Download or read book Heaven s Breath written by Lyall Watson and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “comprehensive and fascinating study” of how wind has shaped the world as we know it, affecting all aspects of human and natural life—from geography to political history, plant life to psychology, and biology to philosophy (The Observer) Wind is everywhere and nowhere. Wind is the circulatory system of the earth, and its nervous system, too. Energy and information flow through it. It brings warmth and water, enriches and strips away the soil, aerates the globe. Wind shapes the lives of animals, humans among them. Trade follows the path of the wind, as empire also does. Wind made the difference in wars between the Greeks and Persians, the Mongols and the Japanese. Wind helped to destroy the Spanish Armada. And wind is no less determining of our inner lives: the föhn, mistral, sirocco, Santa Ana, and other “ill winds” of the world are correlated with disease, suicide, and even murder. Heaven’s Breath is an encyclopedic and enchanting book that opens dazzling new perspectives on history, nature, and humanity.
Download or read book Slouching Towards Bethlehem written by Joan Didion and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1990 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A RICH DISPLAY OF SOME OF THE BEST PROSE WRITTEN TODAY IN THE USA.
Download or read book Religion as We Know It An Origin Story written by Jack Miles and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brief, beautiful invitation to the study of religion from a Pulitzer Prize winner. How did our forebears begin to think about religion as a distinct domain, separate from other activities that were once inseparable from it? Starting at the birth of Christianity—a religion inextricably bound to Western thought—Jack Miles reveals how the West’s “common sense” understanding of religion emerged and then changed as insular Europe discovered the rest of the world. In a moving postscript, he shows how this very story continues today in the hearts of individual religious or irreligious men and women.
Download or read book L A Weather written by María Amparo Escandón and published by Flatiron Books. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK • 2022 INTERNATIONAL LATINO BOOK AWARD WINNER FOR FICTION FORECAST: Storm clouds are on the horizon in L.A. Weather, a fun, fast-paced novel of a Mexican American family from the author of the #1 Los Angeles Times bestseller Esperanza’s Box of Saints. “There’s a 100% chance you’ll be paging through this book to uncover the secrets and deception that could potentially burn everything down!”—Reese Witherspoon “This is by far one of the most endearing L.A. novels in recent memory.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) "A lively and ambitious family novel."—New York Times Book Review Oscar, the weather-obsessed patriarch of the Alvarado family, desperately wants a little rain. L.A. is parched, dry as a bone, and he’s harboring a costly secret that distracts him from everything else. His wife, Keila, desperate for a life with a little more intimacy and a little less Weather Channel, feels she has no choice but to end their marriage. Their three daughters—Claudia, a television chef with a hard-hearted attitude; Olivia, a successful architect who suffers from gentrification guilt; and Patricia, a social media wizard who has an uncanny knack for connecting with audiences but not with her lovers—are left questioning everything they know. Each will have to take a critical look at her own relationships and make some tough decisions along the way. With quick wit and humor, María Amparo Escandón follows the Alvarado family as they wrestle with impending evacuations, secrets, deception, and betrayal, and their toughest decision yet: whether to stick together or burn it all down.
Download or read book The Control of Nature written by John McPhee and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on--the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase--"the control of nature"--seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions. For some years, he had been planning a book about places in the world where people have been engaged in all-out battles with nature, about (in the words of the book itself) "any struggle against natural forces--heroic or venal, rash or well advised--when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods." His interest had first been sparked when he went into the Atchafalaya--the largest river swamp in North America--and had learned that virtually all of its waters were metered and rationed by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' project called Old River Control. In the natural cycles of the Mississippi's deltaic plain, the time had come for the Mississippi to change course, to shift its mouth more than a hundred miles and go down the Atchafalaya, one of its distributary branches. The United States could not afford that--for New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and all the industries that lie between would be cut off from river commerce with the rest of the nation. At a place called Old River, the Corps therefore had built a great fortress--part dam, part valve--to restrain the flow of the Atchafalaya and compel the Mississippi to stay where it is. In Iceland, in 1973, an island split open without warning and huge volumes of lava began moving in the direction of a harbor scarcely half a mile away. It was not only Iceland's premier fishing port (accounting for a large percentage of Iceland's export economy) but it was also the only harbor along the nation's southern coast. As the lava threatened to fill the harbor and wipe it out, a physicist named Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson suggested a way to fight against the flowing red rock--initiating an all-out endeavor unique in human history. On the big island of Hawaii, one of the world's two must eruptive hot spots, people are not unmindful of the Icelandic example. McPhee went to Hawaii to talk with them and to walk beside the edges of a molten lake and incandescent rivers. Some of the more expensive real estate in Los Angeles is up against mountains that are rising and disintegrating as rapidly as any in the world. After a complex coincidence of natural events, boulders will flow out of these mountains like fish eggs, mixed with mud, sand, and smaller rocks in a cascading mass known as debris flow. Plucking up trees and cars, bursting through doors and windows, filling up houses to their eaves, debris flows threaten the lives of people living in and near Los Angeles' famous canyons. At extraordinary expense the city has built a hundred and fifty stadium-like basins in a daring effort to catch the debris. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking in his vivid depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those who would attempt to wrest control from her--stubborn, often ingenious, and always arresting characters.
Download or read book Weather Spaces Mobilities and Affects written by Kaya Barry and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book delves into the everyday spaces, diverse mobilities and affective potency of weather. It presents cutting-edge research into the multiplicity of weather phenomena and analyses the lived experiences of humans in conjunction with contemporary issues, notably climate change. The book considers how everyday experiences of weather in the mundane lives of people are linked to broader changes in weather patterns and climate change. Heat, dust, ice, snow, precipitation, sunlight, clouds, tides and fog are states of weather that impact on the ways in which humans become intertwined with landscapes. Our experiences with weather are diverse and ever-changing, and engaging with weather entangles humans with mobilities, materials and landscapes. This book thus explores affective and sensory resonances, drawing upon a variety of theoretical, empirical and creative material to investigate how weather is perceived in different social and cultural contexts. Key themes focus on the mobilities generated by weather, the affective and sensual potency of weather, and the diverse cultural forms and practices that exemplify how weather is historically, geographically and artistically represented. Offering a social and cultural understanding of weather events, this book contributes to a growing literature on weather across various disciplines, including human geography and cultural geography, and will thus appeal to students and scholars of geography, sociology, humanities, cultural studies and the arts.
Download or read book Sex and the Office written by Helen Gurley Brown and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-07-10 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Helen Gurley Brown adds dazzle to dull office days in her follow-up to the phenomenal bestseller Sex and the Single Girl The classic book from 1965 tells what it was really like to be the girl in a Mad Men–style workplace. Sex and the Office became the definitive, comprehensive guide to working life for an entire generation of women. Alongside advice about how to deal with your boss, manage office politics, and make the most of personal and professional opportunities in the office, Helen Gurley Brown also shares stories from her own office days. A classic of its time, this stands as a frank look at how to get ahead, not just through working hard but through playing hard, too.
Download or read book Bluets written by Maggie Nelson and published by Wave Books. This book was released on 2009-10-01 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color . . . A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists. Maggie Nelson is the author of numerous books of poetry and nonfiction, including Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007). She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.
Download or read book Laguna Heat written by T. Jefferson Parker and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-03-03 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Lost Art of Reading written by David L. Ulin and published by Sasquatch Books. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading is a revolutionary act, an act of engagement in a culture that wants us to disengage. In The Lost Art of Reading, David L. Ulin asks a number of timely questions - why is literature important? What does it offer, especially now? Blending commentary with memoir, Ulin addresses the importance of the simple act of reading in an increasingly digital culture. Reading a book, flipping through hard pages, or shuffling them on screen - it doesn't matter. The key is the act of reading, and it's seriousness and depth. Ulin emphasizes the importance of reflection and pause allowed by stopping to read a book, and the accompanying focus required to let the mind run free in a world that is not one's own. Are we willing to risk our collective interest in contemplation, nuanced thinking, and empathy? Far from preaching to the choir, The Lost Art of Reading is a call to arms, or rather, to pages.
Download or read book A Review of the Forest Service Remote Automated Weather Station RAWS Network written by John Zachariassen and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The RAWS network and RAWS data-use systems are closely reviewed and summarized in this report. RAWS is an active program created by the many land-management agencies that share a common need for accurate and timely weather data from remote locations for vital operational and program decisions specific to wildland and prescribed fires. A RAWS measures basic observable weather parameters such as temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, wind direction, and precipitation as well as "fuel stick" temperature. Data from almost 1,900 stations deployed across the conterminous United States, Alaska, and Hawaii are now routinely used to calculate and forecast daily fire danger indices, components, and adjective ratings. Fire business applications include the National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS), fire behavior, and fire use. Findings point to the fact that although the RAWS program works and provides needed weather data in support of fire operations, there are inefficiencies and significant problem areas that require leadership attention at the National level."
Download or read book Organic Gardening for Everyone written by CaliKim and published by Cool Springs Press. This book was released on 2019-12-24 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you want to grow healthy vegetables at home, but have hesitated because it seems too hard and time consuming, Organic Gardening for Everyone is your perfect hands-on guide—an “if I can do it, you can do it” case study that addresses your concerns and gets you started. Loaded with practical advice and step-by-step guidance, Organic Gardening for Everyone takes a very personal and friendly approach to a subject that can be intimidating. It is a first-class primer on organic vegetable gardening, and an inspirational story about how anyone can balance the rigors of gardening with the demands of a modern, family-oriented lifestyle. In 2012, a California mom decided to start an organic vegetable garden. But she went about it in an unusual way: she crowdsourced it by launching a YouTube channel under the name "CaliKim" and asking for help. And then she started planting. As questions came up, she turned to her viewers and subscribers and they replied with answers and advice. As she learned, her garden grew successfully—even in the hot, harsh California climate. Her expertise also grew, and now she answers many more questions than she asks and has become a very accomplished home gardener. And CaliKim has a great story to tell: growing healthy organic vegetables for your family is not difficult, even for today’s time-challenged lifestyles. She provides complete step-by-step information on growing the most popular edibles organically, and also gives sound advice on how to take on the challenges of balancing a hectic lifestyle with successful growing—and how to involve the whole family in the process. You'll be rewarded for your effort every time you place a plate of natural, organic vegetables on the family dinner table knowing exactly what they are, what is in them, and where they came from.
Download or read book Eve s Hollywood written by Eve Babitz and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A legendary love letter to Los Angeles by the city's most charming daughter, complete with portraits of rock stars at Chateau Marmont, surfers in Santa Monica, prostitutes on sunset, and Eve's own beloved cat, Rosie. Journalist, party girl, bookworm, artist, muse: by the time she’d hit thirty, Eve Babitz had played all of these roles. Immortalized as the nude beauty facing down Duchamp and as one of Ed Ruscha’s Five 1965 Girlfriends, Babitz’s first book showed her to be a razor-sharp writer with tales of her own. Eve’s Hollywood is an album of vivid snapshots of Southern California’s haute bohemians, of outrageously beautiful high-school ingenues and enviably tattooed Chicanas, of rock stars sleeping it off at the Chateau Marmont. And though Babitz’s prose might appear careening, she’s in control as she takes us on a ride through an LA of perpetual delight, from a joint serving the perfect taquito, to the corner of La Brea and Sunset where we make eye contact with a roller-skating hooker, to the Watts Towers. This “daughter of the wasteland” is here to show us that her city is no wasteland at all but a glowing landscape of swaying fruit trees and blooming bougainvillea, buffeted by earthquakes and the Santa Ana winds—and every bit as seductive as she is.
Download or read book Who Owns the Wind written by David McDermott Hughes and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The energy transition has begun. To succeed - to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar power - that process must be fair. Otherwise, mounting popular protest against wind farms will prolong carbon pollution and deepen the climate crisis. David Hughes examines that anti-industrial, anti-corporate resistance, drawing insights from a Spanish village surrounded by turbines. In the lives of these neighbours - freighted with centuries of exploitation - clean power and social justice fit together only awkwardly. Proposals for a green economy, the Green New Deal, or Europe's Green Deal require more effort. We must rethink aesthetics, livelihood, property, and, most essentially, the private nature of wind resources. Ultimately, the energy transition will be public and just, or it may not be at all
Download or read book Rediscovering the Golden State written by William A. Selby and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-09-19 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in its fourth edition, Rediscovering the Golden State: California Geography examines this unique state’s incredibly diverse landscapes, and how geography and geographic change influences everything from the state’s natural systems and cycles, to its agriculture and more advanced industries, to human migration, cultures, and urban planning. Exploring California through a geographic lens reveals how the field has evolved to cross traditional boundaries, connect local and global issues, and provide the insights that lead to practical solutions to problems new and old. Challenging the reader to look beyond stereotypes and assumptions, this book encourages active participation in planning the state’s dynamic future. And this project makes teaching and learning about the geography of California more convenient, exciting, and rewarding for instructors and students. Going beyond a scientific analysis of natural features and environmental processes, this book illustrates how social, political, and economic divides can be bridged through the study of geography and the connections it brings to light. From geology, weather and climate, biogeography, and hydrology, we cover the state’s physical geography. And from demography and migration, to cultures and economies, to rural and urban geography, we monitor the state’s human geography pulse and then make the vital connections. California continues to lead the nation in population, economics (5th largest in the world), agriculture, natural and cultural diversity, and a host of other categories. This powerful state has earned this powerful publication. This timely and versatile book will prove useful to Californians in business, education, government, and to concerned citizens and curious readers seeking to learn more about the Golden State.
Download or read book The Los Angeles Almanac 2001 written by Gerhard F. Thornton and published by Given Place Publishing Company. This book was released on 2001-02-01 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Oscar Season written by Mary McNamara and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-05-04 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pinnacle is the place to stay during the Oscars, and this year the pre-Awards crises have reached fever pitch: a very recognizable body is found in the pool, Hollywood's leading man is secretly holed up in the Presidential Suite, and the larger-than-life producer of the Oscars will stop at nothing for higher ratings. A consummate professional, the hotel's PR manager Juliette Greyson must do a careful dance to save the hotel while somehow sparing herself and her famed clientele in the process. But first Juliette must figure out what is real and what is staged? Who is lying and who is acting? And when does murder stop being murder, and start becoming damn good publicity?
