Download or read book The Joy of Small Things written by Hannah Jane Parkinson and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'This book is a not-so-small joy in itself.' NIGELLA LAWSON 'Parkinson has the gift of making you look with new eyes at everyday things. The perfect daily diversion.' JOJO MOYES 'Always funny and frank and full of insight, I absolutely love Parkinson's writing.' DAVID NICHOLLS 'I loved this book . . . Parkinson's writing transports you to unexpected places of joy and comfort . . . these pages contain happiness.' MARINA HYDE 'The twenty-first century feels a lot more bearable in Parkinson's company.' CHARLOTTE MENDELSON Drawn from the successful Guardian column, these everyday exultations and inspirations will get you through dismal days. Hannah Jane Parkinson is a specialist in savouring the small pleasures of life. She revels in her fluffy dressing gown ('like bathing in marshmallow'), finds calm in solo cinema trips, is charmed by the personalities of fonts ('you'll never see Comic Sans on a funeral notice'), celebrates pockets and gleefully abandons a book she isn't enjoying. Parkinson's everyday exaltations - selected from her immensely successful Guardian column - will utterly delight. FEATURES BRAND NEW MATERIAL 'A compendium of delights.' OBSERVER 'Delightful . . . a love letter to those little moments of bliss that get us through the daily grind.' RED

Download or read book The Smell of Fresh Rain written by Barney Shaw and published by Icon Books. This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Smell is the most emotional and evocative of our senses: it can bring back memories faster and with more immediacy than a photograph – so why is it so little understood? Armed with a hungry curiosity and a willingness to self-experiment, author Barney Shaw goes in search of the hidden meanings of smells. Using plain words to describe what he finds, he investigates the chemistry, psychology, history and future of this underappreciated sense. Journeying around boatyards, perfume shops and memories, Shaw opens your nose to the world, breaking down "chords" of smells into their component notes and through them revealing new ways of understanding the spaces through which we move. An investigation into the biology, psychology and history of smell, and a search for effective ways to put into words scents that we instantly relate to, but find strangely ineffable, THE SMELL OF FRESH RAIN includes a 200-entry thesaurus of succinct descriptions of common smells.

Download or read book Reading the OED written by Ammon Shea and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An obsessive word lover provides an account of the year he spent reading the Oxford English Dictionary cover to cover, offering a selection of obscure and offbeat vocabulary gems he discovered along the way.

Download or read book Revelations in Air written by Jude Stewart and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extraordinary, strange, and startlingly beautiful exploration of smell, the least understood of our five senses The nose on your face is the Buckingham Palace Guard of your body, the maitre d' of all taste, as well as the seducer of your imagination, and memory—and Jude Stewart has charmed them all into a wicked, poetic and illuminating tour of their mysterious domains. —Jack Hitt, author of Bunch of Amateurs Overlapping with taste yet larger in scope, smell is the sense that comes closest to pure perception. Smell can collapse space and time, unlocking memories and transporting us to worlds both new and familiar. Yet as clearly as each of us can recognize different smells--the bright tang of citrus, freshly sharpened pencils, parched earth after rain--few of us understand how and why we smell. In Revelations in Air, Jude Stewart takes us on a fascinating journey into the weird and wonderful world of smell. Beginning with lessons on the incredible biology and history of how our noses work, Stewart teaches us how to use our noses like experts. Once we're properly equipped and ready to sniff, Stewart explores a range of smells—from lavender, cut grass and hot chocolate to cannabis and old books—using smell as a lens into art, history, science, and more. With an engaging colorful design and exercises for readers to refine their own skills, Revelations in Air goes beyond science or history or chemistry--it's a doorway into the surprising, pleasurable, and unfamiliar landscape of smell.

Download or read book Chasing The Monsoon written by Alexander Frater and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-03-25 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 20th May the Indian summer monsoon will begin to envelop the country in two great wet arms, one coming from the east, the other from the west. They are united over central India around 10th July, a date that can be calculated within seven or eight days. Alexander Frater aims to follow the monsoon, staying sometimes behind it, sometimes in front of it, and everywhere watching the impact of this extraordinary phenomenon. During the anxious period of waiting, the weather forecaster is king, consulted by pie-crested cockatoos, and a joyful period ensues: there is a period of promiscuity, and scandals proliferate. Frater's journey takes him to Bangkok and the cowboy town on the Thai-Malaysian border to Rangoon and Akyab in Burma (where the front funnels up between the mountains and the sea). His fascinating narrative reveals the exotic, often startling, discoveries of an ambitious and irresistibly romantic adventurer.

Download or read book The Hundredth Acre written by John Camden and published by . This book was released on 1905 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Thunder Lightning written by Lauren Redniss and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015-10-27 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Note: This eBook file contains many richly detailed full-color images and makes use of unconventional page layouts. Because of this, readers will be required to zoom in on each page to read the text and see the finer detail of the artwork. [It has not been optimized for devices that display only in black and white.] From the National Book Award finalist Lauren Redniss, author of Radioactive, comes a dazzling fusion of storytelling, visual art, and reportage that grapples with weather in all its dimensions: its danger and its beauty, why it happens and what it means. WINNER OF THE PEN/E. O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, KIRKUS REVIEWS, AND SHELF AWARENESS Weather is the very air we breathe—it shapes our daily lives and alters the course of history. In Thunder & Lightning, Lauren Redniss tells the story of weather and humankind through the ages. This wide-ranging work roams from the driest desert on earth to a frigid island in the Arctic, from the Biblical flood to the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Redniss visits the headquarters of the National Weather Service, recounts top-secret rainmaking operations during the Vietnam War, and examines the economic impact of disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Drawing on extensive research and countless interviews, she examines our own day and age, from our most personal decisions—Do I need an umbrella today?—to the awesome challenges we face with global climate change. Redniss produced each element of Thunder & Lightning: the text, the artwork, the covers, and every page in between. She created many of the images using the antiquated printmaking technique copper plate photogravure etching. She even designed the book’s typeface. The result is a book unlike any other: a spellbinding combination of storytelling, art, and science. Praise for Thunder & Lightning “[An] aesthetically charged and deeply researched account . . . a wild rainstorm of a book, pelting the reader with ideas and inspiration.”—Nature “A gorgeous and illuminating illustrated study of weather in all its tempestuous variety . . . Redniss’s combo of fact, folklore, and vibrant etched copperplate prints enthralls.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Eerily beautiful . . . Contains plenty of scientific explanation (including more than a few nods toward global warming), but also far-flung personal stories that illuminate the beauty, wonder and chaos inherent in the elements.”—The New York Times “Magical . . . Redniss has . . . shown us how human beings live with nature—fighting, coexisting, taming, predicting via leech barometer and radar and intuition.”—The New York Times Book Review “[A] twenty-first-century genius . . . The reader willing to put herself fully in Redniss’s hands will be rewarded with a delicious feeling of being enveloped by a phenomenon that eclipses the chiming trivialities of daily life.”—Elle “Redniss is one of the most creative science writers of our time—her combination of beautiful artwork, reporting, and poetic prose brings science to life in ways that words alone simply cannot.”—Rebecca Skloot “Redniss combines her own dual punch of expressive art and impressive erudition to give an entirely new take on all that happens above our heads.”—Adam Gopnik “A strange and wonderful thing, the work of a first-class mind that refuses to submit to any categories or precedent.”—Dave Eggers

Download or read book The Slang Dictionary Etymological Historical and Anecdotal written by John Camden Hotten and published by London : Chatto and Windus. This book was released on 1874 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Rain written by Cynthia Barnett and published by Crown. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rain is elemental, mysterious, precious, destructive. It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of the world's water. Yet this is the first book to tell the story of rain. Cynthia Barnett's Rain begins four billion years ago with the torrents that filled the oceans, and builds to the storms of climate change. It weaves together science—the true shape of a raindrop, the mysteries of frog and fish rains—with the human story of our ambition to control rain, from ancient rain dances to the 2,203 miles of levees that attempt to straitjacket the Mississippi River. It offers a glimpse of our "founding forecaster," Thomas Jefferson, who measured every drizzle long before modern meteorology. Two centuries later, rainy skies would help inspire Morrissey’s mopes and Kurt Cobain’s grunge. Rain is also a travelogue, taking readers to Scotland to tell the surprising story of the mackintosh raincoat, and to India, where villagers extract the scent of rain from the monsoon-drenched earth and turn it into perfume. Now, after thousands of years spent praying for rain or worshiping it; burning witches at the stake to stop rain or sacrificing small children to bring it; mocking rain with irrigated agriculture and cities built in floodplains; even trying to blast rain out of the sky with mortars meant for war, humanity has finally managed to change the rain. Only not in ways we intended. As climate change upends rainfall patterns and unleashes increasingly severe storms and drought, Barnett shows rain to be a unifying force in a fractured world. Too much and not nearly enough, rain is a conversation we share, and this is a book for everyone who has ever experienced it.

Download or read book A Shepherd to Fools written by Drew Mendelson and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2021-08-12 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Shepherd to Fools is the second of Drew Mendelson’s trilogy of Vietnam War novels that began with Song Ba To and will conclude with Poke the Dragon. Shepherd: It is the ragged end of the Vietnam war. With the debacle of a failing South Vietnamese invasion of Northern Laos as background, A Shepherd to Fools tells the harrowing tale of a covert Hatchet Team of US soldiers and Montagnard mercenaries. They are ordered to find and capture or kill a band of American deserters, called Longshadows, before the world learns of their paralyzing rebellion. An earlier attempt to capture them failed disastrously, the facts of it buried. Captain Hugh Englander commands the Hatchet Team. He is a humorless bastard, sneering and discourteous to every regular army soldier. He cares little for the welfare of his own men and nothing for the lives of the deserters. The conflict between him and Captain David Weisman, the artillery officer assigned to the mission for artillery support, threatens to tear the team apart. Deep in the Laotian jungle, the team is caught in a final, horrific battle facing an enemy armed with Sarin nerve gas, the “worst of the worst” of the war’s clandestine weapons.

Download or read book The Timingila written by Shon Mehta and published by . This book was released on 2019-10-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who is the hero of a story? The one who is brave and honorable, or the one who survives to tell the story?Which is the more powerful weapon? The one that wins battles, or the one that wins the minds of people?Set in the ancient land of Jivavarta, 'The Timingila' is the story of Trishala, a weak kingdom at the mercy of its neighbors, and Tasvak, the unwanted child of its king. When a series of unexpected events put Trishala under a tyrant's control, Tasvak is forced into a web of deception as he struggles to resurrect Trishala's lost glory. Along the way, he has to deal with fanatics, assassins, victims, and reformers. Facing manipulation and betrayal at every step, will Tasvak succeed?A fast-paced thriller, 'The Timingila' narrates the story of three underdogs -- a fallen kingdom that rises against powerful enemies to become the center of an empire, a nascent faith that stands against traditions to become the dominant religion, and a fugitive warrior who defies all odds to become a mighty king.Goodreads rating: 4.36 / 5"Overall, a lovely book that should appeal to those who want to read something different, something that has a fast pace and at times, odd developments that leave you wondering." - Ashwini Abhyankar (Goodreads)"... if you are looking for fast-paced entertainer with gripping characters and a storyline based in an ancient exotic world, this is must read." - Jennifer (Goodreads)"It is was an unusual experience, but I very much enjoyed reading The Timingila." - Grace (Goodreads)"This is a fantasy on steroids. The author had a story to tell and she tells it in her own unique and original way." - Rettah (Goodreads)

Download or read book Kale Caramel written by Lily Diamond and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born out of the popular blog Kale & Caramel, this sumptuously photographed and beautifully written cookbook presents eighty recipes for delicious vegan and vegetarian dishes featuring herbs and flowers, as well as luxurious do-it-yourself beauty products. Plant-whisperer, writer, and photographer Lily Diamond believes that herbs and flowers have the power to nourish inside and out. “Lily’s deep connection to nature is beautifully woven throughout this personal collection of recipes,” says award-winning vegetarian chef Amy Chaplin. Each chapter celebrates an aromatic herb or flower, including basil, cilantro, fennel, mint, oregano, rosemary, sage, thyme, lavender, jasmine, rose, and orange blossom. Mollie Katzen, author of the beloved Moosewood Cookbook, calls the book “a gift, articulated through a poetic voice, original and bold.” The recipes tell a coming-of-age story through Lily’s kinship with plants, from a sun-drenched Maui childhood to healing from heartbreak and her mother’s death. With bright flavors, gorgeous scents, evocative stories, and more than one hundred photographs, Kale & Caramel creates a lush garden of experience open to harvest year round.

Download or read book Bombay Ice written by Leslie Forbes and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 2012-11-29 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wonderful first novel which dramatically combines the suspense of a gripping literary thriller with a meditation on the nature of scientific chaos Roz Benegal, a feisty young BBC researcher, goes to India to pick up the threads of her life there (she spent part of her childhood growing up in Kerala). She goes to Bombay to visit her sister Miranda, who is married to a prominent Bollywood film director, Prosper. Roz arrives to news headlines announcing the deaths of 8 eunuchs in four months and to rumours that her sister's husband may have murdered his first wife Maya, a film star past her prime. Not satisfied to leave the investigations of these allegations to the Indian police, Roz Benegal begins a dangerous search for the truth. Interwoven with this utterly gripping detective story is a remarkable layering of knowledge gleaned from old books on storms, the monsoon, poisons and magical transformations, the narrator's fascination with chaos theory and her passionate interest in fate.

Download or read book The Secret World of Weather How to Read Signs in Every Cloud Breeze Hill Street Plant Animal and Dewdrop Natural Navigation written by Tristan Gooley and published by The Experiment, LLC. This book was released on 2023-02-28 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn to “see” the forecast in the hidden weather signs all around you—from the New York Times–bestselling author of How to Read a Tree and The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs In The Secret World of Weather, bestselling author Tristan Gooley turns his gaze up to the sky, bringing his signature brand of close observation and eye-opening deduction to the fascinating world of weather. Every cloud, every change in temperature, every raindrop, every sunbeam, every breeze reveals something about our weather—if you know what to look for. Before you know it, you’ll be able to forecast impending storms, sunny days, and everything in between, all without needing to consult your smartphone. But The Secret World of Weather goes far beyond mere weather prediction, changing the very way we think about weather itself. Weather is not something that blankets an area; rather, it changes constantly as you walk through woods or turn down a street. The weather is never identical on two sides of a tree—or even beneath it. Take, for example, Gooley’s remarkable discovery that breezes accelerate beneath a tree. To Gooley, this is “weather,” a tiny microclimate that explains why people sit beneath a tree to cool down—not only for the shade but, subconsciously, for cooler breeze. And so Gooley shows us not only what the weather will be like five days from now, but also what to expect about the weather around every corner. By carefully observing the subtle interplay of wind, cloud, fog, temperature, rain and many other phenomena, we not only form a deeper understanding of weather patterns, but also unlock secrets about our environment. Weather forms our landscape, and landscape forms our weather. Everything we see in the sky reflects where we are. When we learn to read weather’s signs, Gooley shows us, the weather becomes our map, revealing to us how it has made our towns, cities, woods, and hills what they are. You’ll never see your surroundings the same way again.

Download or read book Maverick Gardeners written by Felder Rushing and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2021-03-17 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Be forewarned that this book honors people like the woman in my hometown who paints the numbers of her favorite NASCAR drivers on her elephant ears, and a Tokyo gardener with over a hundred bonsai plants.” So says renowned garden journalist Felder Rushing in his new book Maverick Gardeners: Dr. Dirt and Other Determined Independent Gardeners. In this book, Felder delves deeply into the psychology of what motivates and sustains the Keepers of the Garden Flame. For thousands of years, a loosely connected web of unique, nontraditional gardeners has bonded people across race, culture, language, and other social conventions through sharing unique plants and stories. Found in nearly every neighborhood worldwide, these “determined independent gardeners” (DIGrs) are typically nonjoiners who garden simply and exuberantly, eschewing customary horticultural standards in their amateur pursuits of personal bliss. Included in Maverick Gardeners are classic “passalong plant” lists, a dollop of how-to, numerous color photographs, and thought-provoking essays on quintessential tools, sharing with others, getting away with wildflowers in suburbia, and organizing a plant swap. The centerpiece of this unique gardening journey is the no-holds-barred story of a ten-year cross-cultural collaboration between the horticulturist author and a flamboyant rebellious gardener who called himself Dirt. Through swapping plants and garden lore—and rubbing shoulders with fellow DIGrs—they unraveled their shared humanity. From the practical to the inspiring, Maverick Gardeners is the perfect book for those nonconformist souls who see no sense in trying to fit in and follow the footpaths of others.

Download or read book A Multisensory Philosophy of Perception written by Casey O'Callaghan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of the time people perceive using multiple senses. Out walking, we see colors and motion, hear chatter and footsteps, smell petrichor after rain, feel a breeze or the brush of a shoulder. We use our senses together to navigate and learn about the world. In spite of this, scientists and philosophers alike have merely focused on one sense at a time. Nearly every theory of perception is unisensory. This book instead offers a revisionist multisensory philosophy of perception. Casey O'Callaghan considers how our senses work together, in contrast with how they work separately and independently, and how one sense can impact another, leading to surprising perceptual illusions. The joint use of multiple senses, he argues, enables novel forms of perception and experience, such as multisensory rhythms, motions, and flavors that enrich aesthetic experiences of music, dance, and gustatory pleasure.

Download or read book Dr Eleanor s Book of Common Ants written by Eleanor Spicer Rice and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-08-03 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this witty, accessible, and beautifully illustrated guide, Eleanor Spicer Rice, Alex Wild, and Rob Dunn metamorphose creepy-crawly revulsion into myrmecological wonder. Dr. Eleanor?s Book of Common Ants provides an eye-opening entomological overview of the natural history of species most noted by project participants. Exploring species from the spreading red imported fire ant to the pavement ant, and featuring Wild?s stunning photography, this guide will be a tremendous resource for teachers, students, and scientists alike. But more than this, it will transform the way we perceive the environment around us by deepening our understanding of its littlest inhabitants, inspiring everyone to find their inner naturalist, get outside, and crawl across the dirt?magnifying glass in hand.