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The longbow, the schooner & the violin : wood and human achievement / by De Villiers, Marq,author.;
Includes bibliographical references.The English longbow, made of rare yew wood, unmatched for accuracy, speed of fire, and deadliness, shifted Europe's balance of power in the Middle Ages. Schooners, those "able handsome ladies" of the sea, inaugurated a new era of global trade, carrying high-value cargoes of tea and spice to Europe and America with unmatched speed and reliability. The violin, individual examples of which have personalities and histories as brilliant as the performers who play them, brought Western music to the pinnacle of expressiveness. These three iconic artifacts exemplify the inventive ways human ingenuity has employed wood - one of our most extraordinary natural substances - to change its culture and history. In this sweeping and beautifully-written history, award-winning author Marq de Villiers explores our relationship with wood, from ancient times to the present, from the forest to the workshop. Wood, he writes, has always been an essential companion to human development, and its most remarkable applications may still be ahead.
Subjects: Material culture.; Technology and civilization.; Technology; Wood; Woodwork;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Lone wolf : walking the line between civilization and wildness / by Weymouth, Adam,author.;
Includes bibliographical references."In 2011, a wolf named Slavc left his home territory of Slovenia for a wide-ranging journey across the Alps. Tracked by a GPS collar, he travelled over 1,200 miles, where he would mate with a female wolf on a walkabout of her own -- the only two wolves for hundreds of square miles -- and start the first pack to call the Italian Alps home in more than a century. A decade later and there are more than a hundred wolves in the area, the result of their remarkable meeting. Now, journalist Adam Weymouth follows Slavc's path on foot, and in doing so, interrogates the fears and realities of those living on land that is being repopulated by wolves; a metaphor for economic, political, and climate upheaval in a region that is seeing a centuries-old way of life being upended. Weymouth journeys to understand how wolves -- vilified throughout history in literature, art, and folklore -- are slowly creeping back into our forests, woods, and sometimes even our towns, and what that deep-rooted terror at the back of our minds really means. Slavc serves as the ultimate symbol for the outsider, journeying through places that are now wrestling with an influx of immigration, a resurgence of the far-right wing, and the steady decline of the environment due to the rapid advance of climate change; the question of how we see the other and treat the earth becomes paramount in everyday lives. Examining the political dimensions that this individual animal's trek brings to light, Lone Wolf tells a newly resonant story -- one less about fear and more about the courage required to seek out a new life, as well as the challenge of accepting the changing world around us. Sharply observed, searching, and written in poetic and precise prose, Lone Wolf explores the thorny connection between humans and nature, and indeed between borders themselves, and presses us to consider this much-discussed creature anew"--
Subjects: Slavc (Wolf); Weymouth, Adam; Gray wolf; Gray wolf; Human-animal relationships.; Gray wolf;
Available copies: 0 / Total copies: 1
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Einstein in time and space : a life in 99 particles / by Graydon, Samuel,1994-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."In Einstein in Time and Space, talented young science journalist Samuel Graydon captures the essence of Albert Einstein with an illuminating mosaic--99 intriguingly different particles that cumulatively reveal Einstein's contradictory and multitudinous nature. Glimpsed among these shards: a slacker who failed every subject but math, a job seeker who couldn't get hired, a lothario who courted many women, and a charmer who was the life of the party. As brilliant as he was inconsistent, Einstein was simultaneously an avid supporter of the NAACP and the fight for civil rights and someone capable of great prejudice. He was loved by many, known by few, and inspirational to a generation of young physicists. Graydon reveals every corner of Einstein's world: the false reporting that rocketed Einstein to fame nearly overnight, his effect on people he met merely in passing, even the remarkable posthumous journey of the famed physicist's brain. Entertaining, comforting, bolstering, and shocking, Einstein in Time and Space is the unique story of a man who redefined how we view our universe and our place within it"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Einstein, Albert, 1879-1955.; Physicists;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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These truths : a history of the United States / by Lepore, Jill,1966-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation. The American experiment rests on three ideas--"these truths," Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. And it rests, too, "on a dedication to inquiry, fearless and unflinching," writes Jill Lepore in a groundbreaking investigation into the American past that places truth itself at the center of the nation's history. In riveting prose, These Truths tells the story of America, beginning in 1492, to ask whether the course of events has proven the nation's founding truths, or belied them. "A nation born in contradiction, liberty in a land of slavery, sovereignty in a land of conquest, will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history," Lepore writes, finding meaning in those very contradictions as she weaves American history into a majestic tapestry of faith and hope, of peril and prosperity, of technological progress and moral anguish. A spellbinding chronicle filled with arresting sketches of Americans from John Winthrop and Frederick Douglass to Pauli Murray and Phyllis Schlafly, These Truths offers an authoritative new history of a great, and greatly troubled, nation"--
Subjects: Civil rights;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Never let them see you bleed / by Johnstone, William W.,author.; Johnstone, J. A.,author.;
"Flint Moran was fourteen years old when the Civil War ended. He was fifteen when his family bought a plot of land near Tinhorn, Texas. He was barely nineteen when he caught a pair of rustlers stealing cattle - and singlehandedly brought them to justice. How did a teenaged boy track down and capture two hardcase thieves without any help? That's what Tinhorn sheriff Buck Jackson wants to know. He can't help but be impressed by Flint's sharp eye and natural talent with a Henry rifle. So he offers to deputize the boy - tin badge, Colt Frontier Six-Shooter, and all - and Flint happily accepts. But there are things the young deputy doesn't know. And what he doesn't know could kill him ... There's a gunman coming to town. A showdown is brewing that could prove to be Flint's first - and possibly last - test. But either way, there will be blood"--
Subjects: Western fiction.; Novels.; Gunfighters; Sheriffs;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Earthly materials : journeys through our bodies' emissions, excretions, and disintegrations / by Wood, Cutter,author.;
"To live, our bodies must continuously shed materials. Stop urinating, stop defecating, stop expelling breath, and death is near. While we often think of these materials as embarrassing waste products, they serve far more complex functions. The color of our mucus, the volume of our flatus, the rhythm of our breath: taken together, these materials tell a story of the human that produced them. Moreover, the exchange, elimination, and frequent disguise of our effluence has been elemental to the development of human civilization, and our lives today are still governed by a host of laws and superstitions and social mores about the materials our bodies leave behind. In each of twelve discrete chapters, Earthly Materials tells a story about one of the materials the human body sheds--from breath and urine to vomit and tears. Sometimes the questions examined are historical: What have we physically done with all the urine produced in our cities? Sometimes they approach the matter through a philosophical lens: Is it ever logical to cry? Sometimes they explore recent scientific discoveries: How is mucus forcing us to reconsider our understanding of natural selection? But they always offer a window into how we negotiate our place in the world and how we get along with one another."--
Subjects: Trivia and miscellanea.; Human anatomy; Human body; Human physiology;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Followed by the Lark A Novel [electronic resource] : by Humphreys, Helen.aut; Pickens, Jennifer.nrt; cloudLibrary;
Inspired by his journals and writing, this moving novel inhabits the life and mind of renowned nineteenth-century naturalist, poet and abolitionist Henry David Thoreau, revealing the deep connections between his time and our own. Composed in short, compelling scenes, Followed by the Lark is a novel of significant moments in a life, capturing loss, change and the danger and healing that come from communion with the natural world, set against a backdrop of great change and tumult in America. Renowned nineteenth-century naturalist, poet and abolitionist Henry David Thoreau’s connection to nature was tied to his feelings of loss; before he was twenty-seven years old and went to live at Walden Pond, two of those closest to him had died—his older brother, John, and his friend Charles Wheeler. Nature provided solace for these losses, but the world was changing around him. The forests were being destroyed by the logging industry. Wildlife was increasingly being slaughtered for profit and sport. The railroad clanged through his quiet hometown. And the catastrophes of the American Civil War were beginning to stir. Haunting in its quiet spaces, Followed by the Lark portrays this tension of nature and progress and its effect on a singular man. It is a novel uncommon in its combination of scope and brevity, in its communion with its human subject, and its reflections on an astonishing yet changing world. Thoreau’s life in the early nineteenth century seems firmly in the past, but his time bears some striking similarities to ours. As she explores these intersections in Followed by the Lark, Helen Humphreys elegantly, insistently illustrates how Thoreau’s concerns are still, vitally, our own.
Subjects: Audiobooks.; Biographical; Historical;
© 2024., HarperCollins,
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The plague cycle : the unending war between humanity and infectious disease / by Kenny, Charles,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index.For four thousand years, the size and vitality of cities, economies, and empires were heavily determined by infection. Striking humanity in waves, the cycle of plagues set the tempo of civilizational growth and decline, since common response to the threat was exclusion-quarantining the sick or keeping them out. But the unprecedented hygiene and medical revolutions of the past two centuries have allowed humanity to free itself from the hold of epidemic cycles-resulting in an urbanized, globalized, and unimaginably wealthy world. However, our development has lately become precarious. Climate and population fluctuations and aspects of our prosperity such as global trade have left us more vulnerable than ever to newly emerging plagues. Greater global cooperation toward sustainable health is urgently required-such as the international efforts to harvest a Covid-19 vaccine-with millions of lives and trillions of dollars at stake. Written as colorful history, The Plague Cycle reveals the relationship between civilization, globalization, prosperity, and infectious disease over the past five millennia. It harnesses history, economics, and public health, and charts humanity's remarkable progress, providing a fascinating and timely look at the cyclical nature of infectious disease.
Subjects: COVID-19 (Disease); Communicable diseases; Public health; Globalization;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Commanding hope : the power we have to renew a world in peril / by Homer-Dixon, Thomas F.,author.;
"Calling on history, cutting-edge research, complexity science and even Lord of the Rings, Homer-Dixon lays out the tools we can command to rescue a world on the brink. For three decades, the renowned author of The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, and The Ingenuity Gap: Can We Solve the Problems of the Future?, has examined the threats to our future security--predicting a deteriorating global environment, extreme economic stresses, mass migrations, social instability and wide political violence if humankind continued on its current course. He was called The Doom Meister, but we now see how prescient he was. Today just about everything we've known and relied on (our natural environment, economy, societies, cultures and institutions) is changing dramatically--too often for the worse. Without radical new approaches, our planet will become unrecognizable as well as poorer, more violent, more authoritarian. In his fascinating long-awaited new book (dedicated to his young children), he calls on his extraordinary knowledge of complexity science, of how societies work and can evolve, and of our capacity to handle threats, to show that we can shift human civilization onto a decisively new path if we mobilize our minds, spirits, imaginations and collective values. Commanding Hope marshals a fascinating, accessible argument for reinvigorating our cognitive strengths and belief systems to affect urgent systemic change, strengthen our economies and cultures, and renew our hope in a positive future for everyone on Earth."-- Provided by publisher.
Subjects: Creative ability.; Environmental responsibility.; Social change.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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News of the world [videorecording] / by Hanks, Tom,actor.; motion picture adaptation of (work):Jiles, Paulette,1943-News of the world.; Marvel, Elizabeth,actor.; Greengrass, Paul,film director.; McKinnon, Ray,actor.; Sandilands, Neil,1975-actor.; Winningham, Mare,actor.; Zengel, Helena,2008-actor.; Universal Pictures Home Entertainment (Firm),publisher.;
Tom Hanks, Helena Zengel, Ray Mckinnon, Elizabeth Marvel, Mare Winningham, Neil Sandilands.Five years after the Civil War, Captain Kidd moves from town to town as a storyteller. In Texas, he crosses paths with Johanna, a ten-year-old taken in by the Kiowa people six years earlier. She is being returned to her biological aunt and uncle against her will. Kidd agrees to deliver the child where the law says she belongs. As they travel hundreds of miles, the two will face tremendous challenges of both human and natural forces as they search for a place that either can call home.Canadian Home Video Rating: PG.MPAA rating: PG-13.Described video for the blind and visually impaired.Subtitled for the deaf and hard-of-hearing (SDH).DVD ; wide screen presentation ; Dolby Digital 5.1, Dolby Digital 2.0.
Subjects: Video recordings for people with visual disabilities.; Video recordings for the hearing impaired.; Western films.; Feature films.; Road films.; Orphans; Storytellers; Friendship; Frontier and pioneer life; Kiowa Apache Indians;
For private home use only.
Available copies: 2 / Total copies: 2
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