Download or read book Ivory s Ghosts written by John Frederick Walker and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2010-01-19 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] tour de force examination of the history of ivory . . . and the demise of the elephant and human decency in the process of this unholy quest.” —The Huffington Post Praised for the nuance and sensitivity with which it approaches one of the most fraught conservation issues we face today, John Frederick Walker’s Ivory’s Ghosts tells the astonishing story of the power of ivory through the ages, and its impact on elephants. Long before gold and gemstones held allure, ivory came to be prized in every culture of the world—from ancient Egypt to nineteenth-century America to modern Japan—for its beauty, rarity, and ability to be finely carved. But the beauty came at an unfathomable cost. Walker lays bare the ivory trade’s cruel connection with the slave trade and the increasing slaughter of elephants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the 1980s, elephant poaching reached levels that threatened the last great herds of the African continent, and led to a worldwide ban on the ancient international trade in tusks. But the ban has failed to stop poaching—or the emotional debate over what to do with the legitimate and growing stockpiles of ivory recovered from elephants that die of natural causes. “Ivory’s Ghost is essential reading for anyone concerned with conservation and with the tenuous future of one of the most magnificent creatures our earth has ever seen.” —George B. Schaller, author of A Naturalist and Other Beast

Download or read book Ivory Ghost of the Serengeti written by Alan McKenzie and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2005-07-13 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It all began in the bloody Vietnam War as two platoons led by Lt. Jack McKeon and Lt. Keith Kirkland united in a joint effort to overpower the North Vietnamese Army on the battle of Hill 57. Many will die and few will survive this dirt-chewing war. Nine years later, a violent tragedy will take the lives of Jack Mckeon’s wife and daughter. Trying to live a normal life, Jack McKeon, a natural outdoorsman ventures on an African Safari tour. An unfortunate event in Nairobi, Kenya causes him to run from the law. Innocent, he journeys deeper into the grasslands of the grand Serengeti plains. Confronting big-game hunters and poachers in his expedition, Jack McKeon makes it his mission to stop the ivory-bloodshed that has decimated the rhino and elephant populations. Unbeknownst to Jack, all the poachers’ work for Lt. Keith Kirkland, cartel-leader of the ivory-world, and the man who saved his life in the Vietnam War.

Download or read book Critical Approaches to Joseph Conrad written by Agata Szczeszak-Brewer and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2015-08-31 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical Approaches to Joseph Conrad is a collection of essays directed to both new and experienced readers of Conrad. The book takes into account recent developments in literary theory, including the prominence of ecocriticism, ecopostcolonial approaches, and gender studies. Editor Agata Szczeszak-Brewer offers a comprehensive and comprehensible introduction to Conrad's most popular texts, also addressing the most recent academic debates as well as the conversations about narrative and genre in Conrad's canon. Students and scholars of Conrad, twentieth-century literature, and modernism will appreciate the clear, accessible prose by nineteen internationally recognized contributors who approach Conrad in different ways, from postcolonial and ecocritical perspectives, through explorations of gender, to psychoanalysis, narrative theory, and political analysis. Beginning with a biographical introduction by Szczeszak-Brewer, the collection offers an essay outlining the cultural and historical contexts that influenced Conrad's fiction and an essay on reception of Conrad's work. Following that, contributors provide critical approaches to Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Typhoon, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, The Secret Sharer, and Under Western Eyes. In these sections scholars offer insights about complex issues in Conrad's fiction, ranging from the study of specific literary tools and narrative development in his books to the political theories in Conrad's portrayal of the threat of terrorism and violent revolutions.

Download or read book Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World written by Supriya Chaudhuri and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Commodity, culture and colonialism are intimately related and mutually constitutive. The desire for commodities drove colonial expansion at the same time that colonial expansion fuelled technological invention, created new markets for goods, displaced populations and transformed local and indigenous cultures in dramatic and often violent ways. This book analyses the transformation of local cultures in the context of global interaction in the period 1851–1914. By focusing on episodes in the social and cultural lives of commodities, it explores some of the ways in which commodities shaped the colonial cultures of global modernity. Chapters by experts in the field examine the production, circulation, display and representation of commodities in various regional and national contexts, and draw on a range of theoretical and disciplinary approaches. An integrated, coherent and urgent response to a number of key debates in postcolonial and Victorian studies, world literature and imperial history, this book will be of interest to researchers with interests in migration, commodity culture, colonial history and transnational networks of print and ideas.

Download or read book Beyond Words written by Carl Safina and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I wanted to know what they were experiencing, and why to us they feel so compelling, and so-close. This time I allowed myself to ask them the question that for a scientist was forbidden fruit: Who are you? Weaving decades of field observations with exciting new discoveries about the brain, Carl Safina's landmark book offers an intimate view of animal behavior to challenge the fixed boundary between humans and nonhuman animals. In Beyond Words, readers travel to Amboseli National Park in the threatened landscape of Kenya and witness struggling elephant families work out how to survive poaching and drought, then to Yellowstone National Park to observe wolves sort out the aftermath of one pack's personal tragedy, and finally plunge into the astonishingly peaceful society of killer whales living in the crystalline waters of the Pacific Northwest. Beyond Words brings forth powerful and illuminating insight into the unique personalities of animals through extraordinary stories of animal joy, grief, jealousy, anger, and love. The similarity between human and nonhuman consciousness, self-awareness, and empathy calls us to re-evaluate how we interact with animals. Wise, passionate, and eye-opening at every turn, Beyond Words is ultimately a graceful examination of humanity's place in the world.

Download or read book Ghosts of Memories written by Barb Hendee and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With her vampire protector Philip Branté and their human companion Wade Sheffield, a former police psychologist, Eleisha Clevon searches the world for isolated vampires—and offers them sanctuary. She wants to provide a home where she can teach them to follow the Four Laws that will protect them and their kind. But not all vampires want to live by anyone’s rules but their own. Christian Lefevre has been posing a psychic, catering to the upper crust of Seattle society by making contact with their dead loved ones—and leaving his clients faint and weak after each encounter. Now Eleisha must confront the most deadly predator she has ever faced—or lose everything she has fought to protect…

Download or read book The Ruling Elite written by Deanna Spingola and published by Trafford Publishing. This book was released on 2011-04-14 with total page 686 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lincoln's war, the North's attack on the South, took the life of 622,000 citizens and altered the government's structure. Marx and Engels watched the war from afar and applauded his efforts. The media and our government-controlled schools have presented a deceptive view of every historical event and have whitewashed the most scandalous political leaders and vilified leaders who have worked in the best interests of the people. Following Lincoln's precedent-setting war, we have been repeatedly lied into wars. Currently, our young men and women shed their blood in foreign lands while well-connected corporations make massive profits rebuilding the infrastructure that other corporations have demolished. Meanwhile, our politicians, possessing inside knowledge, grow richer through their investments and the bribes they accept from deep-pocketed lobbyists. They have not listened to their constituents for decades. CIA thugs, in behalf of the corporations, commit terrorist acts in other countries which the U.S. government and media blame on the so-called insurgents. In 2010, the Pentagon paid the following to the top five out of 100 (1) Lockheed Martin Corp. $16,700,588,328; (2) Northrop Grumman Corp. $11,145,533,497; (3) Boeing Co. $10,462,626,196; (4) Raytheon Co. $6,727,232,555; (5) Science Applications International Corp. $5,474,482,583. Yet, throughout the country, vital infrastructure is crumbling and politicians are selling taxpayer-funded public properties to private interests as a profitable venture. The new owners exploit the public by raising service rates while diminishing the services.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe written by Nicholas Seager and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-29 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe is the most comprehensive overview available of the author's life, times, writings, and reception. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) is a major author in world literature, renowned for a succession of novels including Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and A Journal of the Plague Year, but more famous in his lifetime as a poet, journalist, and political agent. Across his vast oeuvre, which includes books, pamphlets, and periodicals, Defoe commented on virtually every development and issue of his lifetime, a turbulent and transformative period in British and global history. Defoe has proven challenging to position--in some respects he is a traditional and conservative thinker, but in other ways he is a progressive and innovative writer. He therefore benefits from the range of critical appraisals offered in this Handbook. The Handbook ranges from concerns of gender, class, and race to those of politics, religion, and economics. In accessible but learned chapters, contributors explore salient contexts in ways that show how they overlap and intersect, such as in chapters on science, environment, and empire. The Handbook provides both a thorough introduction to Defoe and to early eighteenth-century society, culture, and literature more broadly. Thirty-six chapters by leading literary scholars and historians explore the various genres in which Defoe wrote; the sociocultural contexts that inform his works; his writings on different locales, from the local to the global; and the posthumous reception and creative responses to his works.

Download or read book The Mother s Day Protest and Other Fictocritical Essays written by Stephen Muecke and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-06-20 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a genre that confounds the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, fictocriticism continues to gain currency. It solves a problem for researchers and writers who do not wish to be held to that somewhat artificial division, and who consider their research methods necessarily to include the stylistic experiments that show their research and thought processes. Research, knowledge of the world, that continues to be ‘written up’, ‘after the fact’ in the usual academic genres, has a tendency to re-inscribe the status quo. The world stays the way it is; change, surprise and experiment elude the writer. Stephen Muecke, one of the originators of fictocritical writing, presents a selection of his best essays in this innovative genre. In doing so he offers a rare and important theorization of the potential of speculative methods across disciplines including Literary Studies, Philosophy, Anthropology, Geography, and Science and Technology Studies.

Download or read book Ghosts in the Schoolyard written by Eve L. Ewing and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-04-10 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Failing schools. Underprivileged schools. Just plain bad schools.” That’s how Eve L. Ewing opens Ghosts in the Schoolyard: describing Chicago Public Schools from the outside. The way politicians and pundits and parents of kids who attend other schools talk about them, with a mix of pity and contempt. But Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures—they’re an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together. Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings. Pitched simultaneously as a solution to a budget problem, a response to declining enrollments, and a chance to purge bad schools that were dragging down the whole system, the plan was met with a roar of protest from parents, students, and teachers. But if these schools were so bad, why did people care so much about keeping them open, to the point that some would even go on a hunger strike? Ewing’s answer begins with a story of systemic racism, inequality, bad faith, and distrust that stretches deep into Chicago history. Rooting her exploration in the historic African American neighborhood of Bronzeville, Ewing reveals that this issue is about much more than just schools. Black communities see the closing of their schools—schools that are certainly less than perfect but that are theirs—as one more in a long line of racist policies. The fight to keep them open is yet another front in the ongoing struggle of black people in America to build successful lives and achieve true self-determination.

Download or read book New Directions in Africa China Studies written by Chris Alden and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-07-17 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interest in China and Africa is growing exponentially. Taking a step back from the ‘events-driven’ reactions characterizing much coverage, this timely book reflects more deeply on questions concerning how this subject has been, is being and can be studied. It offers a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary and authoritative contribution to Africa–China studies. Its diverse chapters explore key current research themes and debates, such as agency, media, race, ivory, development or security, using a variety of case studies from Benin, Kenya and Tanzania, to Angola, Mozambique and Mauritius. Looking back, it explores the evolution of studies about Africa and China. Looking forward, it explores alternative, future possibilities for a complex and constantly evolving subject. Showcasing a range of perspectives by leading and emerging scholars, New Directions in Africa–China Studies is an essential resource for students and scholars of Africa and China relations.

Download or read book Elephant or Lions written by Bethuel Sithole and published by Bethuel Sithole. This book was released on with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elephant or Lions: The book is about the wild elephants and lions that are in declining, the biggest threat to then. The report on elephants and lions trophy hunting, reminds us that the problems elephants and lions face are actually much broader and more damaging than most people realize. Lion bones, which can substitute for tiger bones, are used in East Asian countries including China as medicinal remedies said to treat a wide range of ailments from insomnia to osteoporosis. The other parts of lions such as whiskers, fat and tails have always had a traditional value and use in many African nations as medicines, talismans and components of ceremonial and ritual practices. Before the lion never had any traditional value in China, but it’s an analog to the tiger so it seems to be acceptable. Illegal trade remains difficult because, despite lions’ declining populations, there is actually still a legal trade in lion bones. The things that most of us do not know are that the demand of lion’s bones is growing every day. Customs officials that are trying to block illegal shipments of ivory or rhino horn have started to notice lion parts nestled inside the same containers. The conservation world started to become increasingly nervous about where the trade might be headed and what impact it would have on wild populations. As the price of bones is rising steadily, some breeders have started slaughtering their own lions, without obtaining a permit or getting a vet to put the animal to sleep, says a fraud inspector. The South African Department of Environmental Affairs has raised concerns that the demand for lion bones could potentially threaten South Africa’s 2,000 wild lions. On the other hand TB on the lions looks like malaria and know is killing more lions than before. Lions are thought to contract TB from infected prey species, especially buffalo, being exposed to the bacterium that causes the disease when they eat infected animals. And all the questions you may have about elephants and lions.

Download or read book Object Stories written by Steve Brown and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-five archaeologists each tell an intimate story of their experience and entanglement with an evocative artifact.

Download or read book King Leopold s Ghost written by Adam Hochschild and published by Picador. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With an introduction by award-winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver In the late nineteenth century, when the great powers in Europe were tearing Africa apart and seizing ownership of land for themselves, King Leopold of Belgium took hold of the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. In his devastatingly barbarous colonization of this area, Leopold stole its rubber and ivory, pummelled its people and set up a ruthless regime that would reduce the population by half. . While he did all this, he carefully constructed an image of himself as a deeply feeling humanitarian. Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize in 1999, King Leopold’s Ghost is the true and haunting account of this man’s brutal regime and its lasting effect on a ruined nation. It is also the inspiring and deeply moving account of a handful of missionaries and other idealists who travelled to Africa and unwittingly found themselves in the middle of a gruesome holocaust. Instead of turning away, these brave few chose to stand up against Leopold. Adam Hochschild brings life to this largely untold story and, crucially, casts blame on those responsible for this atrocity.

Download or read book The Edwin Fox written by Boyd Cothran and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2023-10-17 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It began as a small, slow, and unadorned sailing vessel—in a word, ordinary. Later, it was a weary workhorse in the age of steam. But the story of the Edwin Fox reveals how an everyday merchant ship drew together a changing world and its people in an extraordinary age of rising empires, sweeping economic transformation, and social change. This fascinating work of global history offers a vividly detailed and engaging narrative of globalization writ small, viewed from the decks and holds of a single vessel. The Edwin Fox connected the lives and histories of millions, though most never even saw it. Built in Calcutta in 1853, the Edwin Fox was chartered by the British navy as a troop transport during the Crimean War. In the following decades, it was sold, recommissioned, and refitted by an increasingly far-flung constellation of militaries and merchants. It sailed to exotic ports carrying luxury goods, mundane wares, and all kinds of people: not just soldiers and officials but indentured laborers brought from China to Cuba, convicts and settlers being transported from the British Empire to western Australia and New Zealand—with dire consequences for local Indigenous peoples—and others. But the power of this story rests in the everyday ways people, nations, economies, and ideas were knitted together in this foundational era of our modern world.

Download or read book Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World written by Martha Chaiklin and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines trades in animals and animal products in the history of the Indian Ocean World (IOW). An international array of established and emerging scholars investigate how the roles of equines, ungulates, sub-ungulates, mollusks, and avians expand our understandings of commerce, human societies, and world systems. Focusing primarily on the period 1500-1900, they explore how animals and their products shaped the relationships between populations in the IOW and Europeans arriving by maritime routes. By elucidating this fundamental yet under-explored aspect of encounters and exchanges in the IOW, these interdisciplinary essays further our understanding of the region, the environment, and the material, political and economic history of the world.

Download or read book All the Hearts You Eat written by Hailey Piper and published by Titan Books. This book was released on 2024-10-15 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A visceral and heartbreaking work of gothic horror about small town mysteries, local folklore and the things we leave behind when we're gone, from the Bram Stoker Award winning author of Queen of Teeth. What really happened to Cabrina Brite? Ivory's life changes irrevocably when she discovers the body of Cabrina Brite on the sands of Cape Morning, along with a mysterious poem. How did she die, and why does it seem she was trying to swim to Ghost Cat Island, the center of so many local mysteries? Desperate to uncover the answers surrounding Cabrina's death, and haunted by her discovery, Ivory begins to see the pale ghost of Cabrina, only to shake it off as a mere hallucination. But Ivory is not alone. Cabrina's closest friends have also seen a similar apparition, and as they toy with occult possibilities, they begin to unravel the truth behind Cabrina's death. Because Cape Morning isn't a ghost town, but a town filled with ghosts, and Ivory is about to discover just what happens when you let one in.