Download or read book The Red Hourglass written by Gordon Grice and published by Delta. This book was released on 2009-10-21 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Snake venom that digests human flesh. A building cleared of every living thing by a band of tiny spiders. An infant insect eating its living prey from within, saving the vital organs for last. These are among the deadly feats of natural engineering you'll witness in The Red Hourglass, prize-winning author Gordon Grice's masterful, poetic, often dryly funny exploration of predators he has encountered around his rural Oklahoma home. Grice is a witty and intrepid guide through a world where mating ends in cannibalism, where killers possess toxins so lethal as to defy our ideas of a benevolent God, where spider remains, scattered like "the cast-off coats of untidy children," tell a quiet story of violent self-extermination. It's a world you'll recognize despite its exotic strangeness--the world in which we live. Unabashedly stepping into the mix, Grice abandons his role as objective observer with beguiling dark humor--collecting spiders and other vermin, decorating a tarantula's terrarium with dollhouse furniture, or forcing a battle between captive insects because he deems one "too stupid to live." Kill. Eat. Mate. Die. Charting the simple brutality of the lives of these predators, Grice's starkly graceful essays guide us toward startling truths about our own predatory nature. The Red Hourglass brings us face to fanged face with the inadequacy of our distinctions between normal and abnormal, dead and alive, innocent and evil.
Download or read book Red Hourglass Lives of the Predators written by Gordon Grice and published by . This book was released on 1999-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Global Wallace written by Lucas Thompson and published by Bloomsbury Academic. This book was released on 2018-06-28 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Foster Wallace is invariably seen as an emphatically American figure. Lucas Thompson challenges this consensus, arguing that Wallace's investments in various international literary traditions are central to both his artistic practice and his critique of US culture. Thompson shows how, time and again, Wallace's fiction draws on a diverse range of global texts, appropriating various forms of world literature in the attempt to craft fiction that critiques US culture from oblique and unexpected vantage points. Using a wide range of comparative case studies, and drawing on extensive archival research, Global Wallace reveals David Foster Wallace's substantial debts to such unexpected figures as Jamaica Kincaid, Julio Cortázar, Jean Rhys, Octavio Paz, Leo Tolstoy, Zbigniew Herbert, and Albert Camus, among many others. It also offers a more comprehensive account of the key influences that Wallace scholars have already perceived, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, and Manuel Puig. By reassessing Wallace's body of work in relation to five broadly construed geographic territories -- Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe, France, and Africa -- the book reveals the mechanisms with which Wallace played particular literary traditions off one another, showing how he appropriated vastly different global texts within his own fiction. By expanding the geographic coordinates of Wallace's work in this way, Global Wallace reconceptualizes contemporary American fiction, as being embedded within a global exchange of texts and ideas.
Download or read book The Beast in the Garden A Modern Parable of Man and Nature written by David Baron and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-10-04 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true tale of an edenic Rocky Mountain town and what transpired when a predatory species returned to its ancestral home. When, in the late 1980s, residents of Boulder, Colorado, suddenly began to see mountain lions in their yards, it became clear that the cats had repopulated the land after decades of persecution. Here, in a riveting environmental fable that recalls Peter Benchley's thriller Jaws, journalist David Baron traces the history of the mountain lion and chronicles Boulder's effort to coexist with its new neighbors. A parable for our times, The Beast in the Garden is a scientific detective story and a real-life drama, a tragic tale of the struggle between two highly evolved predators: man and beast.
Download or read book Shark Attacks written by Gordon Grice and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 61 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Geographic pairs gripping and gruesome stories of shark attacks with cutting edge research to illuminate a fascinating underwater world that few truly understand. Sharks are the world's most fascinating predators—capable of detecting a single drop of blood in 25 million drops of ocean and sensing electricity emitted by their prey. This ebook short takes readers deep into the realm of the very latest shark science, including new insights into the nature of shark attacks around the world.
Download or read book The Tapir s Morning Bath written by Elizabeth Royte and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2002 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging portrait of a community of biologists, The Tapir's Morning Bathis a behind-the-scenes account of life at a tropical research station that"conveys the uncertainties, frustrations, and joys of [scientific] fieldwork" (Science). On Panama's Barro Colorado Island, Elizabeth Royte worksalongside the scientists -- counting seeds, sorting insects, collectingmonkey dung, radiotracking fruit bats -- as they struggle to parse theintricate workings of the tropical rain forest. While showing the humanside of the scientists at work, Royte explores the tensions between the slow pace of basic research and the reality of a world that may not have time to wait for answers.
Download or read book Hidden Depths written by Robin Waterfield and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-22 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Hidden Depths, Robin Waterfield explores the fascinating world of hypnosis, tracing the history of this often misunderstood craft beginning with a passage in the book of Genesis, and continuing through his own personal experiences today. Waterfield uses the history and controversy surrounding the practice of hypnosis to gain insight into our behavior and psychology, and considers how hypnotic techniques have been absorbed into society through advertising, media and popular culture.
Download or read book Cabinet of Curiosities written by Gordon Grice and published by Workman Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exactly the book for every young explorer who loves finding stuff in nature and bringing it home. Cabinet of Curiosities is a lavishly illustrated introduction to the wonders of natural history and the joys of being an amateur scientist and collector. Nature writer Gordon Grice, who started his first cabinet of curiosities at age six when he found a skunk’s skull, explains how scientists classify all living things through the Linnaeus system; how to tell real gold from fool’s gold; how to preserve butterflies, crab shells, feathers, a robin’s egg, spider specimens, and honeycombs; how to identify seashells; the difference between antlers and horns; how to read animal tracks. And then, what to do with your specimens, including how to build a cabinet of curiosities out of common household objects, like a desk organizer or a box for fishing tackle.
Download or read book I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts written by Mark Dery and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2012-04-06 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the cultural critic Wired called “provocative and cuttingly humorous” comes a viciously funny, joltingly insightful collection of drive-by critiques of contemporary America where chaos is the new normal. Exploring the darkest corners of the national psyche and the nethermost regions of the self—the gothic, the grotesque, and the carnivalesque—Mark Dery makes sense of the cultural dynamics of the American madhouse early in the twenty-first century. Here are essays on the pornographic fantasies of Star Trek fans, Facebook as Limbo of the Lost, George W. Bush’s fear of his inner queer, the theme-parking of the Holocaust, the homoerotic subtext of the Super Bowl, the hidden agendas of IQ tests, Santa’s secret kinship with Satan, the sadism of dentists, Hitler’s afterlife on YouTube, the sexual identity of 2001’s HAL, the suicide note considered as a literary genre, the surrealist poetry of robot spam, the zombie apocalypse, Lady Gaga, the Church of Euthanasia, toy guns in the dream lives of American boys, and the polymorphous perversity of Madonna’s big toe. Dery casts a critical eye on the accepted order of things, boldly crossing into the intellectual no-fly zones demarcated by cultural warriors on both sides of America’s ideological divide: controversy-phobic corporate media, blinkered academic elites, and middlebrow tastemakers. Intellectually omnivorous and promiscuously interdisciplinary, Dery’s writing is a generalist’s guilty pleasure in an age of nanospecialization and niche marketing. From Menckenesque polemics on American society and deft deconstructions of pop culture to unflinching personal essays in which Dery turns his scalpel-sharp wit on himself, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts is a head-spinning intellectual ride through American dreams and American nightmares.
Download or read book Slavemakers written by Joseph Wallace and published by Ace. This book was released on 2015-12 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After venomous parasitic wasps known as thieves push humans to the brink of extinction, the survivors journey through the wastelands to discover if there are any other humans left who are not under the thieves' control.
Download or read book Animal Hunting and Feeding written by Natalie Goldstein and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All animals have to eat, but feeding behavior goes far beyond predators and prey. Animals have a variety of ways to find food. Some sit and wait for food to come to them. Others chase or trap their food. Other animals are scavengers and decomposers, breaking down the leftovers of other animals' meals. Animal Hunting and Feeding explains these various techniques as well as the importance of food chains and food webs.
Download or read book The Dynamics of Language Use written by Christopher S. Butler and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2005-09-22 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together a collection of articles characterized by two main themes: the contrastive study of parallel phenomena in two or more languages, and an essentially functional approach in which language is regarded, first and foremost, as a rich and complex communication system, inextricably embedded in sociocultural and psychological contexts of use. The majority of the studies reported is empirical in nature, many making use of corpora or other textual materials in the language(s) under investigation. The book begins with an introductory section in which the editors provide surveys of the state of the art in both functional and contrastive linguistics. The other five sections of the volume are devoted to (i) a cognitive perspective on form and function, (ii) information structure, (iii) collocations and formulaic language, (iv) language learning, and (v) discourse and culture.
Download or read book The Book of Deadly Animals written by Gordon Grice and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether at a zoo, on a camping trip, or under our bedsheets, we are surrounded by animals. While most are perfectly harmless, it's the magnificent exceptions that populate The Book of Deadly Animals. Award-winning writer Gordon Grice takes readers on a tour of the animal kingdom—from grizzly bears to great white sharks, big cats to crocodiles. Every page overflows with astonishing facts about Earth's great predators and unforgettable stories of their encounters with humans, all delivered in Grice's signature dark comic style. Illustrated with awe-inspiring photographs of beasts and bugs, this wondrous work will horrify, delight, and amaze.
Download or read book Gratitude for the Wild written by Nathaniel Van Yperen and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-06-17 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964, a hotly contested debate over the value of wilderness reveals cultural anxieties about an American society that has spurned limits. Gratitude for the Wild explores how the wild known in wilderness raises our tolerance for mystery in the recognition of our limits and in the celebration of a God-loved world that exceeds our grasping. The idea of wilderness introduces questions about the balance between utility and appreciation, and between enjoyment and restraint. Wilderness is a nexus of competing and contested accounts of responsibility. In conversation with the work of Doug Peacock, Terry Tempest Williams, James Gustafson, and Martin Luther King Jr., Nathaniel Van Yperen offers an original argument for how wilderness can evoke a vision of a good life in which creaturely limits are accepted in gratitude, even in the face of ambiguity and mystery. Through the theme of gratitude, the book refocuses attention on the role of affection and testimony in ecological ethics and Christian ethics.
Download or read book Bitten written by Pamela Nagami and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2005-09 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We've all been bitten, and we all have stories. The bite attacks that Pamela Nagami has chosen to write about in this book take place all around the world, and throughout history. With reports from medical journals, case histories, colleagues, and her own career as a practicing physician and infectious disease specialist, the author offers readers intrigued by infection, disease, and mesmerized by creatures in the wild a compulsively readable narrative that is entertaining, sometimes disturbing, and always engrossing. -- Publisher description.
Download or read book Mussolini and the Axeman s Jazz Are You Loathsome Tonight written by Poppy Z. Brite and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Available for the first time as an ebook pairing, these two short stories were specifically chosen by the author Poppy Z. Brite and her fans as favorite examples of her work. Mussolini and the Axeman's Jazz is a thrilling mix off historical fact and fiction surrounding Freemasons, WWI, and New Orleans’ only verified serial killer, the Axeman. Are You Loathsome Tonight? showcases the author’s dark, unique take on the man and the myth that was Elvis Presley.
Download or read book The Killing Kind written by John Connolly and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While investigating the death of a senator's daughter, Charlie Parker lands himself in a dangerously gruesome situation after he discovers a mass grave and a shadowy religious organization. Reissue.
