Download or read book Islands of Abandonment written by Cal Flyn and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-06-14 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautiful, lyrical exploration of the places where nature is flourishing in our absence "[Flyn] captures the dread, sadness, and wonder of beholding the results of humanity's destructive impulse, and she arrives at a new appreciation of life, 'all the stranger and more valuable for its resilence.'" --The New Yorker Some of the only truly feral cattle in the world wander a long-abandoned island off the northernmost tip of Scotland. A variety of wildlife not seen in many lifetimes has rebounded on the irradiated grounds of Chernobyl. A lush forest supports thousands of species that are extinct or endangered everywhere else on earth in the Korean peninsula's narrow DMZ. Cal Flyn, an investigative journalist, exceptional nature writer, and promising new literary voice visits the eeriest and most desolate places on Earth that due to war, disaster, disease, or economic decay, have been abandoned by humans. What she finds every time is an "island" of teeming new life: nature has rushed in to fill the void faster and more thoroughly than even the most hopeful projections of scientists. Islands of Abandonment is a tour through these new ecosystems, in all their glory, as sites of unexpected environmental significance, where the natural world has reasserted its wild power and promise. And while it doesn't let us off the hook for addressing environmental degradation and climate change, it is a case that hope is far from lost, and it is ultimately a story of redemption: the most polluted spots on Earth can be rehabilitated through ecological processes and, in fact, they already are.
Download or read book Thicker Than Water written by Cal Flyn and published by William Collins. This book was released on 2017-02-23 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cal Flyn was very proud when she discovered that her ancestor, Angus McMillan, had been a pioneer of colonial Australia. However, when she dug deeper, she began to question her pride. McMillan had not only cut tracks through the bush, but played a dark role in Australia's bloody history. Angus McMillan had left the stark, windswept landscape of the Highlands in the 1830s blighted by the Clearances for the alien harshness of the Australian frontier and had since been mythologised as a great explorer. This tug of personal history and a glimmer of an ancestor's greatness convinced Cal Flyn to investigate her great-great-great uncle's story fully. So when she uncovered the tough Highlander's involvement leading several horrific massacres of Aboriginal people, she realised that her family had played an iconic role in a most shameful chapter of Australia's bloody history. Indeed, Angus McMillan was known by another name: 'The Butcher of Gippsland'. Driven to piece together his story and to confront her history, Cal decided to follow Angus's route from Skye to rural Australia. 'Thicker Than Water' evokes the startlingly beautiful wilderness of the Highlands, the seemingly empty bush of Victoria and the echoes and reverberations on one from the other. The expulsion and brutality that marked the Highland Clearances were re-enacted in Australia, and Flyn's stunning prose prompts contemplation on the nature of the destruction of ways of life and the way in which one culture lays claim and asserts its weight over another. Delving into a dark period in Australian history with a novel's immediate style, this book asks how whole societies can come to be overlooked, forgotten and shamed.
Download or read book The Metabolism of Islands written by Simron Singh and published by MDPI. This book was released on 2021-08-04 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book makes the case for why we should care about islands and their sustainability. Islands are hotspots of biocultural diversity and home to 600 million people that depend on one-sixth of the earth’s total area, including the surrounding oceans, for their subsistence. Today, they are at the frontlines of climate change and face an existential crisis. Islands are, however, potential “hubs of innovation” that are uniquely positioned to be leaders in sustainability and climate action. This volume argues that a full-fledged program on “island industrial ecology” is urgently needed, with the aim of offering policy-relevant insights and strategies to sustain small islands in an era of global environmental change. The nine contributions in this volume cover a wide range of applications of socio-metabolic research, from flow accounts to stock analysis and their relationship to services in space and time. They offer insights into how reconfiguring patterns of resource use will allow island governments to build resilience and adapt to the challenges of climate change.
Download or read book Abandoned NYC written by Will Ellis and published by Schiffer Publishing. This book was released on 2015-02-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Manhattan and Brooklyn's trendiest neighbourhoods to the far-flung edges of the outer boroughs, Ellis captures the lost and lonely corners of New York. Step inside the New York you never knew, with 200 eerie images of urban decay
Download or read book Island Dreams written by Gavin Francis and published by Canongate Books. This book was released on 2020-10-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR In Island Dreams, Gavin Francis examines our collective fascination with islands. He blends stories of his own travels with psychology, philosophy and great voyages from literature, shedding new light on the importance of islands and isolation in our collective consciousness. Comparing the life of freedom of thirty years of extraordinary travel from the Faroe Islands to the Aegean, from the Galapagos to the Andaman Islands with a life of responsibility as a doctor, community member and parent approaching middle age, Island Dreams riffs on the twinned poles of rest and motion, independence and attachment, never more relevant than in today’s perennially connected world. Illustrated with maps throughout, this is a celebration of human adventures in the world and within our minds.
Download or read book Landmarks written by Robert Macfarlane and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2015-03-05 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 2015 SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2016 Landmarks is Robert Macfarlane's joyous meditation on words, landscape and the relationship between the two. Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes are grained into our words. Landmarks is about the power of language to shape our sense of place. It is a field guide to the literature of nature, and a glossary containing thousands of remarkable words used in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales to describe land, nature and weather. Travelling from Cumbria to the Cairngorms, and exploring the landscapes of Roger Deakin, J. A. Baker, Nan Shepherd and others, Robert Macfarlane shows that language, well used, is a keen way of knowing landscape, and a vital means of coming to love it. Praise for Robert Macfarlane: 'He has a poet's eye and a prose style that will make many a novelist burn with envy' John Banville, Observer "I'll read anything Macfarlane writes" David Mitchell, Independent 'Every movement needs stars. In [Macfarlane] we surely have one, burning brighter with each book.' Telegraph '[Macfarlane] is a godfather of a cultural moment' Sunday Times
Download or read book The World Without Us written by Alan Weisman and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-08-05 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A penetrating take on how our planet would respond without the relentless pressure of the human presence
Download or read book Out in the Open written by Jesús Carrasco and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-07-04 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A harrowing, humane, and very beautiful book.” —Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You A searing dystopian vision of a young boy's flight through an unnamed, savaged country, searching for sanctuary and redemption—a debut novel from one of Europe's bestselling literary stars. A young boy has fled his home. He’s pursued by dangerous forces. What lies before him is an infinite, arid plain, one he must cross in order to escape those from whom he’s fleeing. One night on the road, he meets an old goatherd, a man who lives simply but righteously, and from that moment on, their paths intertwine. Out in the Open tells the story of this journey through a drought-stricken country ruled by violence. A world where names and dates don’t matter, where morals have drained away with the water. In this landscape the boy—not yet a lost cause—has the chance to choose hope and bravery, or to live forever mired in the cycle of violence in which he was raised. Carrasco has masterfully created a high stakes world, a dystopian tale of life and death, right and wrong, terror and salvation.
Download or read book Five Tuesdays in Winter written by Lily King and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Five Tuesdays in Winter moved me, inspired me, thrilled me. It filled up every chamber of my heart. I loved this book." —Ann Patchett By the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers and Euphoria comes a masterful new collection of short stories Lily King, one of the most "brilliant" (New York Times Book Review), "wildly talented" (Chicago Tribune), and treasured authors of contemporary fiction, returns after her recent bestselling novels with Five Tuesdays in Winter, her first book of short fiction. Told in the intimate voices of complex, endearing characters, Five Tuesdays in Winter intriguingly subverts expectations as it explores desire, loss, jolting violence, and the inexorable tug toward love at all costs. A reclusive bookseller begins to feel the discomfort of love again. Two college roommates have a devastating middle-aged reunion. A proud old man rages powerlessly in his granddaughter's hospital room. A writer receives a visit from all the men who have tried to suppress her voice. Romantic, hopeful, brutally raw, and unsparingly honest, this wide-ranging collection of ten selected stories by one of our most accomplished chroniclers of the human heart is an exciting addition to Lily King's oeuvre of acclaimed fiction.
Download or read book Four Lost Cities A Secret History of the Urban Age written by Annalee Newitz and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and Science Friday A quest to explore some of the most spectacular ancient cities in human history—and figure out why people abandoned them. In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes readers on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy’s southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today. Newitz travels to all four sites and investigates the cutting-edge research in archaeology, revealing the mix of environmental changes and political turmoil that doomed these ancient settlements. Tracing the early development of urban planning, Newitz also introduces us to the often anonymous workers—slaves, women, immigrants, and manual laborers—who built these cities and created monuments that lasted millennia. Four Lost Cities is a journey into the forgotten past, but, foreseeing a future in which the majority of people on Earth will be living in cities, it may also reveal something of our own fate.
Download or read book Theorising Literary Islands written by Ian Kinane and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-11-16 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theorising Literary Islands is an epistemological study of the development of the Robinsonade genre, its ideological functions within contemporary Anglophone cultural thought, and the role of literary and filmic mediation in constructing twentieth and twenty-first century European and American relations with and to the Pacific region.
Download or read book Romania s Abandoned Children written by Charles A. Nelson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-06 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The implications of early experience for children's brain development, behavior, and psychological functioning have long absorbed caregivers, researchers, and clinicians. The 1989 fall of Romania's Ceausescu regime left approximately 170,000 children in 700 overcrowded, impoverished institutions across Romania, and prompted the most comprehensive study to date on the effects of institutionalization on children's well-being. Romania's Abandoned Children, the authoritative account of this landmark study, documents the devastating toll paid by children who are deprived of responsive care, social interaction, stimulation, and psychological comfort. Launched in 2000, the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP) was a rigorously controlled investigation of foster care as an alternative to institutionalization. Researchers included 136 abandoned infants and toddlers in the study and randomly assigned half of them to foster care created specifically for the project. The other half stayed in Romanian institutions, where conditions remained substandard. Over a twelve-year span, both groups were assessed for physical growth, cognitive functioning, brain development, and social behavior. Data from a third group of children raised by their birth families were collected for comparison. The study found that the institutionalized children were severely impaired in IQ and manifested a variety of social and emotional disorders, as well as changes in brain development. However, the earlier an institutionalized child was placed into foster care, the better the recovery. Combining scientific, historical, and personal narratives in a gripping, often heartbreaking, account, Romania's Abandoned Children highlights the urgency of efforts to help the millions of parentless children living in institutions throughout the world.
Download or read book Dadland written by Keggie Carew and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As her father’s memory fails, a daughter explores his military past: “Part family memoir, part history book . . . Compelling and moving from start to finish” (Financial Times). One of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Ten Best Books of the Year For most of Keggie Carew’s life, she was kept at arm’s length from her father’s personal history. But when she is invited to join him for the sixtieth anniversary of the Jedburghs—an elite special operations unit that was the first collaboration between the American and British Secret Services during World War II—a new door opens in their relationship. As dementia begins to stake a claim over Tom Carew’s memory, Keggie embarks on a quest to unravel his story, and soon finds herself in a far more consuming place than she bargained for. Tom Carew was a maverick, a left-handed stutterer, a law unto himself. As a Jedburgh he parachuted behind enemy lines to raise guerrilla resistance first against the Germans in France, then against the Japanese in Southeast Asia, where he won the nickname “Lawrence of Burma.” But his wartime exploits were only the beginning. A winner of the Costa Book Award, Dadland takes us on a journey through peace and war and shady corners of twentieth-century politics; though the author’s English childhood and the breakdown of her family, and into the mysterious realm of memory. “Brings to mind Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk in the way it soars off in surprising directions, teaches you things you didn’t know, and ambushes your emotions.” ―NPR “Astonishing . . . Mixes intimate memoir, biography, history and detective story: this is a shape-shifting hybrid that meditates on the nature of time and identity . . . Tom Carew was a razzle-dazzle character, larger than life and anarchically self-invented . . . For all its vigor and comic zest, Dadland is a careful and tender discovery that patiently circles around a man who spent his life mythologizing and running away from himself.” ―The Observer
Download or read book Island of the Invisible Being written by Madelain Westermann and published by Ferne Press. This book was released on 2012-09-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When you're filled with fear, disappointment, and despair, do you shrink down and hide or do you get up and survive? When Emon realizes what her parents have done to her, she rises up and thrives on her own, so she thinks! Island of the Invisible Being depicts the spirit and determination of the people of the Marshall Islands. Beautifully written and illsutrated, Island of the Invisible Being is a legend that will touch the hearts of all.
Download or read book The Body Keeps the Score written by Bessel A. Van der Kolk and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published by Viking Penguin, 2014.
Download or read book Abandoned Islands written by Claudia Martin and published by Abandoned. This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning photographic guide to some of the world's most remote islands left to return to nature. Exploring some of the world's eeriest places, Abandoned Islands features American Civil War forts, Europe's last leper colony, and South Atlantic whaling stations, along with once-grand mansions, colonial settlements and churches, and much more. Arranged geographically, the book takes us from New York's East River to islands off Alaska, from a French Napoleonic-era fort off the coast of Normandy to deserted villages on remote Scottish isles, from Venetian sanatoria to Croatian penal colonies, from Japanese mining colonies to Sudanese deserted ports and abandoned atolls in the Indian Ocean. As you leaf through these pages, the reasons for abandonment are revealed: climate change sealing off fresh water or river channels, shifting economic forces making life too hard, religious conflict, or wars disrupting daily life--or the absence of war rendering a military settlement unnecessary. With outstanding color photographs and fascinating captions, Abandoned Islands is a brilliant pictorial exploration of lost worlds.
Download or read book Clipperton written by Jimmy M. Skaggs and published by Walker & Company. This book was released on 1989-01-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
