Author: David McGonigal
Publisher: Frances Lincoln Limited
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
An Illustrated guide to Antarctica's environment, geography, wildlife, and history.

Author: Bill Bryson
Publisher: Anchor Canada
ISBN: 0385674562
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
"I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of smiling village where the movies from his youth were set. Instead he drove through a series of horrific burgs, which he renamed Smellville, Fartville, Coleslaw, Coma, and Doldrum. At best his search led him to Anywhere, USA, a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by obese and slow-witted hicks with a partiality for synthetic fibres. He discovered a continent that was doubly lost: lost to itself because he found it blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a foreigner in his own country.

Author: Michel Peissel
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312309534
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
A passionate homage to Tibet in words and pictures by one of the last great explorers who brings the geographical, spiritual, and intellectual heart of the country to life. 250 photos.

Author: Gillen D’Arcy Wood
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691201684
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
A gripping history of the polar continent, from the great discoveries of the nineteenth century to modern scientific breakthroughs Antarctica, the ice kingdom hosting the South Pole, looms large in the human imagination. The secrets of this vast frozen desert have long tempted explorers, but its brutal climate and glacial shores notoriously resist human intrusion. Land of Wondrous Cold tells a gripping story of the pioneering nineteenth-century voyages, when British, French, and American commanders raced to penetrate Antarctica’s glacial rim for unknown lands beyond. These intrepid Victorian explorers—James Ross, Dumont D’Urville, and Charles Wilkes—laid the foundation for our current understanding of Terra Australis Incognita. Today, the white continent poses new challenges, as scientists race to uncover Earth’s climate history, which is recorded in the south polar ice and ocean floor, and to monitor the increasing instability of the Antarctic ice cap, which threatens to inundate coastal cities worldwide. Interweaving the breakthrough research of the modern Ocean Drilling Program with the dramatic discovery tales of its Victorian forerunners, Gillen D’Arcy Wood describes Antarctica’s role in a planetary drama of plate tectonics, climate change, and species evolution stretching back more than thirty million years. An original, multifaceted portrait of the polar continent emerges, illuminating our profound connection to Antarctica in its past, present, and future incarnations. A deep-time history of monumental scale, Land of Wondrous Cold brings the remotest of worlds within close reach—an Antarctica vital to both planetary history and human fortunes.

Author: Matt London
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698146840
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
HAVE YOU EVER WANTED TO CREATE A PLACE WHERE YOU COULD MAKE YOUR OWN RULES? Evie and Rick Lane are determined to transform the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—a real life pile of floating garbage—into an eighth continent, using a special formula developed by their father. This new continent will be a place where their family can make their own rules and live free from the intervention of Winterpole, a global governing agency run by bumbling bureaucrats. But eleven-year-old pink-and-plastic-obsessed Vesuvia Piffle, the secret mastermind behind the villainous Condo Corp, also has her sights set on this new land, and she wants to use it to build a kind of Miami-on-steroids. Now, it’s a race against time and across the world as the kids gather the items they need to create their continent. Because whoever controls the eighth continent controls our future. And the future can’t be both “green” and pink. BUILD IT - RUN IT - RULE IT at 8thContinentBooks.com

Author: Michael Wesley
Publisher: ABRAMS
ISBN: 1468313452
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 117

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Book Description
An essential road map to modern Asia’s dynamic transition on the world stage from the foreign policy expert and author of There Goes the Neighbourhood. The world has never seen economic development as rapid or significant as Asia’s during recent decades. Home to three-fifths of the global population, this restless continent will soon produce more than half of the world’s economic output and consume more energy than the rest of the world combined. All but three of the planet’s current and nascent nuclear powers are Asian, and it has the greatest growth in weapons spending of any other region. Yet, surprisingly little has been written about the future of Asia. Restless Continent is the first book to examine the economic, social, political, and strategic trends across the world’s largest continent, providing the necessary framework for thinking about the future of Asia—and the world. A professor of international affairs at Australian National University, Michael Wesley looks at the psychology of Asian countries becoming newly rich and powerful. He explores the geography and politics of conflict, and offers persuasive ideas about how to avert dispute, or even war. Written for general readers and policy specialists alike, Restless Continent is an agenda-shaping book about international affairs in the twenty-first century.

Author: Keith Lowe
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250015049
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
The Second World War might have officially ended in May 1945, but in reality it rumbled on for another ten years... The end of the Second World War in Europe is one of the twentieth century's most iconic moments. It is fondly remembered as a time when cheering crowds filled the streets, danced, drank and made love until the small hours. These images of victory and celebration are so strong in our minds that the period of anarchy and civil war that followed has been forgotten. Across Europe, landscapes had been ravaged, entire cities razed and more than thirty million people had been killed in the war. The institutions that we now take for granted - such as the police, the media, transport, local and national government - were either entirely absent or hopelessly compromised. Crime rates were soaring, economies collapsing, and the European population was hovering on the brink of starvation. In Savage Continent, Keith Lowe describes a continent still racked by violence, where large sections of the population had yet to accept that the war was over. Individuals, communities and sometimes whole nations sought vengeance for the wrongs that had been done to them during the war. Germans and collaborators everywhere were rounded up, tormented and summarily executed. Concentration camps were reopened and filled with new victims who were tortured and starved. Violent anti-Semitism was reborn, sparking murders and new pogroms across Europe. Massacres were an integral part of the chaos and in some places – particularly Greece, Yugoslavia and Poland, as well as parts of Italy and France – they led to brutal civil wars. In some of the greatest acts of ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen, tens of millions were expelled from their ancestral homelands, often with the implicit blessing of the Allied authorities. Savage Continent is the story of post WWII Europe, in all its ugly detail, from the end of the war right up until the establishment of an uneasy stability across Europe towards the end of the 1940s. Based principally on primary sources from a dozen countries, Savage Continent is a frightening and thrilling chronicle of a world gone mad, the standard history of post WWII Europe for years to come.

Author: Antonia Michaelis
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1510720022
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Twelve-year-old Karl (a friend of Achim's from the orphanage) is really strong but can't cope without his timid friend, who has been adopted by a nice couple and now lives far away. What's the use in being strong, thinks Karl, if you don't have anyone to protect? He is relentlessly teased by the other kids at school, so Karl starts beating them up and is eventually expelled. Spending time alone in his room, Karl daydreams about his father, who he believes is a sea captain who has somehow lost Karl as a baby, but who will one day come and fetch him. But when Maria, who works at the orphanage, admits to Karl that she made up this story to soothe him when he was younger, he decides to run away from his teachers, his peers who tease him, and the people in his life who tell him lies. Thus he embarks on a journey to reach the ocean, become a sailor, and find his father. On his journey he meets the Tiny Ones, a tribe of adventurers and sailors not much bigger than Karl's little finger. They've lost their ship and would like to borrow the model ship Karl has brought with him on his escape. Karl is magically changed into one of the Tiny Ones and they set sail on an adventure to the Twelfth Continent. On a previous journey here, the children of the Tiny Ones vanished while on a walk one evening. Now, with Karl's help, the Tiny Ones want to find their children again. Throughout his adventures, Karl not only finds the solution to an old riddle on the Twelfth Continent, but also discovers traces of his real father on this very peculiar island with more than one surprise in store for him and his fellow sailors. Full of wit and surprises, The Secret of the Twelfth Continent is sure to captivate children while reinforcing the importance of family and friendship.

Author: Howard W. French
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307946657
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book Chinese immigrants of the recent past and unfolding twenty-first century are in search of the African dream. So explains indefatigable traveler Howard W. French, prize-winning investigative journalist and former New York Times bureau chief in Africa and China, in the definitive account of this seismic geopolitical development. China’s burgeoning presence in Africa is already shaping, and reshaping, the future of millions of people. From Liberia to Senegal to Mozambique, in creaky trucks and by back roads, French introduces us to the characters who make up China’s dogged emigrant population: entrepreneurs singlehandedly reshaping African infrastructure, and less-lucky migrants barely scraping by but still convinced of Africa’s opportunities. French’s acute observations offer illuminating insight into the most pressing unknowns of modern Sino-African relations: Why China is making these cultural and economic incursions into the continent; what Africa’s role is in this equation; and what the ramifications for both parties and their people—and the watching world—will be in the foreseeable future. One of the Best Books of the Year at • The Economist • The Guardian • Foreign Affairs

Author: Dayo Olopade
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547678339
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
“For anyone who wants to understand how the African economy really works, The Bright Continent is a good place to start” (Reuters). Dayo Olopade knew from personal experience that Western news reports on conflict, disease, and poverty obscure the true story of modern Africa. And so she crossed sub-Saharan Africa to document how ordinary people deal with their daily challenges. She found what cable news ignores: a continent of ambitious reformers and young social entrepreneurs driven by kanju—creativity born of African difficulty. It’s a trait found in pioneers like Kenneth Nnebue, who turned cheap VHS tapes into the multimillion-dollar film industry Nollywood. Or Ushahidi, a technology collective that crowdsources citizen activism and disaster relief. A shining counterpoint to conventional wisdom, The Bright Continent rewrites Africa’s challenges as opportunities to innovate, and celebrates a history of doing more with less as a powerful model for the rest of the world. “[An] upbeat study of development in Africa . . . The book is written more in wonder at African ingenuity than in anger at foreign incomprehension.” —The New Yorker “A hopeful narrative about a continent on the rise.” —The New York Times Book Review