Author: Shirley Walker
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 82

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Book Description

Author: Rita Kimber
Publisher: Barron's Educational Series
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Shows the immense variety of plant and animal life that struggles to survive in a constantly shrinking portion of the earth's tropical region.

Author: Andrew W. Mitchell
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292724662
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
The author traces his journey through the South Pacific and examines the natural history of the region

Author: Janine di Giovanni
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1541756681
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
The Vanishing reveals the plight and possible extinction of Christian communities across Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Palestine after 2,000 years in their historical homeland. Some of the countries that first nurtured and characterized Christianity - along the North African Coast, on the Euphrates and across the Middle East and Arabia - are the ones in which it is likely to first go extinct. Christians are already vanishing. We are past the tipping point, now tilted toward the end of Christianity in its historical homeland. Christians have fled the lands where their prophets wandered, where Jesus Christ preached, where the great Doctors and hierarchs of the early church established the doctrinal norms that would last millennia. From Syria to Egypt, the cities of northern Iraq to the Gaza Strip, ancient communities, the birthplaces of prophets and saints, are losing any living connection to the religion that once was such a characteristic feature of their social and cultural lives. In The Vanishing, Janine di Giovanni has combined astonishing journalistic work to discover the last traces of small, hardy communities that have become wisely fearful of outsiders and where ancient rituals are quietly preserved amid 360 degree threats. Di Giovanni's riveting personal stories and her conception of faith and hope are intertwined throughout the chapters. The book is a unique act of pre-archeology: the last chance to visit the living religion before all that will be left are the stones of the past.

Author: Candace Slater
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520226410
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
"The skill with which [Slater] combines various levels and modalities of narrative, utilizing her personal experience as a colorful unifying thread, is truly remarkable."—Antonio Candido, author of Antonio Candido: On Literature and Society (Howard S. Becker, editor) "A very important book, that quite gracefully, elegantly, and persuasively moves beyond the usual 'myth and history' format to put at its center stories about the Amazon and the people who tell them. Entangled Edens persuasively argues that the Amazon can only be grasped, understood, and come to terms with through its myths and stories. It addresses a very real failing of modern environmentalism, which for all its virtues, tends to dehumanize and metaphorically depopulate, when it does not villainize, populations that do share its concerns or share them in very different ways. Instead of forcing us to choose between land and people, Slater uses the stories and the people who tell them to rethink human relations with nature and each other."—Richard White, author of The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River "Elegant, erudite, profoundly serious, Entangled Edens is a source of inspiration and knowledge for the reader interested in the Amazon. Without the cultural tradition and the life experience of Amazonia’s people, any analysis of the Amazon risks becoming inconsequential or opportunistic. This is one of the powerful messages of this important reflection on the Amazon, whose greatest riches are ultimately its people. Candace Slater has written a book that will last."—Milton Hatoum, author of The Tree of the Seventh Heaven(1994) and The Brothers (2002)

Author: CA. Cranston
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042022183
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
In this, the first collection of ecocritical essays devoted to Australian contexts and their writers, Australian and USA scholars (settlers, invaders, temporary visa holders) comment on the transliteration of sea, land and interior through the works of major and minor authors and through their own experience with the bioregion. The littoral zone is the starting point in this fresh approach to reading literature and is organised around the natural environment - rainforest, desert, mountains, coast, islands, Antarctica. There's the beach where sexual and spiritual crises occur; the Wheatbelt area - the most visible clearance line on the planet; desert literature, camel trekking, and the transformation of a salt flat into an inland island. New Age literature that 'appropriates' Aboriginals and their cultures as the healing poultice for an ailing and dispirited West; a re-examination of pastoralism, and "the feet of millions of sheep . that] have done unspeakable damage to soils"; an inquiry into whether Judith Wright's work can "persuade us to rejoice" in the world; an investigation of the Limestone Plains, home of the bush capital and the bogong moth; of bananas, cane toads and the Great Barrier Reef in tropic Queensland; of national parks and guesthouses where "the mountains meet the sea"; a discursive approach to temperate islands that covers sealing, Soldier Settlement, and sea country pastoral; and finally to Antarctica, where an initial utopian approach gives way to an emphasis on its stark, 'timeless' icescape as a minimalist backdrop for human dramas. The author-terrain is no less grand in its scope: poets, playwrights, novelists, and non-fiction writers are discussed across the broad range of contexts that constitutes the littoral zone known as 'Australia'.

Author: Alex Shoumatoff
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807078255
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Acclaimed naturalist Alex Shoumatoff issues a worldwide call to protect the drastically endangered rainforests of Borneo In his eleventh book, but his first in almost two decades, seasoned travel writer Alex Shoumatoff takes readers on a journey from the woods of rural New York to the rain forests of the Amazon and Borneo, documenting both the abundance of life and the threats to these vanishing Edens in a wide-ranging narrative. Alex and his best friend, Davie, spent their formative years in the forest of Bedford, New York. As adults they grew apart, but bonded by the “imaginary jungle” of their childhood, Alex and Davie reunited fifty years later for a trip to a real jungle, in the heart of Borneo. During the intervening years, Alex had become an author and literary journalist, traveling the world to bring to light places, animals, and indigenous cultures in peril. The two reconnect and spend three weeks together on Borneo, one of the most imperiled ecosystems on earth. Insatiable demand for the palm oil ubiquitous in consumer goods is wiping out the world’s most ancient and species-rich rain forest, home to the orangutan and countless other life-forms, including the Penan people, with whom Alex and Davie camp. The Penan have been living in Borneo’s rain forest for millennia, but 90 percent of the lowland rain forest has already been logged and burned to make way for vast oil-palm plantations. Among the most endangered tribal people on earth, the Penan are fighting for their right to exist. Shoumatoff condenses a lifetime of learning about what binds humans to animals, nature, and each other, culminating in a celebration of the Penan and a call for Westerners to address the palm-oil crisis and protect the biodiversity that sustains us all.

Author: Elizabeth C. Childs
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520271734
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Vanishing paradise" offers a fresh take on the modernist primitivism of the French painter Paul Gauguin, the exoticism of the American John LaFarge, and the elite tourism of the American writer Henry Adams. Childs explores how these artists wrestled with the elusiveness of paradise and portrayed colonial Tahiti in ways both mythic and modern.

Author: Alex Shoumatoff
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807078247
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Acclaimed naturalist Alex Shoumatoff issues a worldwide call to protect the drastically endangered rainforests of Borneo In his eleventh book, but his first in almost two decades, seasoned travel writer Alex Shoumatoff takes readers on a journey from the woods of rural New York to the rain forests of the Amazon and Borneo, documenting both the abundance of life and the threats to these vanishing Edens in a wide-ranging narrative. Alex and his best friend, Davie, spent their formative years in the forest of Bedford, New York. As adults they grew apart, but bonded by the “imaginary jungle” of their childhood, Alex and Davie reunited fifty years later for a trip to a real jungle, in the heart of Borneo. During the intervening years, Alex had become an author and literary journalist, traveling the world to bring to light places, animals, and indigenous cultures in peril. The two reconnect and spend three weeks together on Borneo, one of the most imperiled ecosystems on earth. Insatiable demand for the palm oil ubiquitous in consumer goods is wiping out the world’s most ancient and species-rich rain forest, home to the orangutan and countless other life-forms, including the Penan people, with whom Alex and Davie camp. The Penan have been living in Borneo’s rain forest for millennia, but 90 percent of the lowland rain forest has already been logged and burned to make way for vast oil-palm plantations. Among the most endangered tribal people on earth, the Penan are fighting for their right to exist. Shoumatoff condenses a lifetime of learning about what binds humans to animals, nature, and each other, culminating in a celebration of the Penan and a call for Westerners to address the palm-oil crisis and protect the biodiversity that sustains us all.

Author: Thomas B. Allen, Gilbert M. Grosvenor
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description