Learning about the environment — from forests to deserts and wetlands — can be fun! Thirty adventurous illustrations make the message clear: take care of the planet, it's our home!
What kind of rock can float? Which flower has petals that weigh up to 15 pounds? Why do bees dance? How was the microwave "accidentally" invented? Thirty ready-to-color illustrations — accompanied by incredible facts, astonishing statistics, and odd tidbits about nature — make this one of the most entertaining and educational coloring books around!
Discover where our tap water comes from and how can we conserve our most precious resource. Mr. Turtle conducts a lively tour of the water cycle that features 30 illustrations to color. The drawings and captions explain every step of the process, from the accumulation of rain and snow in reservoirs to the evaporation of oceans, the formation of vapor, and other fascinating facets of water ecology.
“Where is the market?” inquires the tourist one dark, chilly morning. “Follow the ghosts,” responds the taxi driver, indicating a shadowy parade of overloaded tricycles. “It’s not called the ghost market for nothing!” And indeed, Beijing is nothing if not haunted. Among the soaring skyscrapers, choking exhaust fumes, nonstop traffic jams, and towering monuments, one discovers old Beijing—newly styled, perhaps, but no less present and powerful than in its ancient incarnation. Beijing Time conducts us into this mysterious world, at once familiar and yet alien to the outsider. The ancient Chinese understood the world as enchanted, its shapes revealing the mythological order of the universe. In the structure and detail of Tian’anmen Square, the authors reveal the city as a whole. In Beijing no pyramids stand as proud remnants of the past; instead, the entire city symbolizes a vibrant civilization. From Tian’anmen Square, we proceed to the neighborhoods for a glimpse of local color—from the granny and the young police officer to the rag picker and the flower vendor. Wandering from the avant-garde art market to the clock towers, from the Monumental Axis to Mao’s Mausoleum, the book allows us to peer into the lives of Beijingers, the rules and rituals that govern their reality, and the mythologies that furnish their dreams. Deeply immersed in the culture, everyday and otherworldly, this anthropological tour, from ancient cosmology to Communist kitsch, allows us to see as never before how the people of Beijing—and China—work and live.
In The Book of Politics, Michael Dutton offers an affective theorization of the political and a political theorization of affect. Drawing on Western and Chinese social theory and practice, Dutton rethinks Carl Schmitt’s insistence that the political can be thought of only within the antagonistic pairing of friend and enemy. Dutton shows how the power of the friend/enemy binary must be understood by conceptualizing the political as the channeling, harnessing, and transforming of affective energy flows in relation to that binary. Given this affective nature of politics, Dutton contends that to rethink the political means moving away from a political science toward an art of the political. Such an art highlights fluidity and pulls away from Eurocentric political theory, requiring a conceptualization of the political as global. He juxtaposes ancient Chinese cosmology, medicine, and Maoism against the monuments of early capitalist modernity such as the Crystal Palace and the Eiffel Tower to highlight the differences in political investments and intensities. From the Chinese revolution to the global rise of right-wing movements, Dutton rethinks politics in the contemporary world.
Discover some fascinating scientific principles when you take a log ride and encounter inertia and velocity, experience centripetal force on the Ferris wheel, and develop momentum on the roller coaster.
This third volume of American University Publications in Philos ophy continues the tradition of presenting books in the series shaping current frontiers and new directions in phi. osophical reflection. In a period emerging from the neglect of creativity by positivism, Professors Dutton and Krausz and their eminent colleagues included in the collection challenge modern philosophy to explore the concept of creativity in both scientific inquiry and artistic production. In view of the fact that Professor Krausz served at one time as Visiting Professor of Philosophy at The American University we are especially pleased to include this volume in the series. HAROLD A. DURFEE, for the editors of American University Publications in Philosophy EDITORS' PREFACE While the literature on the psychology of creativity is substantial, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the subject by philos ophers in recent years. This fact is no doubt owed in 'part to the legacy of positivism, whose tenets have included a sharp distinction between what Hans Reichenbach called the context of discovery and the context of justification. Philosophy in this view must address itself to the logic of justifying hypotheses; little of philo sophical importance can be said about the more creative business of discovering them. That, positivism has held, is no more than a merely psychological question: since there is no logic of discovery or creation, there can be no philosophical reconstruction of it.
This earth-friendly coloring book presents astounding facts about consumption, waste, and recycling. It offers realistic views of how our actions affect the planet and what we can do reduce our carbon footprint.
On the changing checkerboard of Christmasville, buildings and homes are rearranged annually. The calendar consists of only two pages: December and January. But no one gets any older. And the worst of ailments is poison ivy, and color blindness, and signs of that most harrowing of afflictions: partial blindness. No one knows where the trains go or what lies beyond the mountains and forests. They've never seen grass or walnut trees, but they do discover how tomatoes are named. And roses and violets and orchids. In a town nestled between magic and miracle, dream and deja vu, Mary Jane Higgins embarks on a series of perilous journeys, determined to resolve the enigma of Christmasville. Although it's forbidden, she crosses train tracks, approaches the bottomless abyss, travels through a wilderness that "operates according to a different set of rules." Could Mary Jane's suspicions be true? Could the town in which she resides be a Christmas village, situated on a 4 x 8 model train platform?
Join Mr. Turtle and his young friends for a tour of animal habitats that includes mountains, wetlands, rainforests, deserts, savanna, and outback — all populated by thriving wildlife communities.
“This debut author rightfully earns his place on the storytelling totem pole with this wildly original short story collection.”—San Francisco Chronicle Dazzling and delightful, with its feet only slightly tethered to the world we know, The Sea Beast Takes a Lover explores family, faith, and longing through a kaleidoscope of surreal landscapes and spellbinding characters. Andreasen's stories unfold in wildly inventive worlds that invite the supernatural into our familiar routines: in “Bodies in Space,” an extramarital affair is rudely interrupted by an alien abduction, while in “Blunderbuss,” a third-grade class takes an ill-advised field trip to a floundering time travel institute. “Jenny” follows a reluctant caretaker's attempts to manage his kind-hearted headless sister, and in the title story, a group of sailors find their ship commandeered by an aggressively lovestruck kraken. Romping through the fantastic with bighearted ease, these stories uncover a universal yearning for connection in seldom-explored spaces, revealing that aliens can help us think about loss, that time travel is just another way to talk about guilt, and that sea monsters may have a thing or two to teach us about love. With a captivating new voice from an immensely talented storyteller, The Sea Beast Takes a Lover uses the odd, the extraordinary, and the miraculous to expose us at our most profoundly and hilariously human.
In 'Percy Bysshe Shelly: A Literary Life' , Michael O'Neill gives a knowledgeable and balanced account of Shelley's literary career from his earliest published work to his last unfinished masterpiece, The Triumph of Life . The book draws on recent research about the poet and his age, but its sense of the ways in which texts and contexts interact is sharply independent. Issues discussed include Shelley's social background, his radical politics and his complex response to Enlightenment rationalism. O'Neill stresses Shelley's often disappointed search for an audience, connecting it with the growing sophistication of his poetry and poetics. For Shelley, a poet was the 'combined product' of 'internal powers' and 'external influences' (Preface to Prometheus Unbound ); this book explores how such a combination manifests itself in his own writings.
A perennial favorite in travel guides. Each fully revised chapter has information on history, sights, food, lodging, sports, nightlife, kids' activities--twenty-three topics in all.
In "Christmasville" readers discovered the magic and mystique of a community, perpetually locked in a wintry wonderland of the yuletide season. With the passing of each calendar "year," homes and buildings were rearranged according to a new "plan" of things - as if checkers upon a playing board, presenting for Mary Jane the niggling notion that something was awry. There was the issue of ... memory, and forgetfulness ... of trees without leaves ... of New York City and Boston cream pie. Seeking answers to her question, Mary Jane embarked on a series of perilous journeys through the forests and mountains of the uncharted wilderness, determined to resolve the enigma of "Christmasville". But if Mary Jane was motivated by personal faith, a spirit of independence and the quest for truth in the first volume of the trilogy, Madeleine and Esmeralda are driven by purposes quite different in the second. For both girls it is the embracement of hope - of salvation for Madeleine, of illumination for Esmeralda - that propels them along their separate paths. Madeleine, a daughter of the Magian line, is bequeathed "calinda al emeris magus"--The rare "gift of the fourth king"--which enables her to perceive what others cannot. But, as with many gifts, there are prices for such things. The bloom of a rose, or the fruit of a tree, does not come without the promise of a thorn or the threat of blight. For Esmeralda, the fortune teller who once read Tarot cards for Mary Jane on First Night, the journey forward is impeded by that affliction which haunts everyone who calls Christmasville home: memory - the multiple perforations of memory, which prevent her from summoning images of her long lost father, her mother, her brother, Oscar ... and of what became of them all. As readers follow Madeleine and Esmeralda in their journeys, they discover the origin and dynamics of the colossal clock tower by the "house at the end of the world," the functions of the giant transformers that generate much more than heat and light for the idyllic town of Christmasville, the "secret of lightning" and the remarkable phenomenon of "thin places." But for the astute reader - the reader who discovered in "Christmasville" a confirmation of that sometimes elusive, though always enduring virtue of faith - "Finding Christmasville" will be a journey of illumination, an epiphany, a celebration in that most wondrous and fragile of human aspirations: hope. "Another dickens of a tale!" (Kris Kringle, the "North Pole Gazette").
We are becoming less intelligent. This is the shocking yet fascinating message of At Our Wits' End. The authors take us on a journey through the growing body of evidence that we are significantly less intelligent now than we were a hundred years ago. The research proving this is, at once, profoundly thought-provoking, highly controversial, and it's currently only read by academics. But the authors are passionate that it cannot remain ensconced in the ivory tower any longer. With At Our Wits' End, they present the first ever popular scientific book on this crucially important issue. They prove that intelligence — which is strongly genetic — was increasing up until the breakthrough of the Industrial Revolution, because we were subject to the rigors of Darwinian Selection, meaning that lots of surviving children was the preserve of the cleverest. But since then, they show, intelligence has gone into rapid decline, because large families are increasingly the preserve of the least intelligent. The book explores how this change has occurred and, crucially, what its consequences will be for the future. Can we find a way of reversing the decline of our IQ? Or will we witness the collapse of civilization and the rise of a new Dark Age?
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