Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A presentation of photographs each highlighting a different element of Elliot Porter's lifelong fascination with what he calls the jumble and disorder in nature. The photographs also illustrate the orderly disorder described in James Gleick's recent book, Chaos.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This collaboration by the eminent nature photographer and the recent author of Chaos: Making a New Science ( LJ 8/87) uses the photographer's observation of the ``random chaos of the natural world--a world of endless variety where nothing was ever the same'' to elucidate the new science. While reflections on the disorder of nature are eloquently articulated by both Gleick and Porter, the main offering is the selection of over 100 photographs, most previously unpublished, culled from a lifetime of work. Details and fragments are intermixed with landscapes, exploring the tension between order and chaos. Here are icicles, lichens, mosses, rocks, leaves, lava flows, clouds, cinders, even crab scratchings and flamingos, from far flung places such as Kenya, Uganda, Tan zania, Maine, Michigan, the Galapagos, Iceland, Antarctica, and Asia. What is revealed in this new book is more than the science of chaos--it is the wonder of this photographer's eye and artistry.-- Ann Copeland, Champaign, Ill. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

As inevitable as the holiday season itself is another stunner from the most popular and polished of contemporary nature photographers. This collection consists of 110 images harvested from four decades' work. The common subject is natural pattern--the apparently chaotic arrangements of, say, a river system, cracks in a bed of dried mud, a cloud, or lichen on rocks that such disciplines as fractal geometry and fluid dynamics are helping us see as more complex--though often protean and unique--expressions of order. Accompanying Porter's pix is Gleick's piquant little essay on the science of chaos and how its discoveries and conundrums are reinforcing the premodern wisdom of Heraclitus, who declared that one could not step into the same river twice. Good reading, good viewing. ~--Ray Olson