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Hurricane lizards and plastic squid : the fraught and fascinating biology of climate change / by Hanson, Thor,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."In his three previous books-Feathers, The Triumph of Seeds, and Buzz-Thor Hanson has taken his readers on unforgettable journeys into nature, rendered with great storytelling, the soul of a poet, and the insight of a biologist. In this new book, he is doing it again, but exploring one of the most vital scientific and cultural issues of our time: climate change. As a young biologist, Hanson by his own admission watched with some detachment as our warming planet presented plants and animals with an ultimatum: change or face extinction. But his detachment turned to both concern and awe, as he observed the remarkable narratives of change playing out in each plant and animal he studied. In Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid, Hanson tells the story of how nature-both plants and animals, from beech trees to beetles-are meeting the challenges of rapid climate change head-on, adjusting, adapting, and sometimes noticeably evolving. Brown pelicans are fleeing uphill, seeking out new lives in the mountains. Gorillas in Uganda are turning to new food sources, such as eucalyptus trees (which humans only imported to Africa in the past several decades), as their old sources wain. Auklets, a little sea bird, aren't so lucky: changes in the lifecycles of their primary food source means they return at specific times of year to oceanic feeding grounds expecting plankton blooms that are no longer there. As global warming transforms and restructures the ecosystems in which these animals and others live, Hanson argues, we are forced to conclude that climate change will not have just one effect: Some transformations are beneficial. Others, and perhaps most, are devastating, wiping out entire species. One thing is constant: with each change an organism undergoes, the delicate balance of interdependent ecosystems is tipped, forcing the evolution of thousands more species, including us. To understand how, collectively, these changes are shaping the natural world and the future of life, Hanson looks back through deep time, examining fossil records, pollen, and even the tooth enamel of giant wombats and mummified owl pellets. Together, these records of our past tell the story of ancient climate change, shedding light on the challenges faced by today's species, the ways they will respond, and how these strategies will determine the fate of ecosystems around the globe. Ultimately, the story of nature's response to climate change is both fraught and fascinating, a story of both disaster and resilience, and, sometimes, hope. Lyrical and thought-provoking, Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid is poised to transform the conversation around climate change, shifting the focus from humans to the lattice of life, of which humans are just a single point"--
Subjects: Adaptation (Biology); Bioclimatology.; Biotic communities.; Climatic changes.; Global environmental change.;

The sweet spot : the pleasures of suffering and the search for meaning / by Bloom, Paul,1963-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index.From the author of Against Empathy comes a different kind of happiness book, one that shows us how suffering is an essential source of both pleasure and meaning in our lives. Why do we so often seek out physical pain and emotional turmoil? We go to movies that make us cry, or scream, or gag. We poke at sores, eat spicy foods, immerse ourselves in hot baths, run marathons. Some of us even seek out pain and humiliation in sexual role-play. Where do these seemingly perverse appetites come from? Drawing on groundbreaking findings from psychology and brain science,The Sweet Spotshows how the right kind of suffering sets the stage for enhanced pleasure. Pain can distract us from our anxieties and help us transcend the self. Choosing to suffer can serve social goals; it can display how tough we are or, conversely, can function as a cry for help. Feelings of fear and sadness are part of the pleasure of immersing ourselves in play and fantasy and can provide certain moral satisfactions. And effort, struggle, and difficulty can, in the right contexts, lead to the joys of mastery and flow. But suffering plays a deeper role as well. We are not natural hedonists-a good life involves more than pleasure. People seek lives of meaning and significance; we aspire to rich relationships and satisfying pursuits, and this requires some amount of struggle, anxiety, and loss. Brilliantly argued, witty, and humane, Paul Bloom shows how a life without chosen suffering would be empty--and, worse than that, boring.
Subjects: Self-help publications.; Conduct of life.; Happiness.; Pain; Pleasure.; Suffering;

Complete guide to growing and cultivating herbs & spices : expert advice for planting indoors and outdoors, the best containers, and storage / by Gray, Linda,1948-author.;
Complete Guide to Herbs and Spices is a must-have book for all garden aficionados. Even if you don't have space for an outdoor garden, it's packed with practical information for propagating, growing, using and preserving herbs and spices in large or small spaces to help make you more self sufficient. While addressing both, author Linda Gray emphasizes clay pot and container gardening. Each plant profile contains growing advice for each herb or spice including how to prepare the soil, when to sow and plant, when to harvest and gather, and how to use each herb and spice in food. Herbs include aloe vera, basil, bay leaves, lavender, lemon balm, lovage, and more! Spices include caraway, chili peppers, garlic, horse radish mustard, poppies, saffron and more! Be inspired to create new culinary delights with herb and spice infused recipes, complete with beautiful full-color photography. Recipes include Aloe Vera Juice, Candied Angelica, Tomato and Basil Salad, Bouquet Garni, Blackberry and Apple Crumble, Borage Syrup, Dandelion and Burdock Beer, Caraway Seed Cake and more! Become more self-sufficient and one with nature when you grow and cultivate your own herbs and spices.
Subjects: Container gardening.; Gardening.; Herb gardening.;

Tides : a novel / by Freeman, Sara,1985-author.;
"An intoxicating, compact debut novel, Tides is the story of a lost woman who walks out of her life and washes up in a seaside town by the winner of the Henfield Prize, Sara Freeman. After a sudden, devastating loss, Mara flees her family and ends up adrift in a wealthy beach town with a dead cellphone and barely any money. Mired in her grief, Mara detaches from the outside world and spends her days of self-imposed exile scrounging for food and swimming in the night ocean. In her state of emotional extremis, the sea at the town's edge is rendered bleak, luminous, implacable. As her money runs out and tourist season comes to a close, Mara finds a job at the local wine store. There, she meets Simon, the shop's soft-spoken, lonely owner. Confronted with the possibility of connection with Simon and the slow thawing of her desires and appetites, the facts of her flight begin to emerge. With echoes of Rachel Cusk, Jenny Offill, and Marguerite Duras, Tides is a spare, visceral debut novel about the nature of selfhood, intimacy, and the private narratives that shape our lives. A shattering and unforgettable debut"--
Subjects: Domestic fiction.; Psychological fiction.; Grief; Loneliness; Man-woman relationships; Self-consciousness (Awareness);

Ten birds that changed the world / by Moss, Stephen,1960-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."For the whole of human history, we have shared our world with birds. We have hunted and domesticated them for food, fuel and feathers; placed them at the heart of our rituals, religions, myths and legends; poisoned, persecuted and often demonized them; and celebrated them in our music, art and poetry. Even today, despite a growing disconnect between humanity and the rest of nature, birds continue to play an integral role in our lives. Ten Birds that Changed the World tells the story of this long and intricate relationship, spanning the whole of human history, and featuring birds from all seven of the world's continents. It does so through those species whose lives, and their interactions with us, have - in one way or another - changed the course of human history. From when Noah sent out the Raven from the Ark, birds have been central to our superstitions, mythology and folklore. Once humans switched from hunter-gathering to settled societies they began to domesticate wild birds: first the Rock Dove - now the domestic or feral Pigeon - used to communicate over long distances; and then the Wild Turkey and other species for food - later, they became the centerpiece of the annual family festivals of Thanksgiving and Christmas. The Dodo of the Indian Ocean is the icon of extinction, while Darwin's Finches changed the way we look at life on our planet, and the droppings of the Guanay Cormorant provided vast amounts of phosphates, kickstarting a global agricultural revolution. In North America, the Snowy Egret almost disappeared when its plumes were used for fashion; this led to the modern bird protection and conservation movement. The Bald Eagle is the proud symbol of the USA, but eagles have a checkered history, especially in Roman and Nazi propaganda. In China, Mao's 'Great Leap Forward' turned out to be the exact opposite. His call to kill millions of Tree Sparrows meant the insects they ate destroyed the grain harvest - leading to a famine in which thirty million people died. Finally, the Emperor Penguin of Antarctica stands as a potent symbol of how humanity's future is now in the balance, as it heads towards becoming the first global casualty of the Climate Emergency. It is an urgent sign, warning us about our own survival on the planet? Ten Birds that Changed the World is a 'big picture' view of global human history, seen through a unique and original viewpoint: our relationship with birds, as crucial to our lives today as is has ever been"--
Subjects: Birds; Human-animal relationships;

Love marriage : a novel / by Ali, Monica,1967-author.;
"Yasmin Ghorami is twenty-six, in training to be a doctor (like her Indian-born father) and engaged to the charismatic, upper-class Joe Sangster, whose domineering mother, Helen, is a famous feminist. Though both Yasmin's parents and Joe's mother approve of the marriage, the cultural gulf between them is vast as, it turns out, is the gulf in sexual experience between Yasmin and Joe. The novel opens as Yasmin, her parents and her brother pile into their car, packed with Indian food prepared by Yasmin's mother, to go to dinner to meet Joe's mother in her elegant townhouse in one of London's poshest neighborhoods. Contrary to all of Yasmin's fears, her unsophisticated and somewhat flamboyant mother is embraced and celebrated by Helen and her friends. Many complications ensue when Yasmin discovers that Joe has had an affair with a co-worker, and Yasmin's ne'er do well brother is banished from the house by her father, and Yasmin's mother moves to Helen's house in protest. Love Marriage is a story of emotionally fraught self-discovery and how the secrets people keep hidden affect their most intimate relationships. Joe hides the exact nature of his promiscuous past; Yasmin's brother and mother keep a monumental secret from their father; Yasmin has a wildly erotic affair of her own; and the story of her parents' love marriage proves to be a cover-up for a dark, tragic history. In the wake of extreme upheaval, Yasmin finds herself, and her life, transformed"--
Subjects: Domestic fiction.; Novels.; East Indians; Interracial couples; Secrecy;

Entangled life : how fungi make our worlds, change our minds & shape our futures / by Sheldrake, Merlin,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."Living at the border between life and non-life, fungi use diverse cocktails of potent enzymes and acids to disassemble some of the most stubborn substances on the planet, turning rock into soil and wood into compost, allowing plants to grow. Fungi not only help create soil, they send out networks of tubes that enmesh roots and link plants together in the "Wood Wide Web." Fungi also drive many long-standing human fascinations: from yeasts that cause bread to rise and orchestrate the fermentation of sugar into alcohol; to psychedelic fungi; to the mold that produces penicillin and revolutionized modern medicine. And we can partner with fungi to heal the damage we've done to the planet. Fungi are already being used to make sustainable building materials and wearable leather, but they can do so much more. Fungi can digest many stubborn and toxic pollutants from crude oil to human-made polyurethane plastics and the explosive TNT. They can grow food from renewable sources: edible mushrooms can be grown on anything from plant waste to cigarette butts. And some fungi's antiviral compounds might be able to ease the colony collapse of bees. Merlin Sheldrake's revelatory introduction to this world will show us how fungi, and our relationships with them, are more astonishing than we could have imagined. Bringing to light science's latest discoveries and ingeniously parsing the varieties and behaviors of the fungi themselves, he points us toward the fundamental questions about the nature of intelligence and identity this massively diverse, little understood kingdom provokes"--
Subjects: Fungi.;

The uninhabitable earth : life after warming / by Wallace-Wells, David,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible. In California, wildfires now rage year-round, destroying thousands of homes. Across the US, "500-year" storms pummel communities month after month, and floods displace tens of millions annually. This is only a preview of the changes to come. And they are coming fast. Without a revolution in how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth could become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century. In his travelogue of our near future, David Wallace-Wells brings into stark relief the climate troubles that await -- food shortages, refugee emergencies, and other crises that will reshape the globe. But the world will be remade by warming in more profound ways as well, transforming our politics, our culture, our relationship to technology, and our sense of history. It will be all-encompassing, shaping and distorting nearly every aspect of human life as it is lived today. Like An inconvenient truth and Silent spring before it, The uninhabitable earth is both a meditation on the devastation we have brought upon ourselves and an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation"--
Subjects: Nature; Global warming; Climatic changes; Global environmental change; Environmental degradation;

In love with the world : a monk's journey through the bardos of living and dying / by Yongey Mingyur,Rinpoche,1976-author.; Tworkov, Helen,author.;
"In 2011, Mingyur Rinpoche was the respected thirty-six-year-old abbot of three monasteries, a world-renowned meditation teacher, the son of an esteemed meditation master, and a rising star within his generation of Tibetan masters. In Love with the World begins the night that, without telling anyone of his plan, he slips past the monastery gates alone for the first time in his life and sets forth on a wandering retreat, following the ancient practice of holy mendicants. He wanted to throw off his titles and privileges, give up the protections he had always known, and engage in an "ego-killing mission" in order to explore the deepest aspects of his own being and move beyond the grasping self. Yet he immediately discovers that his training has not prepared him to deal with the stench of the third-class train car to Varanasi, or the filthy people around him, or the screeching noise of the train. He has trouble taking off his monk's robes and pays for a cheap hostel rather than sleep on the streets. Soon he becomes deathly ill from food poisoning--and his journey begins in earnest. His lifelong training has prepared him for facing death, and he must now test the strength of his practice. The invaluable lessons he learns from this near-death experience--how we can transform our fear of dying into joyful living--are just what we need to navigate these challenging times. A profoundly moving, unusually candid account by a spiritual master"--
Subjects: Autobiographies.; Biographies.; Yongey Mingyur, Rinpoche, 1976-; Buddhist monks; Near-death experiences; Intermediate state; Spiritual life;

Leave only footprints : my Acadia-to-Zion journey through every national park / by Knighton, Conor,author.;
Includes bibliographical references."The Emmy-winning CBS Sunday Morning correspondent chronicles his year traveling to every one of our National Parks, discovering the most beautiful places and most interesting people that America has to offer. When Conor Knighton decided to spend a year wandering through America's "best idea," he was worried the whole thing might end up being his worst idea. But after a broken engagement and a broken heart, Conor desperately needed a change of scenery. The ambitious plan he cooked up went a bit overboard in that department; Knighton set out to visit every single one of America's National Parks, from Acadia to Zion. Leave Only Footprints is the memoir of his year spent traveling across the United States, a journey that yielded his "On the Trail" series, which quickly became one of CBS Sunday Morning's most beloved segments. In this smart, informative, and entertaining book, he shares how his journey through these natural wonders ended up changing his worldview on everything from God and love to politics and technology. Whether he's waking up early for a naked scrub in a historic bathhouse or staying up late to stargaze along our loneliest highway, Knighton goes behind the scenery to provide an unfiltered look at our country. In doing so, he reveals the unforgettable stories behind the often beautiful, always fascinating lands that all Americans share"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Travel writing.; Personal narratives.; Knighton, Conor; National parks and reserves;

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