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In Suspect Terrain
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Download or read book In Suspect Terrain written by John McPhee and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the outwash plains of Brooklyn to Indiana's drifted diamonds and gold, John McPhee's In Suspect Terrain is a narrative of the earth, told in four sections of equal length, each in a different way reflecting the three others-- a biography; a set piece about a fragment of Appalachian landscape in illuminating counterpoint to the human history there; a modern collision of ideas about the origins of the mountain range; and, in contrast, a century-old collision of ideas about the existence of the Ice Age. The central figure is Anita Harris, an internationally celebrated geologist who went into her profession to get out of a Brooklyn ghetto. The unifying theme is plate tectonics-- here concentrating on the acceptance that all aspects of the theory do not universally enjoy. As such, In Suspect Terrain is a report from the rough spots at the front edge of a science. In Suspect Terrain is the second book in a series on geology and geologists, presenting a cross section of North America along the fortieth parallel, and gathered under the overall title Annals of the Former World. The other books in the series are Basin and Range, Rising from the Plains, and Assembling California.
Book Synopsis In Suspect Terrain by : McPhee J Staff
Download or read book In Suspect Terrain written by McPhee J Staff and published by . This book was released on 1983-10 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the outwash plains of Brooklyn to Indiana's drifted diamonds and gold "In Suspect Terrain "is a narrative of the earth, told in four sections of equal length, each in a different way reflecting the three others--a biography; a set piece about a fragment of Appalachian landscape in illuminating counterpoint to the human history there; a modern collision of ideas about the origins of the mountain range; and, in contrast, a century-old collision of ideas about the existence of the Ice Age. The central figure is Anita Harris, an internationally celebrated geologist who went into her profession to get out of a Brooklyn ghetto. The unifying theme is plate tectonics--here concentrating on the acceptance that all aspects of the theory do not universally enjoy. As such, "In Suspect Terrain "is a report from the rough spots at the front edge of a science.
Book Synopsis Annals of the Former World by : John McPhee
Download or read book Annals of the Former World written by John McPhee and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2000-06-15 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pulitzer Prize-winning view of the continent, across the fortieth parallel and down through 4.6 billion years Twenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross section of North America at about the fortieth parallel and, in the process, come to an understanding not only of the science but of the style of the geologists he traveled with. The structure of the book never changed, but its breadth caused him to complete it in stages, under the overall title Annals of the Former World. Like the terrain it covers, Annals of the Former World tells a multilayered tale, and the reader may choose one of many paths through it. As clearly and succinctly written as it is profoundly informed, this is our finest popular survey of geology and a masterpiece of modern nonfiction. Annals of the Former World is the winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.
Book Synopsis Rising from the Plains by : John McPhee
Download or read book Rising from the Plains written by John McPhee and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize-winning author John McPhee continues his Annals of the Former World series about the geology of North America along the fortieth parallel with Rising from the Plains. This third volume presents another exciting geological excursion with an engaging account of life—past and present—in the high plains of Wyoming. Sometimes it is said of geologists that they reflect in their professional styles the sort of country in which they grew up. Nowhere could that be more true than in the life of a geologist born in the center of Wyoming and raised on an isolated ranch. This is the story of that ranch, soon after the turn of the twentieth century, and of David Love, the geologist who grew up there, at home with the composition of the high country in the way that someone growing up in a coastal harbor would be at home with the vagaries of the sea.
Book Synopsis Assembling California by : John McPhee
Download or read book Assembling California written by John McPhee and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At various times in a span of fifteen years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California, a cross-section in human and geologic time, from Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada through the golden foothills of the Mother Lode and across the Great Central Valley to the wine country of the Coast Ranges, the rock of San Francisco, and the San Andreas family of faults. The two disparate time scales occasionally intersect—in the gold disruptions of the nineteenth century no less than in the earthquakes of the twentieth—and always with relevance to a newly understood geologic history in which half a dozen large and separate pieces of country are seen to have drifted in from far and near to coalesce as California. McPhee and Moores also journeyed to remote mountains of Arizona and to Cyprus and northern Greece, where rock of the deep-ocean floor has been transported into continental settings, as it has in California. Global in scope and a delight to read, Assembling California is a sweeping narrative of maps in motion, of evolving and dissolving lands.
Download or read book Basin and Range written by John McPhee and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 1982-04-01 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first of John McPhee's works in his series on geology and geologists, Basin and Range is a book of journeys through ancient terrains, always in juxtaposition with travels in the modern world—a history of vanished landscapes, enhanced by the histories of people who bring them to light. The title refers to the physiographic province of the United States that reaches from eastern Utah to eastern California, a silent world of austere beauty, of hundreds of discrete high mountain ranges that are green with junipers and often white with snow. The terrain becomes the setting for a lyrical evocation of the science of geology, with important digressions into the plate-tectonics revolution and the history of the geologic time scale.
Download or read book The Founding Fish written by John McPhee and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2003-09-10 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John McPhee's twenty-sixth book is a braid of personal history, natural history, and American history, in descending order of volume. Each spring, American shad-Alosa sapidissima-leave the ocean in hundreds of thousands and run heroic distances upriver to spawn. McPhee--a shad fisherman himself--recounts the shad's cameo role in the lives of George Washington and Henry David Thoreau. He fishes with and visits the laboratories of famous ichthyologists; he takes instruction in the making of shad darts from a master of the art; and he cooks shad in a variety of ways, delectably explained at the end of the book. Mostly, though, he goes fishing for shad in various North American rivers, and he "fishes the same way he writes books, avidly and intensely. He wants to know everything about the fish he's after--its history, its habits, its place in the cosmos" (Bill Pride, The Denver Post). His adventures in pursuit of shad occasion the kind of writing--expert and ardent--at which he has no equal.
Download or read book Nature Cure written by Richard Mabey and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Mabey is the author of numerous books on Britain's ecology, including the best-selling Flora Britannica and the Whitbread Prize-winning Gilbert White (Virginia).
Book Synopsis The Control of Nature by : John McPhee
Download or read book The Control of Nature written by John McPhee and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on--the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase--"the control of nature"--seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions. For some years, he had been planning a book about places in the world where people have been engaged in all-out battles with nature, about (in the words of the book itself) "any struggle against natural forces--heroic or venal, rash or well advised--when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods." His interest had first been sparked when he went into the Atchafalaya--the largest river swamp in North America--and had learned that virtually all of its waters were metered and rationed by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' project called Old River Control. In the natural cycles of the Mississippi's deltaic plain, the time had come for the Mississippi to change course, to shift its mouth more than a hundred miles and go down the Atchafalaya, one of its distributary branches. The United States could not afford that--for New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and all the industries that lie between would be cut off from river commerce with the rest of the nation. At a place called Old River, the Corps therefore had built a great fortress--part dam, part valve--to restrain the flow of the Atchafalaya and compel the Mississippi to stay where it is. In Iceland, in 1973, an island split open without warning and huge volumes of lava began moving in the direction of a harbor scarcely half a mile away. It was not only Iceland's premier fishing port (accounting for a large percentage of Iceland's export economy) but it was also the only harbor along the nation's southern coast. As the lava threatened to fill the harbor and wipe it out, a physicist named Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson suggested a way to fight against the flowing red rock--initiating an all-out endeavor unique in human history. On the big island of Hawaii, one of the world's two must eruptive hot spots, people are not unmindful of the Icelandic example. McPhee went to Hawaii to talk with them and to walk beside the edges of a molten lake and incandescent rivers. Some of the more expensive real estate in Los Angeles is up against mountains that are rising and disintegrating as rapidly as any in the world. After a complex coincidence of natural events, boulders will flow out of these mountains like fish eggs, mixed with mud, sand, and smaller rocks in a cascading mass known as debris flow. Plucking up trees and cars, bursting through doors and windows, filling up houses to their eaves, debris flows threaten the lives of people living in and near Los Angeles' famous canyons. At extraordinary expense the city has built a hundred and fifty stadium-like basins in a daring effort to catch the debris. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking in his vivid depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those who would attempt to wrest control from her--stubborn, often ingenious, and always arresting characters.
Book Synopsis The Buried Giant by : Kazuo Ishiguro
Download or read book The Buried Giant written by Kazuo Ishiguro and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-03-03 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of Never Let Me Go and the Booker Prize–winning novel The Remains of the Day comes a luminous meditation on the act of forgetting and the power of memory. In post-Arthurian Britain, the wars that once raged between the Saxons and the Britons have finally ceased. Axl and Beatrice, an elderly British couple, set off to visit their son, whom they haven't seen in years. And, because a strange mist has caused mass amnesia throughout the land, they can scarcely remember anything about him. As they are joined on their journey by a Saxon warrior, his orphan charge, and an illustrious knight, Axl and Beatrice slowly begin to remember the dark and troubled past they all share. By turns savage, suspenseful, and intensely moving, The Buried Giant is a luminous meditation on the act of forgetting and the power of memory.
Download or read book Forever Suspect written by Saher Selod and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-28 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The declaration of a “War on Terror” in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks brought sweeping changes to the American criminal justice and national security systems, as well as a massive shift in the American public opinion of both individual Muslims and the Islamic religion generally. Since that time, sociologist Saher Selod argues, Muslim Americans have experienced higher levels of racism in their everyday lives. In Forever Suspect, Selod shows how a specific American religious identity has acquired racial meanings, resulting in the hyper surveillance of Muslim citizens. Drawing on forty-eight in-depth interviews with South Asian and Arab Muslim Americans, she investigates how Muslim Americans are subjected to racialized surveillance in both an institutional context by the state and a social context by their neighbors and co-workers. Forever Suspect underscores how this newly racialized religious identity changes the social location of Arabs and South Asians on the racial hierarchy further away from whiteness and compromises their status as American citizens.
Book Synopsis Geology Underfoot in Southern California by : Robert Phillip Sharp
Download or read book Geology Underfoot in Southern California written by Robert Phillip Sharp and published by Mountain Press Publishing. This book was released on 1993 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty vignettes focus on particular geologic scenes, relationships, and features of southern California's active landscape.
Book Synopsis Staying Alive in Avalanche Terrain by : Bruce Tremper
Download or read book Staying Alive in Avalanche Terrain written by Bruce Tremper and published by The Mountaineers Books. This book was released on 2001 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winter recreation in the mountains has increased steadily over the past few years, and so has the number of deaths and injuries caused by avalanches. Staying Alive in Avalanche Terrain covers everything you need to know to avoid trouble in avalanche terrain: what avalanches are and how they work, common myths, human activities that lead to avalanche trouble, what happens to victims when an avalanche occurs, and rescue techniques. Provides step- by-step instruction for determining avalanche hazards, using safe travel technique, and making effective rescues.
Book Synopsis The Unquiet Dead by : Ausma Zehanat Khan
Download or read book The Unquiet Dead written by Ausma Zehanat Khan and published by Minotaur Books. This book was released on 2015-01-13 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Khan is a refreshing original, and The Unquiet Dead blazes what one hopes will be a new path guided by the author's keen understanding of the intersection of faith and core Muslim values, complex human nature and evil done by seemingly ordinary people. It is these qualities that make this a debut to remember and one that even those who eschew the [mystery] genre will devour in one breathtaking sitting.” —The LA Times Despite their many differences, Detective Rachel Getty trusts her boss, Esa Khattak, implicitly. But she's still uneasy at Khattak's tight-lipped secrecy when he asks her to look into Christopher Drayton's death. Drayton's apparently accidental fall from a cliff doesn't seem to warrant a police investigation, particularly not from Rachel and Khattak's team, which handles minority-sensitive cases. But when she learns that Drayton may have been living under an assumed name, Rachel begins to understand why Khattak is tip-toeing around this case. It soon comes to light that Drayton may have been a war criminal with ties to the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. If that's true, any number of people might have had reason to help Drayton to his death, and a murder investigation could have far-reaching ripples throughout the community. But as Rachel and Khattak dig deeper into the life and death of Christopher Drayton, every question seems to lead only to more questions, with no easy answers. Had the specters of Srebrenica returned to haunt Drayton at the end, or had he been keeping secrets of an entirely different nature? Or, after all, did a man just fall to his death from the Bluffs? In her spellbinding debut, Ausma Zehanat Khan has written a complex and provocative story of loss, redemption, and the cost of justice that will linger with readers long after turning the final page.
Book Synopsis As Rugged as the Terrain by : Priscilla Wegars
Download or read book As Rugged as the Terrain written by Priscilla Wegars and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Rugged as the Terrain explores some intriguing history of Idaho's wild and scenic Lochsa River. In 1893 this site, at turbulent Canyon Creek, was a footnote in the saga of the ill-fated Carlin hunting party. Next, in 1933, it housed nearly two hundred tent-dwelling Civilian Conservation Corps recruits, most of whom were "city slickers" from New York State whose antics provide a colorful tableau of young men on their own and far from home. In 1935 the site became Federal Prison Camp No. 11, a roadbuilding facility for convicts mostly from the Leavenworth, Kansas, penitentiary. Although the authorities stressed rehabilitation rather than punishment, the camp's unsecured status (it had no fence) did allow several thrilling escapes. After the prison camp closed in May 1943, Japanese detainees at the Kooskia Internment Camp continued road construction for two more years. Several chapters in As Rugged as the Terrain document the Japanese internees' story as compared with the experiences of Italian and German internees in the vicinity. This volume features 110 illustrations, notes, appendices, a bibliography, and an index.
Book Synopsis The Book of Times by : Lesley Alderman
Download or read book The Book of Times written by Lesley Alderman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-02-12 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Clever and entertaining . . . contains everything you’d want to know about the ticking away of seconds, minutes, hours, days, years, decades and centuries.” —Time.com Our relationship to time is complex and paradoxical: Time stands still. Time also flies. Tomorrow is another day. Yet there’s no time like the present. We want to do more in less time, but wish we could slow the clock. And despite all our time-saving devices—smart phones, AI, high-speed trains—Americans feel that they have less leisure time than ever. In an era when our time feels fractured and imperiled, The Book of Times encourages readers to ponder time used and time spent. How long does it take to find a new mate, digest a hamburger, or compose a symphony? How much time do we spend daydreaming, texting, and getting ready for work? The book challenges our beliefs and urges us to consider how, and why, some things get faster, some things slow down, and some things never change (the need for seven to eight hours of sleep). Packed with compelling charts, lists, and quizzes, as well as new and intriguing research, The Book of Times is an addictive, browsable, and provocative look at the idea of time from every direction. “Alderman’s greatest achievement is the continual delivery of quirky knowledge that our collective curiosities crave.” —Forbes “Fascinated by how we spend—and waste—our most precious commodity, journalist Lesley Alderman gathered the sometimes-surprising stats for her debut, The Book of Times.” —People “A fascinating foray into familiar terrain and a revealing look at how we really spend our lives.” —Mental Floss
Book Synopsis Twenty Thousand Roads by : Virginia Scharff
Download or read book Twenty Thousand Roads written by Virginia Scharff and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Virginia Scharff's wonderfully readable account of women in motion complicates and enriches our understanding of the nineteenth and twentieth century Wests. Her gendered remapping of the regional landscape explodes traditional notions of western movement. All students of women and gender, travel and place, the West and America, would do well to read this excellent book."—David M. Wrobel, author of Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West "Virginia Scharff claims for women what has long been central to the masculine mythology of the West—free movement and its many gifts, real and imagined. Her book is as exhilarating and as intellectually and emotionally expansive as our enduring dream of flight across the American land."—Elliott West, author of The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, & the Rush to Colorado "Brilliant is not a word that is often a part of my critical vocabulary, but brilliantly is how Twenty Thousand Roads begins. When writing of Sacagawea and Susan Magoffin, Virginia Scharff shows vividly how a single life can be a source of sophisticated cultural analysis without becoming an academic artifact or an object of condescension."—Richard White, author of It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West
