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 Book Was There written by Andrew Piper and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-10-12 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andrew Piper grew up liking books and loving computers. While occasionally burying his nose in books, he was going to computer camp, programming his Radio Shack TRS-80, and playing Pong. His eventual love of reading made him a historian of the book and a connoisseur of print, but as a card-carrying member of the first digital generation—and the father of two digital natives—he understands that we live in electronic times. Book Was There is Piper’s surprising and always entertaining essay on reading in an e-reader world. Much ink has been spilled lamenting or championing the decline of printed books, but Piper shows that the rich history of reading itself offers unexpected clues to what lies in store for books, print or digital. From medieval manuscript books to today’s playable media and interactive urban fictions, Piper explores the manifold ways that physical media have shaped how we read, while also observing his own children as they face the struggles and triumphs of learning to read. In doing so, he uncovers the intimate connections we develop with our reading materials—how we hold them, look at them, share them, play with them, and even where we read them—and shows how reading is interwoven with our experiences in life. Piper reveals that reading’s many identities, past and present, on page and on screen, are the key to helping us understand the kind of reading we care about and how new technologies will—and will not—change old habits. Contending that our experience of reading belies naive generalizations about the future of books, Book Was There is an elegantly argued and thoroughly up-to-date tribute to the endurance of books in our ever-evolving digital world.

Download or read book What We Talk About When We Talk About Books written by Leah Price and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2019-08-20 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reports of the death of reading are greatly exaggerated Do you worry that you've lost patience for anything longer than a tweet? If so, you're not alone. Digital-age pundits warn that as our appetite for books dwindles, so too do the virtues in which printed, bound objects once trained us: the willpower to focus on a sustained argument, the curiosity to look beyond the day's news, the willingness to be alone. The shelves of the world's great libraries, though, tell a more complicated story. Examining the wear and tear on the books that they contain, English professor Leah Price finds scant evidence that a golden age of reading ever existed. From the dawn of mass literacy to the invention of the paperback, most readers already skimmed and multitasked. Print-era doctors even forbade the very same silent absorption now recommended as a cure for electronic addictions. The evidence that books are dying proves even scarcer. In encounters with librarians, booksellers and activists who are reinventing old ways of reading, Price offers fresh hope to bibliophiles and literature lovers alike. Winner of the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, 2020

Download or read book How to Read a Book written by Mortimer J. Adler and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigates the art of reading by examining each aspect of reading, problems encountered, and tells how to combat them.

Download or read book Understanding Music written by N. Alan Clark and published by . This book was released on 2015-12-21 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music moves through time; it is not static. In order to appreciate music wemust remember what sounds happened, and anticipate what sounds might comenext. This book takes you on a journey of music from past to present, from the Middle Ages to the Baroque Period to the 20th century and beyond!

Download or read book My Life with Bob written by Pamela Paul and published by Henry Holt. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For twenty-eight years, Pamela Paul has been keeping a diary that records the books she reads, rather than the life she leads. Or does it? Over time, it's become clear that this Book of Books, or Bob, as she calls him, tells a much bigger story. For Paul, as for many readers, books reflect her inner life--her fantasies and hopes, her dreams and ideas. And her life, in turn, influences which books she chooses, whether for solace or escape, diversion or self-reflection, information or entertainment. My Life with Bob isn't about what's in those books; it's about the relationship between books and readers"--

Download or read book How the Word Is Passed written by Clint Smith and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “important and timely” (Drew Faust, Harvard Magazine) #1 New York Times bestseller examines the legacy of slavery in America—and how both history and memory continue to shape our everyday lives. Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves. It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned-maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers. A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view—whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted. Informed by scholarship and brought to life by the story of people living today, Smith's debut work of nonfiction is a landmark of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country and how it has come to be. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Winner of the Stowe Prize Winner of 2022 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism A New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021

Download or read book Olympics written by Christian Wacker and published by Prestel Publishing. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lavishly illustrated book takes readers into the world of ancient Olympia and the modern Olympic Games. Filled with photographs, drawings, and maps, this book explores the natural environment of the sanctuary and the important political and cultural role it played. Archaeological discoveries give a fascinating picture of an ancient Olympia whose legacy of peaceful competition and athletic excellence lives on. The first modern Olympic Games were held in 1896 and, since then, the number of nations competing has grown from 14 to more than 200. In addition to numerous illustrations, this book includes fascinating essays that offer a global perspective on the phenomenon that the Olympic Games have become and trace its evolution from a great idea to a grand spectacle. With hundreds of photographs and illustrations, it looks at aspects of the Games from the first Winter Olympic Games in 1924 to the highly politically charged Olympics in Berlin in 1936; from doping scandals to the growth of the Paralympics. Interspersed with the illustrations are fascinating essays that gather the latest information, records, and research making this one of the most comprehensive and up-to-date books on the topic.

Download or read book The Eternal Present of the Past written by Li-Ling Xiao and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing together illustration, theater, and literature, this study examines a late Ming conception of the stage as a mystical space for temporal conflation that allowed the past to be reborn in the present and to uphold the continuity of the cultural tradition

Download or read book Forum written by and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Divination for Beginners written by Scott Cunningham and published by Llewellyn Worldwide Limited. This book was released on 2003 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readers can become their own diviner with the methods outlined in this book. Includes detailed descriptions of both common and unusual techniques, each grouped by the tools or techniques used to perform them. The more advanced techniques of Tarot, Palmistry, and the I Ching are also discussed.

Download or read book Reading Chaucer After Auschwitz written by William McClellan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-04 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the work of Holocaust writer Primo Levi and political philosopher Giorgio Agamben McClellan introduces a critical turn in our reading of Chaucer. He argues that the unprecedented event of the Holocaust, which witnessed the total degradation and extermination of human beings, irrevocably changes how we read literature from the past. McClellan gives a thoroughgoing reading of the Man of Law’s Tale, widely regarded as one of Chaucer’s most difficult tales, interpreting it as a meditation on the horrors of sovereign power. He shows how Chaucer, through the figuration of Custance, dramatically depicts the destructive effects of power on the human subject. McClellan’s intervention, which he calls “reading-history-as-ethical-meditation,” places reception history in the context of a reception ethics and holds the promise of changing the way we read traditional texts.

Download or read book UGC NET JRF SET History Papers II and III written by Vikas Experts and published by Vikas Publishing House. This book was released on with total page 681 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Test Prep for UGC-NET/JRF/SET History

Download or read book Dream Boy written by Jim Grimsley and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1997-01-30 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a novel as stunning and heartbreaking as his acclaimed debut work, Grimsley recounts the story of a painful first love--between two adolescent boys who bravely sustain each other in a world of domestic disintegration.

Download or read book Book Clubs written by Elizabeth Long and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003-08 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Book clubs are everywhere these days. And women talk about the clubs they belong to with surprising emotion. But why are the clubs so important to them? And what do the women discuss when they meet? To answer questions like these, Elizabeth Long spent years observing and participating in women's book clubs and interviewing members from different discussion groups. Far from being an isolated activity, she finds reading for club members to be an active and social pursuit, a crucial way for women to reflect creatively on the meaning of their lives and their place in the social order.

Download or read book How Should One Read a Book written by Virginia Woolf and published by Renard Press Ltd. This book was released on 2021-11-24 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First delivered as a speech to schoolgirls in Kent in 1926, this enchanting short essay by the towering Modernist writer Virginia Woolf celebrates the importance of the written word. With a measured but ardent tone, Woolf weaves together thought and quote, verse and prose into a moving tract on the power literature can have over its reader, in a way which still resounds with truth today. I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards – their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble – the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.”

Download or read book Yoga Pant Nation written by Laurie Gelman and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Good Morning America Buzz Pick From the author of Class Mom and You've Been Volunteered comes a new book on one mom's challenges through parenting and life, keeping her on her toes and perpetually in yoga pants. Jen Dixon of Overland Park, Kansas—fearless mother of a fifth-grade boy and two thirty-something daughters—is used to juggling a lot, from her mission to become a spin instructor, to stepping in as the most acerbic class mom ever (again), to taking care of her two-year-old granddaughter. But when the PTA president throws her a mandate to raise $10,000 for the fifth-grade class, even unflappable Jen is going to need more than her regular spin class to get her through this final year at William Taft Elementary School. In the midst of new complications—organizing the class overnight to Topeka, an unexpected spin class fan in the form of her husband’s crazy ex-wife, and trying to navigate her parents’ sudden descent into apparent delusions—Jen hardly has the patience to listen to yet another half-baked idea (come on, ladies, another wrapping paper sale?) from WeFUKCT (We Fundraise Until Kingdom Come Team), her fundraising committee. But if anyone can get elementary parents to pull off the impossible, it’s Jen Dixon. With her always irreverent and laugh-out-loud humor—boldly holding forth on those things you’re thinking, but would never dare say out loud—Laurie Gelman shines a light on the indignities and hilarities of modern parenting.