An enchanting book...poignant and passionate.' Geographical 'A captivating and absorbing account.' Sir David Attenborough Madagascar is one of the world’s natural jewels, with over ninety per cent of its wildlife found nowhere else on Earth. Few people knew it better than the pioneering primatologist and conservationist, Alison Jolly. Thank You, Madagascar is her eyewitness account of the extraordinary biodiversity of the island, and the environment of its people. At the book’s heart is a conflict between three different views of nature. Is the extraordinary forest treasure-house of Madagascar a heritage for the entire world? Is it a legacy of the forest dwellers’ ancestors, bequeathed to serve the needs of their living descendants? Or is it an economic resource to be pillaged for short-term gain and to be preserved only to deliver benefits for those with political power? Exploring and questioning these different views, this is a beautifully written diary and a tribute to Madagascar.
Chronicles the rich human, plant, and animal diversity of this Isle off the East Coast of Africa, home to lemurs, unusual reptiles, and other creatures more at home in mythology than natural science.
Takes a look at human evolution focusing on the long line of women and of female behavior that was to follow the age of the much-studied oldest human remains.
Mommy's Big, Red Monster Truck is back, and this time it’s going on a jolly adventure! The USA is full of different winter holiday traditions, whether that’s Christmas, Kwanza, or Hanukkah. Take a joyful trip along with Mommy, her son, and the monster truck — which is all decorated for the holiday season! See the decorated lighthouses in New England. Ride the Christmas City Express in Minnesota. Watch Santa arrive on a surfboard in California. And even go hang gliding with Santa Claus at Jockey's Ridge State Park in the Outer Banks of North Carolina! Kids will squeal with anticipation and glee at the customs celebrated throughout the United States.
Bitika (which means "tiny" in Malagasy) is a mouse lemur, the earth's smallest primate. This story is about baby Bitika growing up and her first forays into the forest where she encounters other lemurs and a potentially tragic situation. Bitika saves the day and in spite of her small size, feels like a powerful creature of the forest.
A human female is born, lives her life, and dies within the space of a few decades, but the shape of her life has been strongly influenced by 50 million years of primate evolution and more than 100 million years of mammalian evolution. How the individual female plays out the stages of her life--from infancy, through the reproductive period, to old age--and how these stages have been formed by a long evolutionary process, is the theme of this collection. Written by leading scholars in fields ranging from evolutionary biology to cultural anthropology, these essays together examine what it means to be female, integrating the life histories of marine mammals, monkeys, apes, and humans. The result is a fascinating inquiry into the similarities among the ways females of different species balance the need for survival with their role in reproduction and mothering. The Evolving Female offers an outlook integrating life history with an intimate examination of female life paths. Behavior, anatomy and physiology, growth and development, cultural identity of women, the individual, and the society are among the topics investigated. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Linda Fedigan, Kathryn Ono, Joanne Reiter, Barbara Smuts, Mariko Hiraiwa-Hasegawa, Mary McDonald Pavelka, Caroline Pond, Robin McFarland, Silvana Borgognini Tarli and Elena Repetto, Gilda Morelli, Patricia Draper, Catherine Panter-Brick, Virginia J. Vitzthum, Alison Jolly, and Beverly McLeod.
The Parable of the Prodigal Son is one of the best-known stories in the Bible. It has captured the imagination of commentators, preachers and writers. Alison M. Jack explores the reconfiguring of the character of the Prodigal Son and his family in literature in English. She considers diverse literary periods and genres in which the paradigm is particularly prevalent, such as Elizabethan literature, the work of Shakespeare, the novels of female Victorian writers, the American short story tradition, novels focused on the lives of ordained ministers, and the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Iain Crichton Smith. Drawing on scholarship from biblical and literary studies, this study demonstrates the remarkable potency of the parable in generating new, and at times contradictory, meanings in different contexts. Historical and literary criticism are brought into dialogue to explore this remarkably resilient and nimble character as he dances through drama, novels and poetry across the centuries.
I absolutely loved Lillian on Life." —Kate Atkinson "I found it full of life and full of wisdom.” —Erica Jong Smart, poignant, funny, and totally original, Lillian on Life is as fresh and surprising as fiction gets. This is the story of Lillian, a single woman reflecting on her choices and imagining her future. Born in the Midwest in the 1930s; Lillian lives, loves, and works in Europe in the fifties and early sixties; she settles in New York and pursues the great love of her life in the sixties and seventies. Now it’s the early nineties, and she’s taking stock. Throughout her life, walking the unpaved road between traditional and modern choices for women, Lillian grapples with parental disappointment and societal expectations, wins and loses in love, and develops her own brand of wisdom. Lillian on Life lifts the skin off the beautiful, stylish product of an era to reveal the confused, hot-blooded woman underneath.
This volume is a major, groundbreaking study of the modernist E. E. Cummings' engagement with the classics. It explores the significance of Cummings' Harvard training as a classicist to his development as a poet and to his published work and also contains an edition of new, previously unpublished material by Cummings himself.
A moving account of Madagascar told by a researcher who has spent over fifty years investigating the mysteries of this remarkable island. Madagascar is a place of change. A biodiversity hotspot and the fourth largest island on the planet, it has been home to a spectacular parade of animals, from giant flightless birds and giant tortoises on the ground to agile lemurs leaping through the treetops. Some species live on; many have vanished in the distant or recent past. Over vast stretches of time, Madagascar’s forests have expanded and contracted in response to shifting climates, and the hand of people is clear in changes during the last thousand years or so. Today, Madagascar is a microcosm of global trends. What happens there in the decades ahead can, perhaps, suggest ways to help turn the tide on the environmental crisis now sweeping the world. The Sloth Lemur’s Song is a far-reaching account of Madagascar’s past and present, led by an expert guide who has immersed herself in research and conservation activities with village communities on the island for nearly fifty years. Alison Richard accompanies the reader on a journey through space and time—from Madagascar’s ancient origins as a landlocked region of Gondwana and its emergence as an island to the modern-day developments that make the survival of its array of plants and animals increasingly uncertain. Weaving together scientific evidence with Richard’s own experiences and exploring the power of stories to shape our understanding of events, this book captures the magic as well as the tensions that swirl around this island nation.
In eighteenth-century England, “variety” became a prized aesthetic in musical culture. Not only was variety—of counterpoint, harmony, melody, and orchestration—expected for good composition, but it also manifested in cultural mediums such as songbook anthologies, which compiled miscellaneous songs and styles in single volumes; pasticcio operas, which were cobbled together from excerpts from other operas; and public concerts, which offered a hodgepodge assortment of different types and styles of performance. I call this trend of producing music through the collection, assemblage, and juxtaposition of various smaller pieces as musical miscellany; like a jigsaw puzzle (also invented in the eighteenth century), the urge to construct a whole out of smaller, different parts reflected a growing desire to appeal to a quickly diversifying England. This book explores the phenomenon of musical miscellany in early eighteenth-century England both in performance culture and as an aesthetic. Chapters offer analyses of concert programming, early music criticism, the compilation of pasticcio operas and songbook miscellanies, and even the ways in which composers and performers shaped their freelancing careers. Musical miscellany, in its many forms, juxtaposed foreign and homegrown musical practices and styles in order to stimulate discourse surrounding English musical culture during a time of cosmopolitan transformation as the eighteenth century unfolded.
As the world has been reshaped since the 1970s by neoliberalism and globalization, increasing financial abstraction has presented a new political urgency for contemporary writers. Globalized finance, the return to Gilded Age levels of inequality, and the emergence of new technologies pose a similar challenge to the one faced by American social realists a century ago: making the virtualization of capitalism legible within the conventions of the realist novel. In The Financial Imaginary, Alison Shonkwiler reads texts by Richard Powers, Don DeLillo, Jane Smiley, Teddy Wayne, and Mohsin Hamid to examine how fiction confronts the formal and representational mystifications of the economic. As Shonkwiler shows, these contemporary writers navigate the social, moral, and class preoccupations of American “economic fiction” (as shaped by such writers as William Dean Howells, Henry James, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser), even as they probe the novel’s inadequacies to tell the story of an increasingly abstract world system. Drawing a connection from historical and theoretical accounts of financialization to the formal contours of contemporary fiction, The Financial Imaginary examines the persistent yet vexed relationship between financial representation and the demands of literary realism. It argues that the novel is essential to understanding our relation to the mystifications of abstraction past and present.
Behavioral Variation is the most thorough field research to date on the lemurs of Madagascar. Dr. Richard's investigation ranges from a history of the subject to a description of the diverse Malagasy climate and vegetation, to population dynamics, activity patterns, and social behavior, to group social life, behavioral variability, and a general review of ecology and social organization among primates.
AUTHORISED & VETTED BY SAS/SBS, MI5/MI6 AND PM RISHI SUNAK FOR UK GOVERNMENT AND BY UN & ICJ, AT EASE NOW ICC CASE REPORT PUBLISHED HERE. PM RISHI SUNAK: ‘A BIG slot please to praise Alison’s tenacity holding firm as 001 SAS Sammie for sixty years now, THANK YOU! You are a long-range visionary to my girls who think your Treaty in UN banning nuclear weaponry is most striking thing I’ve ever supported, whoops-a daisy, I love you for this marvellous policy I have adopted officially! I support her plan for reformation of the House of Lords as well, we all agree privilege is outdated and plain wrong nowadays.’ ADMIRAL LORD RADAKIN: ‘Awarded 49 MCs, latest count! Mandatory to call her ‘heroine’, always, UN orders!First female UN-appointed UK Field Marshal in 2010, performs superbly in action! She’s ‘M.’ in jargon, unpaid.’ RAY STUBBS, TV Sports commentator: ‘WOW! Do not read if you think liars and cheats should win! I knew her on Calday/West Kirby State Grammar School bus and not only filmed her winning the Grand National secretly, but winning Gold Medals, the grand stand view is hers.’ TOM WHIPPLE, Science Editor, The Times: ‘It is the best book I ever read, volume 1 was unsurpassable to me until I read volume 2! Volume 3 was even better! And volume 4 made me eat my hat! Must be read by everyone!’
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