?We share a common bond with even the most bizarre beetle of the Peruvian rain forest,? asserts John Janovy Jr. ?A belief in that common bond might, in fact, be the most fundamental characteristic of a biologist.? And biologists see the worth of a plant or an animal not in monetary terms but in its contribution to our understanding of life. The famous naturalist brings a humanist?s vision to this superbly written book. On Becoming a Biologist is grounded in reality, cognizant of practical matters (education and jobs) as well as the ideals that inform the profession?a reverence for life and a responsibility to humankind and its future. Janovy draws on his experiences as a graduate and postdoctoral student, on his rewarding relationships with teachers, and on his fieldwork as a naturalist. This edition includes new information throughout the book regarding pertinent events, issues, and changes in technology.
In Yellowlegs John Janovy again displays his rare talent for making the scientific accessible and the personal universal. The result is a an extraordinary parable of man and technology. It is also an intensely personal account of one man's journey toward an understanding of himself, of his fellow man, and perhaps most important, of the secrets of a single sandpiper–a Tringa flavipes, or lesser yellowlegs. We fly with Janovy's Yellowlegs from its nesting grounds in the Canadian north to South America and back. And along the way we join a slightly crazed biologist who leaves his university position, withdraws his life savings from the bank, and decides to follow the bird on its odyssey. Starting on the sand flats of Nebraska, and progressing across Kansas and down to the Gulf of Mexico (with a brief stop in Oklahoma jail), our migratory route brings us into contact not only with the wild creatures of the American West, but with the people–a few of whom are pretty wild themselves–with whom Janovy talks, drinks, and debates. Seldom has the life of a wild creature been so intimately and vividly described. Seldom have hard science and mysticism been more successfully and lyrically combined. There can be little question that Yellowlegs will take its place a classic of nature writing at its best.
Teaching in Eden provides any teacher with powerful and virtually free tools that he or she can use to alter the fundamental nature of the educational experience. The tools are simple instructional devices that require only a teacher's time, and the courage to break out of the existing constraints to discover and assemble the elements of an ideal instructional environment.
Intelligent Designer is a set of twenty answered questions about evolution. The book is intended to help alleviate the rampant scientific illiteracy so typical of today's political climate, an illiteracy that is outright dangerous to any society so dependent on science and technology as is the United States.
Examines the magic behind the scientific process through the lives of five of the author's students as they study the insects, microscopic organisms, frogs, and fish that thrive in a tiny Nebraska pond.
John Janovy "has produced his best book. . . . He gives us a superb example of nature writing and of life in the Great Plains, perhaps surpassing such admired works in the genre as Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac and William Warner's Beautiful Swimmers. Janovy takes us on a journey of intellectual serendipity, deriving extraordinary thoughts from ordinary circumstances".-Washington Post. "This 'human need for wilderness' is the trail winding through Back in Keith County . . . [to] the streams of John Janovy's 'inner cowboy country.' The fourteen essays are a very human mix of biology, sentiment, wandering observation and personal philosophy".-Smithsonian. Janovy's earlier Keith County Journal "met with astonishing success, and some reviewers compared the author to Henry David Thoreau. Back in Keith County returns to the part of Nebraska that Mr. Janovy knows and loves. . . . The book shows the area's wildlife-tiger beetles, toads, swallows, owls and a variety of fish-to be as special as its people. . . . The author also reflects on the intangible aspects of life. . . . The rich ramblings of these 179 pages are fascinating".-Kansas City Star. John Janovy Jr. is Varner Professor at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and director of the Cedar Point Biological Station. He is the author of Keith County Journal and On Becoming a Biologist, also available as a Bison Book.
In nature, as in society, the parasites outnumber the hosts. John Janovy Jr. offers the parasites' view of this situation. The result is smart, funny, and all too revealing." – Elizabeth Kolbert, staff writer for The New Yorker and New York Times bestselling author of The Sixth Extinction The answers to life's biggest questions can be found by looking at the little things... Though you may not be able to see them with the naked eye, parasites—miniscule life forms that live inside other organisms—inhabit our everyday lives. From headlice to bird droppings, litterboxes to unfiltered water, you have brushed up against the most common way of life on our planet. In this unique book, John Janovy Jr., one of the world's preeminent experts on parasites, reveals what can humans learn from the most reviled yet misunderstood animals on Earth: lice, tapeworms, flukes, and maggots that can eat a lizard from the inside, and how these lessons help us negotiate our own complicated world. Whether we're learning to adapt to adverse conditions, accept our own limitations, or process new information in an ever-changing landscape—we can be sure a parasite did it first. At once peculiar and profound, Life Lessons from a Parasite makes a case for using knowledge of the natural world, with all its wonderful mysteries and quirks, to tackle our worst problems.
With another death at his small, Forbes-listed, liberal arts college in Iowa, Gideon Marshall, unwilling and temporary chair of the Geology Department, gets dumped into even a bigger and more complex mess than he experienced as a result of the first one a year earlier. Instead of the simple heart attack and stroke that felled his predecessor, which was the perfect murder of a despised faculty bully, Marshall now deals with the brutal execution-style shooting of a geology prof, this one a female whose personality has earned her the nickname “Becky Bitcher.” THE STITCHER FILE is a sequel to BE CAREFUL, Dr. RENNER.In THE STITCHER FILE Marshall is put under house arrest because of a note found in the deceased's hands. The victim is found on an ice-covered railroad crossing by the Geology Department accountant. Law enforcement descends on the site, and Marshall ends up with an ankle monitor. Many of the same players that plagued Gideon Marshall in BE CAREFUL, DR. RENNER re-appear in new roles, along with new characters from various law enforcement agencies. RENNER, it turns out, was a victim of a perfect murder scheme. STITCHER is a different matter.
To learn from nature, not about nature, was the imperative that took John Janovy Jr. and his students into the sandhills, marshes, grasslands, canyons, lakes, and streams of Keith County in western Nebraska. The biologist explores the web of interrelationships among land, animals, and human beings. Even termites, snails, and barn swallows earn respect and assume significance in the overall scheme of things. Janovy, reminiscent of Henry David Thoreau in his acute powers of observation and search for wisdom, has written a new foreword for this Bison Books edition.John Janovy Jr. is Varner Professor at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and director of the Cedar Point Biological Station. He is the author of Back in Keith County and On Becoming a Biologist, also available as Bison Books.
The Ginkgo is a story about a girl from a western ranch who comes to a large university and writes four papers about a single tree. In the process, she discovers and explores the clash between tradition and creativity, eventually producing a sobering vision of American a thousand years into the future.
TUSKERS takes place on the day of a football game between the University of Nebraska and the University of Oklahoma in the year 2090. Nebraska has not lost a game in ten years, but must win this last one to complete the perfect Winning Decade. Global warming has turned the American central plains into a desert. A brilliant chemical engineer has devised a way to make petroleum products from slime corn, a desert-loving perennial invented by molecular biologists. As a result of his patents, this engineer owns a company named Anti-Environmental Products, Inc. (AEPI), whose raw material-corn slime-is the crude oil of the late 21st Century. Nebraska is now the petroleum source for much of the world, and thus the engineer's wealth. But this guy hates Nebraska and will use everything in his power to make the Tuskers lose! The molecular biologists also have succeeded in resurrecting woolly mammoths from DNA in carcasses appearing in the rapidly-melting polar ice cap. The first, and largest, of these mammoths is Archie, the University of Nebraska mascot, and the team is now known as the "Tuskers" instead of the "Cornhuskers" as earlier in the century. TUSKERS not only is science fiction, it also is satire, exploring the American obsession with football as a national sport as the world experiences global climate change, political turmoil, and accelerating technological advance. In the end, the book is not so much about sport as it is about our preoccupation with sport as a displacement behavior in a world that is changing so rapidly we cannot control it.
OUTWITTING COLLEGE PROFESSORS is the ultimate college success book. This valuable little volume tells everything you need to know, from how profs make out exams, how you should act if you encounter your prof in a bar, tips for maximizing grades on papers, to advice on how to handle your relationships with the most difficult profs (in a chapter named "Advanced Outwitting"!) For over four decades, college students have used these tricks on the author, and now he's passing along the ones that work, along with explanations of why they work. The 4th Edition contains a contributed chapter by Nicole Searcey, champion outwitter and Fulbright Scholar. If there is any single textbook any college student must have, it's OUTWITTING. This one makes the ideal gift for a graduating, college-bound, high school senior!
Dr. Clyde Renner, professor of geology, chair of the department, world renowned expert on volcanoes and earthquakes, and intellectual giant, is dead, apparently of a heart attack, alone in his insect-infested house. Leonard Branch, campus cop at Renner's small liberal arts college in Iowa, is convinced there's more to Renner's demise than appears on the death certificate. Gideon Marshall, paleontologist, now acting chair, plays host to a parade of characters, including Ranner's bullied secretary and accountant, a belligerent female prof, an untenured young scientist and his hot-headed coed paramour, her wealthy helicopter parent, Renner's estranged gay son and his computer geek husband, and the college president; all are involved in various ways with Clyde Renner's distinguished career and all have a stake in the autopsy results. In the end, Marshall accepts the fact that he's probably discovered not only the perfect murder, but also ideal weapons of mass destruction.
CONVERSATIONS addresses what God calls The Ultimate Question, namely, why people throughout the universe are killing one another in His name. God arrives on Earth as a male pre-med college student from South Dakota; Satan arrives as a feisty female English major and struggling writer with a love for high calorie cookies, cigarettes, and vodka. They spend two weeks, an hour a day, at The Crescent Moon addressing a wide range of problems that people, and people-like animals, but eventually deal with the issue of wholesale slaughter in the name of God. After reading CONVERSATIONS, you will never look at the sky, or your local church, in the same way again.
OUTWITTING COLLEGE PROFESSORS is the ultimate college success book. This valuable little volume tells everything you need to know, from how profs make out exams, how you should act if you encounter your prof in a bar, tips for maximizing grades on papers, to advice on how to handle your relationships with the most difficult profs (in a chapter named "Advanced Outwitting"!) For over four decades, college students have used these tricks on the author, and now he's passing along the ones that work, along with explanations of why they work. If there is any single textbook any college student must have, it's OUTWITTING. This one makes the ideal gift for a graduating, college-bound, high school senior!
A parasitology text for biology and/or zoology students at the undergraduate level. Emphasizes principles with related information on the biology, physiology, morphology, and ecology of the major parasites of humans and domestic animals. This is not a diagnostic manual for medical students.
Delmar Stevens, obscenely rich oil baron with rigs and drilling platforms throughout the world, is obsessed with theoretical research by an obscure, and now dead, woman scientist at a small college in Iowa, research he believes will give him the power to generate massive earthquakes, or set off equally massive volcanoes, at selected places on Earth. Caught up in this obsession with a potential weapon of mass destruction are a suite of characters, including scientists, detectives from the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, and an oil field inspector working for the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, and a young geologist who holds the key to success, or failure, of Stevens' obsession. Belief in the validity of scientific discoveries drives Stevens' actions, namely an effort to build a weapon of mass destruction disguised as a natural disaster. He dreams of the power at his command if he can use his company's massive inventory of equipment and those Einstein-level equations to prove that his ideas work. The first big experiments are underway in Oklahoma.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.