The Sound Of The Sea Seashells And The Fate Of The Oceans

Author : Cynthia Barnett
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393651452
Total Pages : 414 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans written by Cynthia Barnett and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Science Friday Best Science Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year A Library Journal Best Science and Technology Book of the Year A Tampa Bay Times Best Book of the Year A stunning history of seashells and the animals that make them that "will have you marveling at nature…Barnett’s account remarkably spirals out, appropriately, to become a much larger story about the sea, about global history and about environmental crises and preservation" (John Williams, New York Times Book Review). Seashells have been the most coveted and collected of nature’s creations since the dawn of humanity. They were money before coins, jewelry before gems, art before canvas. In The Sound of the Sea, acclaimed environmental author Cynthia Barnett blends cultural history and science to trace our long love affair with seashells and the hidden lives of the mollusks that make them. Spiraling out from the great cities of shell that once rose in North America to the warming waters of the Maldives and the slave castles of Ghana, Barnett has created an unforgettable history of our world through an examination of the unassuming seashell. She begins with their childhood wonder, unwinds surprising histories like the origin of Shell Oil as a family business importing exotic shells, and charts what shells and the soft animals that build them are telling scientists about our warming, acidifying seas. From the eerie calls of early shell trumpets to the evolutionary miracle of spines and spires and the modern science of carbon capture inspired by shell, Barnett circles to her central point of listening to nature’s wisdom—and acting on what seashells have to say about taking care of each other and our world.

Author : Bathsheba Demuth
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393635171
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait written by Bathsheba Demuth and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-08-20 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between capitalism, communism, and Arctic ecology since the dawn of the industrial age. Whales and walruses, caribou and fox, gold and oil: through the stories of these animals and resources, Bathsheba Demuth reveals how people have turned ecological wealth in a remote region into economic growth and state power for more than 150 years. The first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada, Floating Coast breaks away from familiar narratives to provide a fresh and fascinating perspective on an overlooked landscape. The unforgiving territory along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans—the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia—before Americans and Europeans arrived with revolutionary ideas for progress. Rapidly, these frigid lands and waters became the site of an ongoing experiment: How, under conditions of extreme scarcity, would the great modern ideologies of capitalism and communism control and manage the resources they craved? Drawing on her own experience living with and interviewing indigenous people in the region, as well as from archival sources, Demuth shows how the social, the political, and the environmental clashed in this liminal space. Through the lens of the natural world, she views human life and economics as fundamentally about cycles of energy, bringing a fresh and visionary spin to the writing of human history. Floating Coast is a profoundly resonant tale of the dynamic changes and unforeseen consequences that immense human needs and ambitions have brought, and will continue to bring, to a finite planet.

Author : Martín Espada
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393541045
Total Pages : 75 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Floaters: Poems written by Martín Espada and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 75 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Poetry From the winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize come masterfully crafted narratives of protest, grief and love. Martín Espada is a poet who "stirs in us an undeniable social consciousness," says Richard Blanco. Floaters offers exuberant odes and defiant elegies, songs of protest and songs of love from one of the essential voices in American poetry. Floaters takes its title from a term used by certain Border Patrol agents to describe migrants who drown trying to cross over. The title poem responds to the viral photograph of Óscar and Valeria, a Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned in the Río Grande, and allegations posted in the "I’m 10-15" Border Patrol Facebook group that the photo was faked. Espada bears eloquent witness to confrontations with anti-immigrant bigotry as a tenant lawyer years ago, and now sings the praises of Central American adolescents kicking soccer balls over a barbed wire fence in an internment camp founded on that same bigotry. He also knows that times of hate call for poems of love—even in the voice of a cantankerous Galápagos tortoise. The collection ranges from historical epic to achingly personal lyrics about growing up, the baseball that drops from the sky and smacks Espada in the eye as he contemplates a girl’s gently racist question. Whether celebrating the visionaries—the fallen dreamers, rebels and poets—or condemning the outrageous governmental neglect of his father’s Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane María, Espada invokes ferocious, incandescent spirits.

Author : Mary Roach
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393348741
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal written by Mary Roach and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-04 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The irresistible, ever-curious, and always bestselling Roach returns with a new adventure to the invisible realm that people carry around inside.

Author : Cynthia Barnett
Publisher : Crown
ISBN 13 : 0804137110
Total Pages : 370 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Rain written by Cynthia Barnett and published by Crown. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rain is elemental, mysterious, precious, destructive. It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of the world's water. Yet this is the first book to tell the story of rain. Cynthia Barnett's Rain begins four billion years ago with the torrents that filled the oceans, and builds to the storms of climate change. It weaves together science—the true shape of a raindrop, the mysteries of frog and fish rains—with the human story of our ambition to control rain, from ancient rain dances to the 2,203 miles of levees that attempt to straitjacket the Mississippi River. It offers a glimpse of our "founding forecaster," Thomas Jefferson, who measured every drizzle long before modern meteorology. Two centuries later, rainy skies would help inspire Morrissey’s mopes and Kurt Cobain’s grunge. Rain is also a travelogue, taking readers to Scotland to tell the surprising story of the mackintosh raincoat, and to India, where villagers extract the scent of rain from the monsoon-drenched earth and turn it into perfume. Now, after thousands of years spent praying for rain or worshiping it; burning witches at the stake to stop rain or sacrificing small children to bring it; mocking rain with irrigated agriculture and cities built in floodplains; even trying to blast rain out of the sky with mortars meant for war, humanity has finally managed to change the rain. Only not in ways we intended. As climate change upends rainfall patterns and unleashes increasingly severe storms and drought, Barnett shows rain to be a unifying force in a fractured world. Too much and not nearly enough, rain is a conversation we share, and this is a book for everyone who has ever experienced it.

Author : Cynthia Barnett
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 0472033034
Total Pages : 249 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mirage written by Cynthia Barnett and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2008-04-21 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description

Author : Helen Scales
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1472911377
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Spirals in Time written by Helen Scales and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-05-07 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The beautifully written story of shells and their makers, and our relationships with them. Seashells are the sculpted homes of a remarkable group of animals: the molluscs. These are some of the most ancient and successful animals on the planet. But watch out. Some molluscs can kill you if you eat them. Some will kill you if you stand too close. That hasn't stopped people using shells in many ways over thousands of years. They became the first jewelry and oldest currencies; they've been used as potent symbols of sex and death, prestige and war, not to mention a nutritious (and tasty) source of food. Spirals in Time is an exuberant aquatic romp, revealing amazing tales of these undersea marvels. Helen Scales leads us on a journey into their realm, as she goes in search of everything from snails that 'fly' underwater on tiny wings to octopuses accused of stealing shells and giant mussels with golden beards that were supposedly the source of Jason's golden fleece, and learns how shells have been exchanged for human lives, tapped for mind-bending drugs and inspired advances in medical technology. Weaving through these stories are the remarkable animals that build them, creatures with fascinating tales to tell, a myriad of spiralling shells following just a few simple rules of mathematics and evolution. Shells are also bellwethers of our impact on the natural world. Some species have been overfished, others poisoned by polluted seas; perhaps most worryingly of all, molluscs are expected to fall victim to ocean acidification, a side-effect of climate change that may soon cause shells to simply melt away. But rather than dwelling on what we risk losing, Spirals in Time urges you to ponder how seashells can reconnect us with nature, and heal the rift between ourselves and the living world.

Author : Robert Morrison
Publisher : National Geographic Books
ISBN 13 : 0393249050
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Regency Years written by Robert Morrison and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A surprising and lively history of an overlooked era that brought the modern world of art, culture, and science decisively into view. The Victorians are often credited with ushering in our current era, yet the seeds of change were planted in the years before. The Regency (1811–1820) began when the profligate Prince of Wales—the future king George IV—replaced his insane father, George III, as Britain’s ruler. Around the regent surged a society steeped in contrasts: evangelicalism and hedonism, elegance and brutality, exuberance and despair. The arts flourished at this time with a showcase of extraordinary writers and painters such as Jane Austen, Lord Byron, the Shelleys, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner. Science burgeoned during this decade, too, giving us the steam locomotive and the blueprint for the modern computer. Yet the dark side of the era was visible in poverty, slavery, pornography, opium, and the gothic imaginings that birthed the novel Frankenstein. With the British military in foreign lands, fighting the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and the War of 1812 in the United States, the desire for empire and an expanding colonial enterprise gained unstoppable momentum. Exploring these crosscurrents, Robert Morrison illuminates the profound ways this period shaped and indelibly marked the modern world.

Author : Fiona Lindsay Shen
Publisher : Reaktion Books
ISBN 13 : 1789146224
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Pearl written by Fiona Lindsay Shen and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2022-10-24 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From their creation in the maw of mollusks to lustrous objects of infatuation and conflict, a revealing look at pearls’ dark history. This book is a beautifully illustrated account of pearls through millennia, from fossils to contemporary jewelry. Pearls are the most human of gems, both miraculous and familiar. Uniquely organic in origin, they are as intimate as our bodies, created through the same process as we grow bones and teeth. They have long been described as an animal’s sacrifice, but until recently their retrieval often entailed the sacrifices of enslaved and indentured divers and laborers. While the shimmer of the pearl has enticed Roman noblewomen, Mughal princes, Hollywood royalty, mavericks, and renegades, encoded in its surface is a history of human endeavor, abuse, and aspiration—pain locked in the layers of a gleaming gem.

Author :
Publisher : Publishers Lunch
ISBN 13 : 1948586398
Total Pages : 971 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Buzz Books 2021: Spring/Summer written by and published by Publishers Lunch. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 971 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buzz Books 2021 presents passionate readers with an insider’s look at the buzziest books due out this spring season. Such major bestselling authors as Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, Jean Hanff Korelitz, Lisa Scottoline, and Tia Williams are featured, along with literary greats Leila Slimani and Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Pulitzer Prize-winner. Other sure-to-be popular titles are by Julie Murphy, of Dumplin’ fame, with her first adult novel; Marie Benedict’s book about J.P Morgan’s personal librarian; and Flynn Berry’s thriller about two sisters and the IRA. Buzz Books has had a particularly stellar track record with highlighting the most talented, exciting debut authors, and this edition is no exception. Amanda Dennis, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Carolyn Ferrell, Gabriela Garcia, are among the literary standouts, while Emma Stonex’s The Lamplighters, inspired by a true story, has already been optioned for film. Our nonfiction selections include two World War II stories, one by Boys in the Boat author Daniel James Brown and a second by Mari K. Elder. Jennifer Gunter, M.D. of The Vagina Bible renown, returns with her Menopause Manifesto. Kat Chow, Erin French, and Danielle Henderson have written three very different memoirs, about a Chinese-American family, a restaurateur, and an unconventional Black childhood, respectively. Finally, we present early looks at new work from up-and-coming young adult authors: Safia Elhillo (Home Is Not A Country), Graci Kim (The Last Fallen Star), and Alexandrea Weis (Have You Seen Me?). Be sure to look out for Buzz Books 2021: Fall/Winter, coming in May.