Download or read book Heat written by Bill Streever and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An adventurous ride through the most blisteringly hot regions of science, history, and culture. Melting glaciers, warming oceans, droughts-it's clear that today's world is getting hotter. But while we know the agony of a sunburn or the comfort of our winter heaters, do we really understand heat? A bestselling scientist and nature writer who goes to any extreme to uncover the answers, Bill Streever sets off to find out what heat really means. Let him be your guide and you'll firewalk across hot coals and sweat it out in Death Valley, experience intense fever and fire, learn about the invention of matches and the chemistry of cooking, drink crude oil, and explore thermonuclear weapons and the hottest moment of all time-the big bang. Written in Streever's signature spare and refreshing prose, Heat is an adventurous personal narrative that leaves readers with a new vision of an everyday experience-how heat works, its history, and its relationship to daily life.

Download or read book Botanical Features of North American Deserts written by Daniel Trembly MacDougal and published by . This book was released on 1908 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Race to the Bottom of Crazy written by Richard Grant and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2024-09-17 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling author of Dispatches from Pluto and The Deepest South of All turns his sharp wit and observational powers on the epicenter of America’s most divisive issues: Arizona. When Richard Grant and his wife moved with their four-year-old daughter back to Tucson, Arizona, where the couple first met, he expected to easily rekindle his love of the region. Instead, he found a housing market gone haywire, rampant election conspiracies, and right-wing political violence alarmingly close to his home and family. Undocumented immigration was surging, and the state was also on the front lines of climate change, breaking heat and drought records, and running out of long-term water supplies. Under these circumstances, Grant wondered how he might raise a happy, well-adjusted child who believes in the future. Yet these concerns weren’t keeping people away: Arizona was simultaneously experiencing some of the nation’s highest population growth. In A Race to the Bottom of Crazy, Grant mixes memoir, research, and reporting in a quest to understand what makes Arizona such a confounding and irresistible place. He visits the world’s largest machine-gun shoot; takes a sunset boat cruise with a US Congressman and a group of far-right patriots; rides through the desert with a Border Patrol agent; and goes camping with his family in breathtaking mountain ranges that rise out of the desert like islands in the sky. Interspersed with these adventures are recollections of his previous stint in the state, including his friendship with cult writer Charles Bowden and years living off the grid with smugglers, dope farmers, and outlaws on the Mexican border. Ultimately, Grant arrives at the conclusion that Arizona has always been a scattershot improvisation, with bizarre and extreme behavior in its DNA. This book is an entertaining, illuminating, and essential guide to understanding modern America at its most overheated.

Download or read book Civil War Wests written by Adam Arenson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2015-03-07 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative study presents a new, integrated view of the Civil War and Reconstruction and the history of the western United States. Award-winning historians such as Steven Hahn, Martha Sandweiss, William Deverell, Virginia Scharff, and Stephen Kantrowitz offer original essays on lives, choices, and legacies in the American West, discussing the consequences for American Indian nations, the link between Reconstruction and suffrage movements, and cross-border interactions with Canada and Mexico. In the West, Civil War battlefields and Civil War politics engaged a wide range of ethnic and racial distinctions, raising questions that would arise only later in places farther east. Histories of Reconstruction in the South ignore the connections to previous occupation efforts and citizenship debates in the West. The stories contained in this volume complicate our understanding of the paths from slavery to freedom for white as well as non-white Americans. By placing the histories of the American West and the Civil War and Reconstruction period within one sustained conversation, this volume expands the limits of both by emphasizing how struggles over land, labor, sovereignty, and citizenship shaped the U.S. nation-state in this tumultuous era. This volume highlights significant moments and common concerns of this continuous conflict, as it stretched across the continent and throughout the nineteenth century. Publishing on the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, this collection brings eminent historians into conversation, looking at the Civil War from several Western perspectives, and delivers a refreshingly disorienting view intended for scholars, general readers, and students. Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.

Download or read book Dark Revelations The Role Playing Game Monster Manual written by Chris Constantin and published by Chris Constantin. This book was released on 2014-12-07 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dark Revelations - The Role Playing Game - Monster Manual & Book of Danger The Hodgepocalypse is not a safe place to be and this book tells you why. Almost 300 monsters to use with your adventures.

Download or read book Geographical Review written by Isaiah Bowman and published by . This book was released on 1916 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Physiological Reviews written by and published by . This book was released on 1922 with total page 652 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Arid Zones written by Hilton Kramer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hot and temperate deserts and their marginal steppe lands comprise one-third of the land surface of the world and are an increasingly critical area for the economic wellbeing of world populations. The remarkable mechanisms of floral, faunal, and human adaptation to the distinct and difficult environment of these arid zones, as well as the potential of modern technology for facilitating adaptation, are described and explained by Walton in the light of our most recent knowledge of the phenomena and processes involved.Beginning with a clarification of the definitions of arid and semi-arid regions and with the delineation of techniques for measuring the degree of aridity in these areas, the author shows that there is wide variation among the arid zones in landscape and climate and that there are numerous local and microclimates within any single arid region. The life cycles of the plants and animals of the arid zones are described and the water resources, including problems of salinity, mineral contamination, and the construction of reservoirs, are examined. Extensive treatment is given to potential agricultural adaptations and to pastoralism as the most widespread response to dry land. A final chapter summarizes attempts at adaptation to prevailing drought and discusses the kinds of future development that the author deems most likely in arid zones.Throughout the book emphasis is placed on specific, detailed analysis, with adequate tables and formulas for in-depth understanding of particular aspects of aridity. Examples from both Old and New Worlds are used to demonstrate the spheres in which progress is being made and to show the mistakes in past and present land use in arid areas. An essential supplement for courses in physical geography, the book will be useful in many area studies and in studies of economic development.

Download or read book Killing the Hidden Waters written by Charles Bowden and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2003-11 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the introduction to the new edition: “I’ll tell you where I went wrong. The faucet in the kitchen always becomes the reality we believe, and the periodic droughts, one of which for much of the nineties savaged the West, remain a fantasy. This happens each and every day as the water roars from the faucet and the skies remain dangerously blue.” —Charles Bowden In the quarter-century since his first book, Killing the Hidden Waters, was published in 1977, Charles Bowden has become one of the premier writers on the American environment, rousing a generation of readers to both the wonder and the tragedy of humanity’s relationship with the land. Revisiting his earliest work with a new introduction, “What I Learned Watching the Wells Go Down,” Bowden looks back at his first effort to awaken people to the costs and limits of using natural resources through a simple and obvious example—water. He drives home the point that years of droughts, rationing, and even water wars have done nothing to slake the insatiable consumption of water in the American West. Even more timely now than in 1977, Killing the Hidden Waters remains, in Edward Abbey’s words, “the best all-around summary I’ve read yet, anywhere, of how our greed-driven, ever-expanding urban-industrial empire is consuming, wasting, poisoning, and destroying not only the resource basis of its own existence, but also the vital, sustaining basis of life everywhere.”

Download or read book Sunshot written by and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Devil’s Highway crosses a stretch of borderland desert in northern Mexico where many immigrants have traveled—and too many have died. It is a despoblado where desperate people defend secret places. But it is also known as El Gran Desierto—a place where stately saguaros stand near aromatic elephant trees, where sand dunes caress the edges of jagged granite mountains, where one can watch bighorn sheep in the morning and whales in the afternoon. Over the years, desert rat Bill Broyles has ventured repeatedly into this sunshot landscape, slogged across its salt flats and sand dunes, and defied its deadly heat. This book chronicles his years of exploration, a vivid and personal introduction to a thorny but ultimately enchanting place that manages to endear itself over time, if it doesn’t kill you first. Michael Berman’s stark black-and-white photographs capture the desolate beauty of the desert while conveying a sense of Broyles’ adventures. Gleaned from more than 4,000 images shot with a large-format camera, these exquisite photographs translate the desert’s formidable monotone into finely tuned studies of light and represent some of the best photos ever taken of this mysterious region. El Gran Desierto is a grand desert indeed, with beauty, spirit, and mystery rivaling any place on Earth, and anyone captivated by the earlier explorations of Lumholtz, Ives, or Hornaday—or by Edward Abbey’s love of desert places—will revel in these modern-day adventures. Sunshot defies the stereotype of a punishing wilderness to show how even the most perilous desert can be alluring if approached with knowledge and respect.

Download or read book Time in the Wilderness written by Tim McNeese and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-12 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nebraska Book Award, Biography Honor Most Americans familiar with General John J. "Black Jack" Pershing know him as the commander of American Expeditionary Forces in Europe during the latter days of World War I. But Pershing was in his late fifties by then. Pershing's military career began in 1886, with his graduation from West Point and his first assignments in the American West as a horsebound cavalry officer during the final days of Apache resistance in the Southwest, where Arizona and New Mexico still represented a frontier of blue-clad soldiers, Native Americans, cowboys, rustlers, and miners. But the Southwest was just the beginning of Pershing's West. He would see assignments over the years in the Dakotas, during the Ghost Dance uprising and the battle of Wounded Knee; a posting at Montana's Fort Assiniboine; and, following his years in Asia, a return to the West with a posting at the Presidio in San Francisco and a prolonged assignment on the Mexican-American border in El Paso, which led to his command of the Punitive Expedition, tasked with riding deep into Northern Mexico to capture the pistolero Pancho Villa. During those thirty years from West Point to the Western Front, Pershing had a colorful and varied military career, including action during the Spanish-American War and lengthy service in the Philippines. Both were new versions of the American frontier abroad, even as the frontier days of the American West were closing. All of Pershing's experiences in the American West prepared him for his ultimate assignment as the top American commander during the Great War. If the American frontier and, more broadly, the American West provided a cauldron in which Americans tested themselves during the nineteenth century, they did the same for John Pershing. His story was a historical Western.

Download or read book The Three Cornered War written by Megan Kate Nelson and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History A dramatic, riveting, and “fresh look at a region typically obscured in accounts of the Civil War. American history buffs will relish this entertaining and eye-opening portrait” (Publishers Weekly). Megan Kate Nelson “expands our understanding of how the Civil War affected Indigenous peoples and helped to shape the nation” (Library Journal, starred review), reframing the era as one of national conflict—involving not just the North and South, but also the West. Against the backdrop of this larger series of battles, Nelson introduces nine individuals: John R. Baylor, a Texas legislator who established the Confederate Territory of Arizona; Louisa Hawkins Canby, a Union Army wife who nursed Confederate soldiers back to health in Santa Fe; James Carleton, a professional soldier who engineered campaigns against Navajos and Apaches; Kit Carson, a famous frontiersman who led a regiment of volunteers against the Texans, Navajos, Kiowas, and Comanches; Juanita, a Navajo weaver who resisted Union campaigns against her people; Bill Davidson, a soldier who fought in all of the Confederacy’s major battles in New Mexico; Alonzo Ickis, an Iowa-born gold miner who fought on the side of the Union; John Clark, a friend of Abraham Lincoln’s who embraced the Republican vision for the West as New Mexico’s surveyor-general; and Mangas Coloradas, a revered Chiricahua Apache chief who worked to expand Apache territory in Arizona. As we learn how these nine charismatic individuals fought for self-determination and control of the region, we also see the importance of individual actions in the midst of a larger military conflict. Based on letters and diaries, military records and oral histories, and photographs and maps from the time, “this history of invasions, battles, and forced migration shapes the United States to this day—and has never been told so well” (Pulitzer Prize–winning author T.J. Stiles).

Download or read book Pathophysiology of Hypertension in Blacks written by John C.S. Fray and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-05-27 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Overall, American blacks have twice the rate of high blood pressure of American whites and five to seven times the rate of severe hypertension. As a result, American blacks have a higher incidence of stroke (50%), heart disease (30%), and kidney disease (50%). Not only are blacks more likely to develop hypertension, but the disorder develops earlier, is often more severe, and is more likely to be fatal at an earlier age. While lack of early and aggressive treatment contributes to the problem, research has shown that physiological and environmental factors play an important role. Pathophysiology of Hypertension in Blacks examines much of the research that has been done to explain the pathogenesis of hypertension among black Americans. The book is divided into four sections. The first section considers genetic mechanisms of the disease. Increased sensitivity to salt, a common feature among both normotensive and hypertensive blacks, may have developed during the slave trade and slavery as a physiological adaptation to prevent death from excessive loss of salt and water; survival favored those most able to conserve salt, an ability which predisposes black Americans today to hypertension. During childhood, this enhanced salt-sensitivity may be complicated by insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia. The second section examines the role of social, cultural, psychosocial, and socioeconomic factors in the pathogenesis of hypertension. The authors of these chapters present models and explanations that show how these factors may influence physiological variables. The third area of the book deals with the role of urbanization and salt (both in and out of Africa), the role of diet, the role of intracellular ion metabolism, and the increasing significance of renin. The last section of the book summarizes the evidence presented in earlier chapters, and also outlines therapeutic strategies that are effective in controlling blood pressure in hypertensive blacks. The book presents underlying physiological mechanisms which may become impaired and therefore sets the stage for the application of modern molecular biology to the pathophysiology of hypertension in blacks. This book is a volume in the Clinical Physiology Series of the American Physiological Society and is based on a symposium sponsored by the Society at the 1990 meeting of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. It will be valuable to both researchers and clinicians who study and treat hypertension in blacks.

Download or read book America History and Life written by and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 860 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Article abstracts and citations of reviews and dissertations covering the United States and Canada.

Download or read book Your Atomic Self written by Curt Stager and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do atoms have to do with your life? In Your Atomic Self, scientist Curt Stager reveals how they connect you to some of the most amazing things in the universe. You will follow your oxygen atoms through fire and water and from forests to your fingernails. Hydrogen atoms will wriggle into your hair and betray where you live and what you have been drinking. The carbon in your breath will become tree trunks, and the sodium in your tears will link you to long-dead oceans. The nitrogen in your muscles will help to turn the sky blue, the phosphorus in your bones will help to turn the coastal waters of North Carolina green, the calcium in your teeth will crush your food between atoms that were mined by mushrooms, and the iron in your blood will kill microbes as it once killed a star. You will also discover that much of what death must inevitably do to your body is already happening among many of your atoms at this very moment and that, nonetheless, you and everyone else you know will always exist somewhere in the fabric of the universe. You are not only made of atoms; you are atoms, and this book, in essence, is an atomic field guide to yourself.

Download or read book The Arid Zones written by Kenneth Walton and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Ripple Effect written by Alex Prud'homme and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-04-10 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Alex Prud'homme's remarkable work of investigative journalism shows how fresh water is the pressing global issue of the twenty-first century"--