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Book Synopsis The Comic Encyclopedia by : Evan Esar
Download or read book The Comic Encyclopedia written by Evan Esar and published by Doubleday Books. This book was released on 1978 with total page 896 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here at last is the first genuine encyclopedia of comedy ever published. Its range is enormous. It explores the comedy behind history, the arts, language, literature, entertainments. And on almost every page you will find amusing items, from jokes to anecdotes, from wisecracks to gaglines. The thousand and one articles describe the performers of laughter--humorists, punsters, satirists, comedians, cartoonists. They also explain the science of comedy. The text mingles historical events and funny stories with thousands of specimens of wit and humor.--Jacket flap.
Book Synopsis The Moonday Letters by : Emmi Itäranta
Download or read book The Moonday Letters written by Emmi Itäranta and published by Titan Books (US, CA). This book was released on 2022-07-19 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An effortlessly rich and lyrical mystery wrapped in a love story that bends space, time, myth and science, perfect for fans of Octavia Butler and Emily St. John Mandel. Sol has disappeared. Their Earth-born wife Lumi sets out to find them but it is no simple feat: each clue uncovers another enigma. Their disappearance leads back to underground environmental groups and a web of mystery that spans the space between the planets themselves. Told through letters and extracts, the course of Lumi’s journey takes her not only from the affluent colonies of Mars to the devastated remnants of Earth, but into the hidden depths of Sol’s past and the long-forgotten secrets of her own. Part space-age epistolary, part eco-thriller, and a love story between two individuals from very different worlds.
Book Synopsis Handbook on the Geographies of Creativity by : Anjeline de Dios
Download or read book Handbook on the Geographies of Creativity written by Anjeline de Dios and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-25 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can the ‘where’ of creativity help us examine how and why it has become a paradigmatic concept in contemporary economies and societies? Adopting a geographically diverse, theoretically rigorous approach, the Handbook offers a cutting-edge study of creativity as it has emerged in policy, academic, activist, and cultural discourse over the last two decades. To this end, the volume departs from conventional modes of analyzing creativity (by industry, region, or sector) and instead identifies key themes that thread through shifting contexts of the creative in the arts, media, technology, education, governance, and development. By tracing the myriad spatialities of creativity, the chapters map its inherently paradoxical features: reinforcing persistent conditions of inequality even as it opens avenues for imagining and enacting more equitable futures.
Download or read book Books of the Times written by and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Author :Library of Congress. Copyright Office Publisher :Copyright Office, Library of Congress ISBN 13 : Total Pages :1624 pages Book Rating :4.F/5 ( download)
Book Synopsis Catalog of Copyright Entries. Third Series by : Library of Congress. Copyright Office
Download or read book Catalog of Copyright Entries. Third Series written by Library of Congress. Copyright Office and published by Copyright Office, Library of Congress. This book was released on 1977 with total page 1624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Choice written by and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page 958 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis The New Music Theater by : Eric Salzman
Download or read book The New Music Theater written by Eric Salzman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-11-06 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alternatives to grand opera and the popular musical can be traced at least as far back as the 1912 premiere of Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire." Yet this ongoing history has never been properly sorted out, its complex ideas and philosophy as well as musical and theatrical achievements never brought fully to light. The New Music Theater is the first comprehensive attempt in English to cover this still-emerging art form in its widest range. This book provides a wealth of examples and descriptions not only of the works themselves, but of the concepts, ideas, and trends that have gone into the evolution of what may be the most central performance art form of the post-modern world. Authors Salzman and Desi consider the subject of music theatre from a social as well as artistic point of view, exploring how theatre works in culture, and how music works in the theatre. Illuminating their discussion with illustrations from current artists and their works, The New Music Theater both describes where we have been and points the way to the future of this all-encompassing art form.
Book Synopsis Monarchs and Milkweed by : Anurag Agrawal
Download or read book Monarchs and Milkweed written by Anurag Agrawal and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fascinating and complex evolutionary relationship of the monarch butterfly and the milkweed plant Monarch butterflies are one of nature's most recognizable creatures, known for their bright colors and epic annual migration from the United States and Canada to Mexico. Yet there is much more to the monarch than its distinctive presence and mythic journeying. In Monarchs and Milkweed, Anurag Agrawal presents a vivid investigation into how the monarch butterfly has evolved closely alongside the milkweed—a toxic plant named for the sticky white substance emitted when its leaves are damaged—and how this inextricable and intimate relationship has been like an arms race over the millennia, a battle of exploitation and defense between two fascinating species. The monarch life cycle begins each spring when it deposits eggs on milkweed leaves. But this dependency of monarchs on milkweeds as food is not reciprocated, and milkweeds do all they can to poison or thwart the young monarchs. Agrawal delves into major scientific discoveries, including his own pioneering research, and traces how plant poisons have not only shaped monarch-milkweed interactions but have also been culturally important for centuries. Agrawal presents current ideas regarding the recent decline in monarch populations, including habitat destruction, increased winter storms, and lack of milkweed—the last one a theory that the author rejects. He evaluates the current sustainability of monarchs and reveals a novel explanation for their plummeting numbers. Lavishly illustrated with more than eighty color photos and images, Monarchs and Milkweed takes readers on an unforgettable exploration of one of nature's most important and sophisticated evolutionary relationships.
Download or read book Evolution written by Donald R. Prothero and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-22 with total page 891 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Donald R. Prothero’s Evolution is an entertaining and rigorous history of the transitional forms and series found in the fossil record. Its engaging narrative of scientific discovery and well-grounded analysis has led to the book’s widespread adoption in courses that teach the nature and value of fossil evidence for evolution. Evolution tackles systematics and cladistics, rock dating, neo-Darwinism, and macroevolution. It includes extensive coverage of the primordial soup, invertebrate transitions, the development of the backbone, the reign of the dinosaurs, and the transformation from early hominid to modern human. The book also details the many alleged “missing links” in the fossil record, including some of the most recent discoveries that flesh out the fossil timeline and the evolutionary process. In this second edition, Prothero describes new transitional fossils from various periods, vividly depicting such bizarre creatures as the Odontochelys, or the “turtle on the half shell”; fossil snakes with legs; and the “Frogamander,” a new example of amphibian transition. Prothero’s discussion of intelligent design arguments includes more historical examples and careful examination of the “experiments” and observations that are exploited by creationists seeking to undermine sound science education. With new perspectives, Prothero reframes creationism as a case study in denialism and pseudoscience rather than a field with its own intellectual dynamism. The first edition was hailed as an exemplary exploration of the fossil evidence for evolution, and this second edition will be welcome in the libraries of scholars, teachers, and general readers who stand up for sound science in this post-truth era.
Book Synopsis In All the Rooms of the Yellow House by : Nancy Mairs
Download or read book In All the Rooms of the Yellow House written by Nancy Mairs and published by Confluence Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 1984 Western States Book Award in Poetry.
Download or read book Vital Circuits written by Steven Vogel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1993-04-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of us think about our circulatory system only when something goes wrong, but the amazing story of how it goes right--"magnificently right," as author Steven Vogel puts it--is equally worthy of our attention. It is physically remarkable, bringing food to (and removing waste from) a hundred trillion cells, coursing through 60,000 miles of arteries and veins (equivalent to over twice around the earth at the equator). And it is also intriguing. For instance, blood leaving the heart flows rapidly through the arteries, then slows down dramatically in the capillaries (to a speed of one mile every fifty days), but in the veins, on its way back to the heart, it speed up again. How? In Vital Circuits, Steven Vogel answers hundreds of such questions, in a fascinating, often witty, and highly original guide to the heart, vessels and blood. Vogel takes us through the realm of biology and into the neighboring fields of physics, fluid mechanics, and chemistry. We relive the discoveries of such scientists as William Harvey and Otto Loewi, and we consider the circulatory systems of such fellow earth-dwellers as octopuses, hummingbirds, sea gulls, alligators, snails, snakes, and giraffes. Vogel is a master at using everyday points of reference to illustrate potentially daunting concepts. Heating systems, kitchen basters, cocktail parties, balloons--all are pressed into service. And we learn not only such practical information as why it's a bad idea to hold your breath when you strain and why you might want to wear support hose on a long airplane flight, but also the answers to such seemingly unrelated issues as why duck breasts (but not chicken breasts) have dark meat and why dust accumulates on the blades of a fan. But the real fascination of Vital Circuits lies neither in its practical advice nor in its trivia. Rather, it is in the detailed picture we construct, piece by piece, of our extraordinary circulatory system. What's more, the author communicates not just information, but the excitement of discovering information. In doing so, he reveals himself to be an eloquent advocate for the cause of science as the most interesting of the humanities. Anyone curious about the workings of the body, whether afflicted with heart trouble or addicted to science watching, will find this book a goldmine of information and oelight.
Book Synopsis Ontogeny and Phylogeny by : Stephen Jay Gould
Download or read book Ontogeny and Phylogeny written by Stephen Jay Gould and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1985-01-17 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” was Haeckel’s answer—the wrong one—to the most vexing question of nineteenth-century biology: what is the relationship between individual development (ontogeny) and the evolution of species and lineages (phylogeny)? In this, the first major book on the subject in fifty years, Stephen Jay Gould documents the history of the idea of recapitulation from its first appearance among the pre-Socratics to its fall in the early twentieth century. Mr. Gould explores recapitulation as an idea that intrigued politicians and theologians as well as scientists. He shows that Haeckel’s hypothesis—that human fetuses with gill slits are, literally, tiny fish, exact replicas of their water-breathing ancestors—had an influence that extended beyond biology into education, criminology, psychoanalysis (Freud and Jung were devout recapitulationists), and racism. The theory of recapitulation, Gould argues, finally collapsed not from the weight of contrary data, but because the rise of Mendelian genetics rendered it untenable. Turning to modern concepts, Gould demonstrates that, even though the whole subject of parallels between ontogeny and phylogeny fell into disrepute, it is still one of the great themes of evolutionary biology. Heterochrony—changes in developmental timing, producing parallels between ontogeny and phylogeny—is shown to be crucial to an understanding of gene regulation, the key to any rapprochement between molecular and evolutionary biology. Gould argues that the primary evolutionary value of heterochrony may lie in immediate ecological advantages for slow or rapid maturation, rather than in long-term changes of form, as all previous theories proclaimed. Neoteny—the opposite of recapitulation—is shown to be the most important determinant of human evolution. We have evolved by retaining the juvenile characters of our ancestors and have achieved both behavioral flexibility and our characteristic morphology thereby (large brains by prolonged retention of rapid fetal growth rates, for example). Gould concludes that “there may be nothing new under the sun, but permutation of the old within complex systems can do wonders. As biologists, we deal directly with the kind of material complexity that confers an unbounded potential upon simple, continuous changes in underlying processes. This is the chief joy of our science.”
Book Synopsis Headless Males Make Great Lovers by : Marty Crump
Download or read book Headless Males Make Great Lovers written by Marty Crump and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-11-15 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The natural world is filled with diverse—not to mention quirky and odd—animal behaviors. Consider the male praying mantis that continues to mate after being beheaded; the spiders, insects, and birds that offer gifts of food in return for sex; the male hip-pocket frog that carries his own tadpoles; the baby spiders that dine on their mother; the beetle that craves excrement; or the starfish that sheds an arm or two to escape a predator's grasp. Headless Males Make Great Lovers and Other Unusual Natural Histories celebrates the extraordinary world of animals with essays on curious creatures and their amazing behaviors. In five thematic chapters, Marty Crump—a tropical field biologist well known for her work with the reproductive behavior of amphibians—examines the bizarre conduct of animals as they mate, parent, feed, defend themselves, and communicate. Crump's enthusiasm for the unusual behaviors she describes-from sex change and free love in sponges to aphrodisiac concoctions in bats-is visible on every page, thanks to her skilled storytelling, which makes even sea slugs, dung beetles, ticks, and tapeworms fascinating and appealing. Steeped in biology, Headless Males Make Great Lovers points out that diverse and unrelated animals often share seemingly bizarre behaviors—evidence, Crump argues, that these natural histories, though outwardly weird, are successful ways of living. Illustrated throughout, and filled with vignettes of personal and scientific interest, Headless Males Make Great Lovers will enchant the general reader with its tales of blood-squirting horned lizards and intestine-ejecting sea cucumbers—all in the service of a greater appreciation of the diversity of the natural histories of animals.
Book Synopsis The Life of a Leaf by : Steven Vogel
Download or read book The Life of a Leaf written by Steven Vogel and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In its essence, science is a way of looking at and thinking about the world. In The Life of a Leaf, Steven Vogel illuminates this approach, using the humble leaf as a model. Whether plant or person, every organism must contend with its immediate physical environment, a world that both limits what organisms can do and offers innumerable opportunities for evolving fascinating ways of challenging those limits. Here, Vogel explains these interactions, examining through the example of the leaf the extraordinary designs that enable life to adapt to its physical world. In Vogel’s account, the leaf serves as a biological everyman, an ordinary and ubiquitous living thing that nonetheless speaks volumes about our environment as well as its own. Thus in exploring the leaf’s world, Vogel simultaneously explores our own. A companion website with demonstrations and teaching tools can be found here: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/sites/vogel/index.html
Book Synopsis Landscapes of Collectivity in the Life Sciences by : Snait B. Gissis
Download or read book Landscapes of Collectivity in the Life Sciences written by Snait B. Gissis and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-01-12 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Broad perspective on collectivity in the life sciences, from microorganisms to human consensus, and the theoretical and empirical opportunities and challenges. Many researchers and scholars in the life sciences have become increasingly critical of the traditional methodological focus on the individual. This volume counters such methodological individualism by exploring recent and influential work in the life sciences that utilizes notions of collectivity, sociality, rich interactions, and emergent phenomena as essential explanatory tools to handle numerous persistent scientific questions in the life sciences. The contributors consider case studies of collectivity that range from microorganisms to human consensus, discussing theoretical and empirical challenges and the innovative methods and solutions scientists have devised. The contributors offer historical, philosophical, and biological perspectives on collectivity, and describe collective phenomena seen in insects, the immune system, communication, and human collectivity, with examples ranging from cooperative transport in the longhorn crazy ant to the evolution of autobiographical memory. They examine ways of explaining collectivity, including case studies and modeling approaches, and explore collectivity's explanatory power. They present a comprehensive look at a specific case of collectivity: the Holobiont notion (the idea of a multi-species collective, a host and diverse microorganisms) and the hologenome theory (which posits that the holobiont and its hologenome are a unit of adaption). The volume concludes with reflections on the work of the late physicist Eshel Ben-Jacob, pioneer in the study of collective phenomena in living systems. Contributors Oren Bader, John Beatty, Dinah R. Davison, Daniel Dor, Ofer Feinerman, Raghavendra Gadagkar, Scott F. Gilbert, Snait B. Gissis, Deborah M. Gordon, James Griesemer, Zachariah I. Grochau-Wright, Erik R. Hanschen, Eva Jablonka, Mohit Kumar Jolly, Anat Kolumbus, Ehud Lamm, Herbert Levine, Arnon Levy, Xue-Fei Li, Elisabeth A. Lloyd, Yael Lubin, Eva Maria Luef, Ehud Meron, Richard E. Michod, Samir Okasha, Simone Pika, Joan Roughgarden, Eugene Rosenberg, Ayelet Shavit, Yael Silver, Alfred I. Tauber, Ilana Zilber-Rosenberg
Download or read book Secret Historian written by Justin Spring and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2010-08-17 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2010 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction Drawn from the secret, never-before-seen diaries, journals, and sexual records of the novelist, poet, and university professor Samuel M. Steward, Secret Historian is a sensational reconstruction of one of the more extraordinary hidden lives of the twentieth century. An intimate friend of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Thornton Wilder, Steward maintained a secret sex life from childhood on, and documented these experiences in brilliantly vivid (and often very funny) detail. After leaving the world of academe to become Phil Sparrow, a tattoo artist on Chicago's notorious South State Street, Steward worked closely with Alfred Kinsey on his landmark sex research. During the early 1960s, Steward changed his name and identity once again, this time to write exceptionally literate, upbeat pro-homosexual pornography under the name of Phil Andros. Until today he has been known only as Phil Sparrow—but an extraordinary archive of his papers, lost since his death in 1993, has provided Justin Spring with the material for an exceptionally compassionate and brilliantly illuminating life-and-times biography. More than merely the story of one remarkable man, Justin Spring's Secret Historian is a moving portrait of homosexual life long before Stonewall and gay liberation.
Book Synopsis Cats' Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People by : Steven Vogel
Download or read book Cats' Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People written by Steven Vogel and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2000-01-17 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Full of ideas and well-explained principles that will bring new understanding of everyday things to both scientists and non-scientists alike."—R. McNeill Alexander, Nature Nature and humans build their devices with the same earthly materials and use them in the same air and water, pulled by the same gravity. Why, then, do their designs diverge so sharply? Humans, for instance, love right angles, while nature's angles are rarely right and usually rounded. Our technology goes around on wheels—and on rotating pulleys, gears, shafts, and cams—yet in nature only the tiny propellers of bacteria spin as true wheels. Our hinges turn because hard parts slide around each other, whereas nature's hinges (a rabbit's ear, for example) more often swing by bending flexible materials. In this marvelously surprising, witty book, Steven Vogel compares these two mechanical worlds, introduces the reader to his field of biomechanics, and explains how the nexus of physical law, size, and convenience of construction determine the designs of both people and nature. "This elegant comparison of human and biological technology will forever change the way you look at each."—Michael LaBarbera, American Scientist
