Download or read book The Nature of the Beasts written by Ian Jared Miller and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is widely known that such Western institutions as the museum, the university, and the penitentiary shaped Japan’s emergence as a modern nation-state. Less commonly recognized is the role played by the distinctly hybrid institution—at once museum, laboratory, and prison—of the zoological garden. In this eye-opening study of Japan’s first modern zoo, Tokyo’s Ueno Imperial Zoological Gardens, opened in 1882, Ian Jared Miller offers a refreshingly unconventional narrative of Japan’s rapid modernization and changing relationship with the natural world. As the first zoological garden in the world not built under the sway of a Western imperial regime, the Ueno Zoo served not only as a staple attraction in the nation’s capital—an institutional marker of national accomplishment—but also as a site for the propagation of a new “natural” order that was scientifically verifiable and evolutionarily foreordained. As the Japanese empire grew, Ueno became one of the primary sites of imperialist spectacle, a microcosm of the empire that could be traveled in the course of a single day. The meaning of the zoo would change over the course of Imperial Japan’s unraveling and subsequent Allied occupation. Today it remains one of Japan’s most frequently visited places. But instead of empire in its classic political sense, it now bespeaks the ambivalent dominion of the human species over the natural environment, harkening back to its imperial roots even as it asks us to question our exploitation of the planet’s resources.
Download or read book The Nature of the Beast written by David Anderson and published by . This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of what we know about emotions is unreliable. It's gathered either by asking people about their feelings, or by putting them in an MRI and studying how they react to pretend situations, to which they are unlikely to respond as they would in real life. If we're ever going to understand how emotions work, we need a better way of studying them. In The Nature of the Beast, pioneering neuroscientist David J. Anderson reveals how he has begun to solve this problem. He and his team have figured out how to study the brain activity of animals as they navigate real-life scenarios, like foraging, fleeing a predator, or competing for a mate. His research has revolutionized what we know about animal fear and aggression. Here, he explains what his research can teach us about human behavior, offering new insights into why isolation makes us more aggressive, how sex and violence connect, and whether there's a link between aggression and mental illness. Part How Emotions Are Made, part Mama's Last Hug, The Nature of the Beast reconceptualizes how the brain regulates emotions--and explains why we have them at all.
Download or read book Fantastic Beasts the Wonder of Nature written by Natural History Museum and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The magical world of J.K. Rowling's Fantastic Beasts meets the real-world experts of the world-famous Natural History Museum, in an awe-inspiring exhibition devoted to the wonders of nature, science and adventure - and their fictional counterparts from Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts. Fantastic Beasts: The Wonder of Nature is the official book inspired by the spectacular exhibition, shining a light on beasts in all their fantastic forms. Taking inspiration from Newt Scamander, this gorgeous colour gift book invites the whole family to explore the inspiration and links between the magic of J.K. Rowling's creatures and the astonishing real-world wildlife that has roamed the earth, seas and skies of our planet throughout history. Prepare to pore over ancient maps of sea monsters; naturalists' field notes crammed with intricately painted chameleons and caterpillars; and dinosaurs such as the mighty Dracorex Hogwartsia, the 'Dragon King of Hogwarts'. The Natural History Museum boasts one of the finest collections in the world - some 80 million animals, plants, minerals, rocks and fossils. These scientific specimens sit beside breathtaking artwork of J.K. Rowling's magical creatures; fascinating props and artefacts from the Fantastic Beasts and Harry Potter films; and stunning wildlife photography. Readers are invited to meet unicorns and merpeople, Nifflers and Bowtruckles, pythons and tigers, and observe their amazing and endlessly surprising behaviours. Each chapter begins with an original essay by a well-known writer, environmental expert or natural history scientist, offering their own unique insight into the exhibition. Uplifting and absorbing, this is a book that evokes the true magic and majesty of nature in all its myriad forms. Fantastic Beasts: The Wonder of Nature inspires us to protect our precious planet - a must-have for Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts fans of all ages, budding explorers and readers who aren't able to visit the exhibition in person.
Download or read book The Nature of the Beast written by Louise Penny and published by Minotaur Books. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nature of the Beast is a New York Times bestselling Chief Inspector Gamache novel from Louise Penny. Hardly a day goes by when nine year old Laurent Lepage doesn't cry wolf. From alien invasions, to walking trees, to winged beasts in the woods, to dinosaurs spotted in the village of Three Pines, his tales are so extraordinary no one can possibly believe him. Including Armand and Reine-Marie Gamache, who now live in the little Quebec village. But when the boy disappears, the villagers are faced with the possibility that one of his tall tales might have been true. And so begins a frantic search for the boy and the truth. What they uncover deep in the forest sets off a sequence of events that leads to murder, leads to an old crime, leads to an old betrayal. Leads right to the door of an old poet. And now it is now, writes Ruth Zardo. And the dark thing is here. A monster once visited Three Pines. And put down deep roots. And now, Ruth knows, it is back. Armand Gamache, the former head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec, must face the possibility that, in not believing the boy, he himself played a terrible part in what happens next.
Download or read book Beast and Man written by Mary Midgley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-03 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophers have traditionally concentrated on the qualities that make human beings different from other species. In Beast and Man Mary Midgley, one of our foremost intellectuals, stresses continuities. What makes people tick? Largely, she asserts, the same things as animals. She tells us humans are rather more like other animals than we previously allowed ourselves to believe, and reminds us just how primitive we are in comparison to the sophistication of many animals. A veritable classic for our age, Beast and Man has helped change the way we think about ourselves and the world in which we live.
Download or read book Beloved Beasts Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction written by Michelle Nijhuis and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Sierra Club's 2021 Rachel Carson Award One of Chicago Tribune's Ten Best Books of 2021 Named a Top Ten Best Science Book of 2021 by Booklist and Smithsonian Magazine "At once thoughtful and thought-provoking,” Beloved Beasts tells the story of the modern conservation movement through the lives and ideas of the people who built it, making “a crucial addition to the literature of our troubled time" (Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction). In the late nineteenth century, humans came at long last to a devastating realization: their rapidly industrializing and globalizing societies were driving scores of animal species to extinction. In Beloved Beasts, acclaimed science journalist Michelle Nijhuis traces the history of the movement to protect and conserve other forms of life. From early battles to save charismatic species such as the American bison and bald eagle to today’s global effort to defend life on a larger scale, Nijhuis’s “spirited and engaging” account documents “the changes of heart that changed history” (Dan Cryer, Boston Globe). With “urgency, passion, and wit” (Michael Berry, Christian Science Monitor), she describes the vital role of scientists and activists such as Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson, reveals the origins of vital organizations like the Audubon Society and the World Wildlife Fund, explores current efforts to protect species such as the whooping crane and the black rhinoceros, and confronts the darker side of modern conservation, long shadowed by racism and colonialism. As the destruction of other species continues and the effects of climate change wreak havoc on our world, Beloved Beasts charts the ways conservation is becoming a movement for the protection of all species including our own.
Download or read book Being Animal written by Anna Peterson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-21 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For most people, animals are the most significant aspects of the nonhuman world. They symbolize nature in our imaginations, in popular media and culture, and in campaigns to preserve wilderness, yet scholars habitually treat animals and the environment as mutually exclusive objects of concern. Conducting the first examination of animals' place in popular and scholarly thinking about nature, Anna L. Peterson builds a nature ethic that conceives of nonhuman animals as active subjects who are simultaneously parts of both nature and human society. Peterson explores the tensions between humans and animals, nature and culture, animals and nature, and domesticity and wildness. She uses our intimate connections with companion animals to examine nature more broadly. Companion animals are liminal creatures straddling the boundary between human society and wilderness, revealing much about the mutually constitutive relationships binding humans and nature together. Through her paradigm-shifting reflections, Peterson disrupts the artificial boundaries between two seemingly distinct categories, underscoring their fluid and continuous character.
Download or read book The Bedside Book of Beasts written by Graeme Gibson and published by Nan a Talese. This book was released on 2009 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lavishly illustrated companion to The Bedside Book of Birds explores the relationships between predators and prey, drawing on mythology, nature writings, and other sources to provide coverage of both real and fictional creatures.
Download or read book Savages and Beasts written by Nigel Rothfels and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2008-07-14 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To modern sensibilities, nineteenth-century zoos often seem to be unnatural places where animals led miserable lives in cramped, wrought-iron cages. Today zoo animals, in at least the better zoos, wander in open spaces that resemble natural habitats and are enclosed, not by bars, but by moats, cliffs, and other landscape features. In Savages and Beasts, Nigel Rothfels traces the origins of the modern zoo to the efforts of the German animal entrepreneur Carl Hagenbeck. By the late nineteenth century, Hagenbeck had emerged as the world's undisputed leader in the capture and transport of exotic animals. His business included procuring and exhibiting indigenous peoples in highly profitable spectacles throughout Europe and training exotic animals—humanely, Hagenbeck advertised—for circuses around the world. When in 1907 the Hagenbeck Animal Park opened in a village near Hamburg, Germany, Hagenbeck brought together all his business interests in a revolutionary zoological park. He moved wild animals out of their cages and into "natural landscapes" alongside "primitive" peoples from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the islands of the Pacific. Hagenbeck had invented a new way of imagining captivity: the animals and people on exhibit appeared to be living in the wilds of their native lands. By looking at Hagenbeck's multiple enterprises, Savages and Beasts demonstrates how seemingly enlightened ideas about the role of zoos and the nature of animal captivity developed within the essentially tawdry business of placing exotic creatures on public display. Rothfels provides both fascinating reading and much-needed historical perspective on the nature of our relationship with the animal kingdom.
Download or read book Aleister Crowley written by Colin Wilson and published by Aeon Books. This book was released on 2005-12-31 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poet, Magician, Mountaineer, Polemicist and Pornographer, Aleister Crowley was the most famous, or infamous, name in twentieth century occultism. With his usual flair and style, Colin Wilson brings this complex and enigmatic figure to life and provides an engrossing portrait of the self-styled Great Beast, the man whom the contemporary press dubbed "The Wickedest Man in the World".The popular image of him as, in the words of Francis King, 'an insatiable sexual athlete, a pimp who lived on the immoral earnings of his girl-friends, and a junkie who daily took enough heroin to kill a roomful of people', has a basis in fact; but there were other, less obnoxious and despicable, aspects of this highly original character. Crowley's greatest legacy is his eclectic occult system: his Magick persists, a potent synthesis of Golden Dawn magic, oriental esoteric techniques, sexual magic, and the all-encompassing Law of Thelema with its two fundamental principles, 'Every man and woman is a star' and the notorious 'Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law'.
Download or read book Birds Beasts and Seas written by Jeffrey Yang and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology of poetry that traces the history of poetry's changing relationship to nature, featuring the work of over 140 poets.
Download or read book Book of Beasts written by Elizabeth Morrison and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2019 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A celebration of the visual contributions of the bestiary--one of the most popular types of illuminated books during the Middle Ages--and an exploration of its lasting legacy. Brimming with lively animals both real and fantastic, the bestiary was one of the great illuminated manuscript traditions of the Middle Ages. Encompassing imaginary creatures such as the unicorn, siren, and griffin; exotic beasts including the tiger, elephant, and ape; as well as animals native to Europe like the beaver, dog, and hedgehog, the bestiary is a vibrant testimony to the medieval understanding of animals and their role in the world. So iconic were the stories and images of the bestiary that its beasts essentially escaped from the pages, appearing in a wide variety of manuscripts and other objects, including tapestries, ivories, metalwork, and sculpture. With over 270 color illustrations and contributions by twenty-five leading scholars, this gorgeous volume explores the bestiary and its widespread influence on medieval art and culture as well as on modern and contemporary artists like Pablo Picasso and Damien Hirst. Published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center May 14 to August 18, 2019.
Download or read book History of Four Footed Beasts and Serpents and Insects written by Topsell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-11 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1967. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance written by Ruth Emmie Lang and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Told with brains and heart" —Michelle Gable, New York Times bestselling author of A Paris Apartment "Bristles with charm and curiosity" —Winston Groom, New York Times bestselling author of Forrest Gump "A wholly original and superbly crafted work of art, Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance is a masterpiece of the imagination." —Lori Nelson Spielman, New York Times bestselling author of The Life List and Sweet Forgiveness "Charlotte's Web for grown-ups who, like Weylyn Grey, have their own stories of being different, feared, brave, and loved." —Mo Daviau, author of Every Anxious Wave Ruth Emmie Lang teaches us how to find magic in the ordinary in her magical realism debut Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance. Orphaned, raised by wolves, and the proud owner of a horned pig named Merlin, Weylyn Grey knew he wasn’t like other people. But when he single-handedly stopped that tornado on a stormy Christmas day in Oklahoma, he realized just how different he actually was. As amazing as these powers may appear, they tend to manifest themselves at inopportune times and places, jeopardizing not only his own life, but the life of Mary, the woman he loves. Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance tells the story of Weylyn Grey’s life from the perspectives of the people who knew him, loved him, and even a few who thought he was just plain weird. Although he doesn’t stay in any of their lives for long, he leaves each of them with a story to tell: great storms that evaporate into thin air; fireflies that make phosphorescent honey; a house filled with spider webs and the strange man who inhabits it. There is one story, however, that Weylyn wishes he could change: his own. But first he has to muster enough courage to knock on Mary’s front door.
Download or read book Ask the Beasts Darwin and the God of Love written by Elizabeth A. Johnson and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-01-16 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For millennia plant and animal species have received little sustained attention as subjects of Christian theology and ethics in their own right. Focused on the human dilemma of sin and redemptive grace, theology has considered the doctrine of creation to be mainly an overture to the main drama of human being`s relationship to God. What value does the natural world have within the framework of religious belief? The crisis of biodiversity in our day, when species are going extinct at more than 1,000 times the natural rate, renders this question acutely important. Standard perspectives need to be realigned; theology needs to look out of the window, so to speak as well as in the mirror. Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love leads to the conclusion that love of the natural world is an intrinsic element of faith in God and that far from being an add-on, ecological care is at the centre of moral life.
Download or read book Gorgeous Beasts written by Joan B. Landes and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-06-26 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gorgeous Beasts takes a fresh look at the place of animals in history and art. Refusing the traditional subordination of animals to humans, the essays gathered here examine a rich variety of ways animals contribute to culture: as living things, as scientific specimens, as food, weapons, tropes, and occasions for thought and creativity. History and culture set the terms for this inquiry. As history changes, so do the ways animals participate in culture. Gorgeous Beasts offers a series of discontinuous but probing studies of the forms their participation takes. This collection presents the work of a wide range of scholars, critics, and thinkers from diverse disciplines: philosophy, literature, history, geography, economics, art history, cultural studies, and the visual arts. By approaching animals from such different perspectives, these essays broaden the scope of animal studies to include specialists and nonspecialists alike, inviting readers from all backgrounds to consider the place of animals in history and art. Combining provocative critical insights with arresting visual imagery, Gorgeous Beasts advances a challenging new appreciation of animals as co-inhabitants and co-creators of culture. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Dean Bavington, Ron Broglio, Mark Dion, Erica Fudge, Cecilia Novero, Harriet Ritvo, Nigel Rothfels, Sajay Samuel, and Pierre Serna.
Download or read book Beasts at Bedtime written by Liam Heneghan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] fresh new look at animal tales, often classic, and how they pertain to the present-day and our often fraught relationship to our environment.” —Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach Trilogy Talking lions, philosophical bears, very hungry caterpillars, wise spiders, altruistic trees, companionable moles, urbane elephants: this is the magnificent menagerie that delights our children at bedtime. Within the entertaining pages of many children’s books, however, also lie profound teachings about the natural world that can help children develop an educated and engaged appreciation of the dynamic environment they inhabit. In Beasts at Bedtime, scientist (and father) Liam Heneghan examines the environmental underpinnings of children’s stories. From Beatrix Potter to Harry Potter, Heneghan unearths the universal insights into our inextricable relationship with nature that underlie so many classic children’s stories. Some of the largest environmental challenges in coming years—from climate instability, the extinction crisis, freshwater depletion, and deforestation—are likely to become even more severe as this generation of children grows up. Though today’s young readers will bear the brunt of these environmental calamities, they will also be able to contribute to environmental solutions if prepared properly. And all it takes is an attentive eye: Heneghan shows how the nature curriculum is already embedded in bedtime stories, from the earliest board books like The Rainbow Fish to contemporary young adult classics like The Hunger Games. This book enthralls as it engages. Beasts at Bedtime will help parents, teachers, and guardians extend those cozy times curled up together with a good book into a lifetime of caring for our planet. “Beasts at Bedtime is proof that most kidlit has teachable moments embedded in it.” —Toronto Star
