Download or read book The Ragged Edge of the World written by Eugene Linden and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering work of environmental journalism that vividly depicts the people, animals and landscapes on the front lines of change's inexorable march. A species nearing extinction, a tribe losing centuries of knowledge, a tract of forest facing the first incursion of humans-how can we even begin to assess the cost of losing so much of our natural and cultural legacy? For forty years, environmental journalist and author Eugene Linden has traveled to the very sites where tradition, wildlands and the various forces of modernity collide. In The Ragged Edge of the World, he takes us from pygmy forests to the Antarctic to the world's most pristine rainforest in the Congo to tell the story of the harm taking place-and the successful preservation efforts-in the world's last wild places. The Ragged Edge of the World is a critical favorite, and was an editors' pick on Oprah.com.
Download or read book The Ragged Edge of Silence written by John Francis, Ph.D. and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the author of Planetwalker, The Ragged Edge of Silence takes us to another level of appreciating, through silence, the beauty of the planet and our place in it. John Francis's real and compelling prose forms a tapestry of questions and answers woven from interviews, stories, personal experience, science, and the power of silence through history, including practice by Native American, Hindu, and Buddhist cultures. Through their time-honored traditions and his own experience of communicating silently for 17 years, Francis's practical exercises lay the groundwork for the reader to build constructive silence into everyday life: to learn more about oneself, to set goals and accomplish dreams, to build strong relationships, and to appreciate and be a steward of the Earth. With its amazing human interest element and first-person expertise, this book is energizing and universally instructive.
Download or read book From Warm Center to Ragged Edge written by Jon Lauck and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2017-06 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the half-century after the Civil War, intellectuals and politicians assumed the Midwest to be the font and heart of American culture. Despite the persistence of strong currents of midwestern regionalism during the 1920s and 1930s, the region went into eclipse during the post–World War II era. In the apt language of Minnesota’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Midwest slid from being the “warm center” of the republic to its “ragged edge.” This book explains the factors that triggered the demise of the Midwest’s regionalist energies, from anti-midwestern machinations in the literary world and the inability of midwestern writers to break through the cultural politics of the era to the growing dominance of a coastal, urban culture. These developments paved the way for the proliferation of images of the Midwest as flyover country, the Rust Belt, a staid and decaying region. Yet Lauck urges readers to recognize persisting and evolving forms of midwestern identity and to resist the forces that squelch the nation’s interior voices.
Download or read book The Ragged Edge written by Michael Zacchea and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2017-04-01 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deployed to Iraq in March 2004 after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, US Marine Michael Zacchea thought he had landed a plum assignment. His team's mission was to build, train, and lead in combat the first Iraqi Army battalion trained by the US military. Quickly, he realized he was faced with a nearly impossible task. With just two weeks' training based on outdated and irrelevant materials, no language instruction, and few cultural tips for interacting with his battalion of Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Yazidis, and others, Zacchea arrived at his base in Kirkush to learn his recruits would need beds, boots, uniforms, and equipment. His Iraqi officer counterparts spoke little English. He had little time to transform his troops—mostly poor, uneducated farmers—into a cohesive rifle battalion that would fight a new insurgency erupting across Iraq. In order to stand up a fighting battalion, Zacchea knew, he would have to understand his men. Unlike other combat Marines in Iraq at the time, he immersed himself in Iraq's culture: learning its languages, eating its foods, observing its traditions—even being inducted into one of its Sunni tribes. A constant source of both pride and frustration, the Iraqi Army Fifth Battalion went on to fight bravely at the Battle of Fallujah against the forces that would eventually form ISIS. The Ragged Edge is Zacchea's deeply personal and powerful account of hopeful determination, of brotherhood and betrayal, and of cultural ignorance and misunderstanding. It sheds light on the dangerous pitfalls of training foreign troops to fight murderous insurgents and terrorists, precisely when such wartime collaboration is happening more than at any other time in US history.
Download or read book Living on the Ragged Edge written by Charles R. Swindoll and published by Thomas Nelson. This book was released on 1990-04-19 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book for people living in the trenches--for those who are searching for a deeper sense of satisfaction from the daily grind of being alive in the l990sWord to laypeople who feel the call of the Great Commission upon their lives.ess, a better friend.
Download or read book Pluto and Charon written by Alan Stern and published by Wiley-VCH. This book was released on 1998 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rave reviews for Pluto and Charon: Ice Worlds on the Ragged Edge of the Solar System The story of the quest to understand Pluto and the resulting transformation of our concept of the diminutive planet from that of solar-system misfit to king of the Kuiper Belt is told in this book by Alan Stern and Jacqueline Mitton. Stern, a Plutophile to the core, is one of the most energetic, talented, and savvy planetary astronomers in the business today. Mitton, trained as an astronomer, is an experienced writer and editor of scientific books for nonscientists. Together they have created an immensely informative book . . . Written in an engaging and informal style, Pluto and Charon takes the reader step by step from the discovery of the ninth planet in 1930 to the current understanding of Pluto and its moon, Charon.-Sky & Telescope More than a book summarizing what we know about [the] planet, [Pluto and Charon is] about how far and how fast astronomical technology has come since 1965 . . . Stern and Mitton use the narrative of Pluto research to explain in comfortable, everyday language how such work is done . . . One of the nice touches in the book is that Stern and Mitton tell us something about each astronomer.-Astronomy Pluto and Charon presents the exploration of the ninth planet-written as a vivid historical account-for anyone with an interest in science and astronomy . . . the authors describe in simple language the methods researchers use to explore the universe and the way ever-improving instrumentation helps their knowledge advance.-Physics Today
Download or read book At the Ragged Edge written by A. J. Muntz and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2013-04-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the Ragged Edge chronicles the world's fastest boats and among the most extraordinary of sports spectacles. The focus is on the lives of two of the sport's most famous competitors: Gar Wood was a mechanical genius and a perfectionist. A self-made millionaire who once held more patents than any other living American, he devoted his considerable fortune and skills to becoming the world's greatest speedboat driver. Whether he was fighting off the challenges of racers from other nations, setting speed records, or racing a train down the Hudson River as a publicity stunt, Gar Wood always managed to create a good story for the press and, in the process, became a phenomenon. He was brash, had a vivid imagination and, through his many exploits, became the first to cast national attention on the sport of boatracing. Bill Muncey was a showman and a strategist. At once both cocky and self-effacing, he understood marketing and competed at a time when the ability to represent the sponsor was nearly as important as the ability to push one's foot to the throttle. But, he was skilled on the racecourse, too. He knew how to get the best from his equipment and, most maddening to those he raced against, had the uncanny ability to get into the heads of his fellow competitors and take appropriate advantage. Driving boats capable of traveling the length of a football field in one second, without so much as a seat belt to hold him into his open cockpit, he also knew the sport's danger, the tragedy of losing friends, and the pain of his own harrowing accidents. Along the way, you'll also meet Chris Smith and Ted Jones, two designers and boat builders who would revolutionize the sport; Henry Segrave, one of England's most decorated racers; and Bernie Little, a brash millionaire who spared no expense to have the fastest boat possible. Together, these characters, and many more, tell the fascinating story of hydroplane racing's first one hundred years.
Download or read book Badluck Way written by Bryce Andrews and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Much more than a coming-of-age story, Badluck Way is an important meditation on what it means to share space and breathe the same air as truly wild animals, and the necessary damage that can occur when boundaries are crossed” (Tom Groneberg, author of The Secret Life of Cowboys). In this gripping memoir of a young man, a wolf, their parallel lives and ultimate collision, Bryce Andrews describes life on the remote, windswept Sun Ranch in southwest Montana. The Sun’s twenty thousand acres of rangeland occupy a still-wild corner of southwest Montana—a high valley surrounded by mountain ranges and steep creeks with portentous names like Grizzly and Bad Luck. Just over the border from Yellowstone National Park, the Sun holds giant herds of cattle and elk amid many predators—bears, mountain lions, and wolves. In lyrical, haunting language, Andrews recounts marathon days and nights of building fences, riding, roping, and otherwise learning the hard business of caring for cattle, an initiation that changes him from an idealistic city kid into a skilled ranch hand. But when wolves suddenly begin killing the ranch’s cattle, Andrews has to shoulder a rifle, chase the pack, and do what he’d hoped he would never have to do. Called “an elegant memoir” by the Great Falls Tribune, Badluck Way is about transformation and complications, about living with dirty hands every day. It is about the hard choices that wake us at night and take a lifetime to reconcile. Above all, Badluck Way celebrates the breathtaking beauty of wilderness and the satisfaction of hard work on some of the harshest, most beautiful land in the world.
Download or read book Living on the Ragged Edge written by Charles R. Swindoll and published by W Publishing Group. This book was released on 1985-10 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is an intimate glimpse into Solomon's ancient journal, Ecclesiastes, in which the young king's desperate quest for satisfaction-in work, in sexual conquest, in all the trappings afforded by his fabulous wealth-was as futile as trying to "catch the wind." For those struggling with the anxieties and frustrations of our modern era, the good news is that you can find perspective and joy amid the struggle.
Download or read book Truth s Ragged Edge written by Philip F. Gura and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-04-09 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed cultural historian Philip F. Gura comes Truth's Ragged Edge, a comprehensive and original history of the American novel's first century. Grounded in Gura's extensive consideration of the diverse range of important early novels, not just those that remain widely read today, this book recovers many long-neglected but influential writers—such as the escaped slave Harriet Jacobs, the free black Philadelphian Frank J. Webb, and the irrepressible John Neal—to paint a complete and authoritative portrait of the era. Gura also gives us the key to understanding what sets the early novel apart, arguing that it is distinguished by its roots in "the fundamental religiosity of American life." Our nation's pioneering novelists, it turns out, wrote less in the service of art than of morality. This history begins with a series of firsts: the very first American novel, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, published in 1789; the first bestsellers, Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, novels that were, like Brown's, cautionary tales of seduction and betrayal; and the first native genre, religious tracts, which were parables intended to instruct the Christian reader. Gura shows that the novel did not leave behind its proselytizing purpose, even as it evolved. We see Catharine Maria Sedgwick in the 1820s conceiving of A New-England Tale as a critique of Puritanism's harsh strictures, as well as novelists pushing secular causes: George Lippard's The Quaker City, from 1844, was a dark warning about growing social inequality. In the next decade certain writers—Hawthorne and Melville most famously—began to depict interiority and doubt, and in doing so nurtured a broader cultural shift, from social concern to individualism, from faith in a distant god to faith in the self. Rich in subplots and detail, Gura's narrative includes enlightening discussions of the technologies that modernized publishing and allowed for the printing of novels on a mass scale, and of the lively cultural journals and literary salons of early nineteenth-century New York and Boston. A book for the reader of history no less than the reader of fiction, Truth's Ragged Edge—the title drawn from a phrase in Melville, about the ambiguity of truth—is an indispensable guide to the fascinating, unexpected origins of the American novel.
Download or read book To the Edge of the World written by Michele Torrey and published by Laurel Leaf. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ORPHANED BY THE plague and penniless, Mateo must find his way in the world. By chance he is made a cabin boy on the celebrated voyage of Captain-General Ferdinand Magellan. The destination is secret, but the crew whispers that Magellan will be the first to sail east to the Spice Islands by going west—and everyone shall return with untold riches. At sea, Mateo discovers the meaning of friendship, loyalty, and hard work, as well as the delight of first love. But when the ocean rages and brother turns against brother, both Mateo and Magellan are in danger—and it’s not clear if anyone will survive. . . . “Torrey deftly maintains the taut thread of adventure that, along with the cast of memorable characters, keep the pages turning.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred “This deserves to be in the hands of every reader who loves history and adventure.”—Kirkus Reviews
Download or read book The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists written by Robert Tressell and published by . This book was released on 1921 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Running to the Edge written by Matthew Futterman and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of visionary American running coach Bob Larsen's mismatched team of elite California runners who would win championships and Olympic glory in a decades-long pursuit of "the epic run." In the dusty hills above San Diego, Bob Larsen became America's greatest running coach. Running to the Edge is a riveting account of Larsen's journey, and his quest to discover the unorthodox training secrets that would lead American runners to breakthroughs never imagined. Futterman interweaves the dramatic stories of Larsen's runners with a fascinating discourse on the science behind human running, as well as a personal running narrative that follows Futterman's own checkered love-affair with the sport. The result is a narrative that will speak to every runner, a story of Larsen's triumphs--from high school cross-country meets to the founding of the cult-favorite, 70's running group, the Jamul Toads; from his long tenure as head coach at UCLA to the secret training regimen of world champion athletes like Larsen's protégé, Meb Keflezighi. Running to the Edge is a page-turner . . . a relentless crusade to run faster, farther.
Download or read book To the Bright Edge of the World written by Eowyn Ivey and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2016-08-02 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in the Alaskan landscape that she brought to stunningly vivid life in THE SNOW CHILD (a Sunday Times bestseller, Richard and Judy pick and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), Eowyn Ivey's TO THE BRIGHT EDGE OF THE WORLD is a breathtaking story of discovery set at the end of the nineteenth century, sure to appeal to fans of A PLACE CALLED WINTER. *NOMINATED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2017* 'A clever, ambitious novel' The Sunday Times 'Persuasive and vivid... Breathtaking' Guardian Winter 1885. Lieutenant Colonel Allen Forrester accepts the mission of a lifetime, to navigate Alaska's Wolverine River. It is a journey that promises to open up a land shrouded in mystery, but there's no telling what awaits Allen and his small band of men. Allen leaves behind his young wife, Sophie, newly pregnant with the child he had never expected to have. Sophie would have loved nothing more than to carve a path through the wilderness alongside Allen - what she does not anticipate is that their year apart will demand every ounce of courage of her that it does of her husband.
Download or read book On the Ragged Edge of the World written by Jamie Craig and published by JMS Books LLC. This book was released on 2019-10-30 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argenti agent Darren Sumner spent fifteen years hunting werewolves, but one night of betrayal sent him from his family of assassins into the arms of werewolf Aden Richter. Neither can deny their passion nor their hunger for the other, but as Darren tries to find his place in this new world, he wonders whether desire can be enough. Rumors of an upcoming power struggle between the packs in Washington, DC, bring the question of Darren's role to the forefront. Is he Aden's partner and a leader of the pack? Or is he nothing more than Aden's boytoy, placed outside his family? Darren struggles to prove himself as the tensions between the packs mount and Aden's ex-lover puts a plan of vengeance into action.
Download or read book To The Blight written by Robert Jordan and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2002-01-07 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An American Library Association “Best Books for Young Adults” A VOYA “Best Books for Young Adults” “Jordan has come to dominate the world that Tolkien began to reveal.” —The New York Times Pursued by Trollocs and Myrddraal, Rand and his friends find refuge in the deserted city of Shadar Logoth. But their wandering—and the many dangers they face—are far from over. For from the lips of a dying Aiel girl they learn that the Dark One means to blind the Eye of the World. Having barely escaped capture and death, Rand finds himself face to face with Aginor: a wielder of the One Power and an ally of the Dark One. In the battle that follows, Rand will discover his true identity...and destiny. “The most ambitious American fantasy saga [may] also be the finest. Rich in detail and his plot is rich in incident. Impressive work, and highly recommended.”—Booklist “Recalls the work of Tolkien.”—Publishers Weekly “This richly detailed fantasy presents fully realized, complex adventure. Recommended.”—Library Journal “The definitive American fantasy saga.” —Chicago Sun-Times
Download or read book The Wild Edge of Sorrow written by Francis Weller and published by North Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and be stretched large by them. As seen on All There Is with Anderson Cooper Noted psychotherapist Francis Weller provides an essential guide for navigating the deep waters of sorrow and loss in this lyrical yet practical handbook for mastering the art of grieving. Describing how Western patterns of amnesia and anesthesia affect our capacity to cope with personal and collective sorrows, Weller reveals the new vitality we may encounter when we welcome, rather than fear, the pain of loss. Through moving personal stories, poetry, and insightful reflections he leads us into the central energy of sorrow, and to the profound healing and heightened communion with each other and our planet that reside alongside it. The Wild Edge of Sorrow explains that grief has always been communal and illustrates how we need the healing touch of others, an atmosphere of compassion, and the comfort of ritual in order to fully metabolize our grief. Weller describes how we often hide our pain from the world, wrapping it in a secret mantle of shame. This causes sorrow to linger unexpressed in our bodies, weighing us down and pulling us into the territory of depression and death. We have come to fear grief and feel too alone to face an encounter with the powerful energies of sorrow. Those who work with people in grief, who have experienced the loss of a loved one, who mourn the ongoing destruction of our planet, or who suffer the accumulated traumas of a lifetime will appreciate the discussion of obstacles to successful grief work such as privatized pain, lack of communal rituals, a pervasive feeling of fear, and a culturally restrictive range of emotion. Weller highlights the intimate bond between grief and gratitude, sorrow and intimacy. In addition to showing us that the greatest gifts are often hidden in the things we avoid, he offers powerful tools and rituals and a list of resources to help us transform grief into a force that allows us to live and love more fully.
