explore

Born to Explore: How to Be a Backyard Adventurer
$18.99
First of all there are your kids and then there is the kid in you. This book reaches and teaches both. Best money I've spent on amazon. Thanks Richard Wiese for the excellent book.

Explore: Stories of Survival from Off the Map (Adrenaline)
$16.95
EXPLORE adds 18 well-selected tales of adventure to the Adrenaline series. They blend of humor, like Tim Cahill's Peruvian expedition with two eccentric companions; dangerous adventure, including A.N. de Vaca's exploration of America in the early 1500's; and more scholarly accounts, such as David Roberts' search for lost cliff dwellings in New Mexico. The best feature of this book, and the series as a whole, is that it exposes us to writings that we would otherwise never see. Ms Schwamm has cast her net widely and hauled in four centuries of engaging exploration stories. Some are excerpted from works out of print, but the bibliography makes it possible to track these books down if you must hear the rest of the story. So why only four stars? As a collector of the entire series, I find this volume less spine-tingling than the rest, with fewer stories of death-defying danger, which is okay - not all exploration involves a struggle to survive if you go about it properly. If you like National Geographic and the Discovery Channel, this is a book for you.

Playskool Explore and Grow Busy Ball Popper
$22.99
Got this as a gift. My daughter hated it from the first time we hit the button. It's very loud, and at 11 months she thought it was scary. She thought it was scary right up until we put it in the garage sale when she was 2.5. It also throws the balls everywhere so its more a toy for the parents as they continuously fish balls out from under furnature. She played with it a little once we pulled the batteries by dropping the balls in, watching them roll down, then tipping the thing over to dump them out. Its a better bet to buy a toy without batteries that is more interactive.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.)
$15.99
Like being at a nerdy cocktail party playing "Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon" with statistics, but without the cocktails. Great hook with the speculation that legalizing abortion resulted in decreased crime rate, but downhill from there as the comparisons become more labored and tedious. Couldn't bring myself to finish it.