observation.
Berntsen more or less follows this pattern through out this book. For example he provides a brief discussion of the traditional Islamic Banking System called Hawalla, but is apparently unaware that the system is based on a recognized credit not cash and that money does not move across international borders. The system is widely trusted and is widely used by Muslim expatriates in the West and Saudi Arabia to send money home. For this reason Hawalla credit transfers providing money to terrorists are easily lost in a world wide mass of transactions. Yet it is possible to track Hawalla transactions and it has been done without "intensive manpower" allocations.
Berntsen deserves a good deal of respect and credit for his obvious service to the U. S. and his dedication to the cause of clandestine intelligence operations and its hand maiden covert operations. Yet this book is a terminally superficial and ill-considered work by someone who not only should know better, but could have produced a first rate `practical guide' to a counter-terrorism strategy.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 30, 2008
★★★★★ 5
Excellent Overview on Counterterrorism
Format: Hardcover
What really sets this book apart from the rest of books on the subject is that it illustrates positive solutions to the problems. It is also a very entertaining and fun read. I would highly recommend this book to anyone concerned over current events and terrorism in our time.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2014
★★★★★ 4
Good book worth adding to your CIA collection.
Format: Kindle
I enjoyed reading this quite a bit. It's a very fast read that provides an introduction to the layers of the CIA.
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Reviewed in the United States on August 2, 2016
★★★★★ 5
Five Stars
Format: Hardcover
Excellent CIA methofology review
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Reviewed in the United States on May 16, 2017