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Greenhouse Review

The rather amateurish review of Jim Salinger's book Greenhouse New Zealand by Mike Bradstock [%Xref=|563|link-text=%Under the Microscope, Dec91/Jan92] is disappointing.

This book was devised for use in intermediate and secondary schools in New Zealand and, so far, with over a quarter of high schools presently with copies for assessment, it has been very well received --  reflecting reviews that have so far appeared in the media.

Our educational system needs books like this. They are hard to do, costly to produce, and when your reviewer describes the illustrations as "awful", he displays a purely subjective attitude that does the review pages of NZSM little good.

Putting a "human face" on the weather is not easy -- just as it isn't with most scientific subjects. A conscious attempt was made (involving hours and hours of work) to make the diagrams and graphics more interesting than the hard, boring computer graphics so common in books nowadays.

We are sorry Mike Bradstock's acid view of the book made it difficult for him to "get through" to the authoritativeness of Salinger's writing. We know that most of the teenagers we know who have read it just love it. They have no difficulty with it at all.

Trevor Reeves, Publisher, Square One Press, Dunedin

Our "Under the Microscope" feature aims to review books. This necessarily involves subjective attitudes, and is what makes it very different, and much more useful and credible, than "reviews" which are book summaries or publicity blurbs.