Download or read book Uncentering the Earth written by William T. Vollmann and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 2006 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The man and the idea that created modern science, as seen by one of today's most celebrated writers.
Download or read book Uncentering the Earth written by William T. Vollman and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Earth written by Frank H. T. Rhodes and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-15 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It's impossible to grasp the whole planet or integrate all the descriptions of it. But because we live here, we have to try. This is not just an artistic compulsion or an existential yearning, still less an academic exercise. It's a survival issue. This is the only planet we have. We're stuck here, and we don't own the place—it would be the height of arrogance to assume that we do. We're tenants here, not owners, but we're tenants with hope for a long-term tenancy. We want to extend our lease just as far as we can."—from Earth: A Tenant's Manual In Earth: A Tenant's Manual, the distinguished geologist Frank H. T. Rhodes, President Emeritus of Cornell University, provides a sweeping, accessible, and deeply informed guide to the home we all share, showing us how we might best preserve the Earth's livability for ourselves and future generations. Rhodes begins by setting the scene for our active planet and explaining how its location and composition determine how the Earth works and why it teems with life. He emphasizes the changes that are of concern to us today, from earthquakes to climate change and the clashes over the energy resources needed for the Earth's exploding population. He concludes with an extended exploration of humanity's prospects on a complex, protean, and ultimately finite world. It is not a question of whether the planet is sustainable; the challenge facing life on Earth—and the life of the Earth—is whether an expanding and high-consumption species like ours is sustainable. Only new resources, new priorities, new policies and, most of all, new knowledge, can reverse the damage that humanity is doing to our home—and ourselves. A sustainable human future, Rhodes concludes in this eloquent, sobering, but ultimately optimistic book, will require a sense of responsible stewardship, for we are not owners of this planet; we are tenants. Surveying the systems, large and small, that govern Earth's processes and influence its changes, Rhodes addresses the negative consequences of human activities for the health of its regulatory systems but offers practical suggestions as to how we might effect repairs, or at least limit further damage to our home.
Download or read book The Earth Moves Galileo and the Roman Inquisition Great Discoveries written by Dan Hofstadter and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-05-10 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cogent portrayal of a turning point in the evolution of the freedom of thought and the beginnings of modern science. Celebrated, controversial, condemned, Galileo Galilei is a seminal figure in the history of science. Both Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein credit him as the first modern scientist. His 1633 trial before the Holy Office of the Inquisition is the prime drama in the history of the conflict between science and religion. Galileo was then sixty-nine years old and the most venerated scientist in Italy. Although subscribing to an anti-literalist view of the Bible, as per Saint Augustine, Galileo considered himself a believing Catholic. Playing to his own strengths—a deep knowledge of Italy, a longstanding interest in Renaissance and Baroque lore—Dan Hofstadter explains this apparent paradox and limns this historic moment in the widest cultural context, portraying Galileo as both humanist and scientist, deeply versed in philosophy and poetry, on easy terms with musicians, writers, and painters.
Download or read book Outside America written by Hikaru Fujii and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of the "outside" as a space of freedom has always been central in the literature of the United States. This concept still remains active in contemporary American fiction; however, its function is being significantly changed. Outside, America argues that, among contemporary American novelists, a shift of focus to the temporal dimension is taking place. No longer a spatial movement, the quest for the outside now seeks to reach the idea of time as a force of difference, a la Deleuze, by which the current subjectivity is transformed. In other words, the concept is taking a "temporal turn." Discussing eight novelists, including Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, Paul Theroux, and Annie Proulx, each of whose works describe forces of given identities-masculine identity, historical temporality, and power, etc.-which block quests for the outside, Fujii shows how the outside in these texts ceases to be a spatial idea. With due attention to critical and social contexts, the book aims to reveal a profound shift in contemporary American fiction.
Download or read book Welcome to BioTech Nation written by Moira Anne Gunn and published by Amacom Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Funny, entertaining, and informative, the host of public radios "Tech Nation" gives readers a unique, inside look at biotechnology today and a glimpse at what could be in store for tomorrow.
Download or read book The Sun and the Earth written by Rebecca Stefoff and published by Cavendish Square Publishing, LLC. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We say that the sun "rises" in the morning and "sets" at night, but is it really moving? Readers will learn about the long, sometimes dangerous struggle to discover whether the sun revolves around Earth, or Earth around the sun, and find out what scientists now know about our planet's place in the universe.
Download or read book Help For Writers written by Roy Peter Clark and published by Little, Brown Spark. This book was released on 2011-09-21 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The craft of writing offers countless potential problems: The story is too long; the story's too short; revising presents a huge hurdle; writer's block is rearing its ugly head. In Help! For Writers, Roy Peter Clark presents an "owner's manual" for writers, outlining the seven steps of the writing process, and addressing the 21 most urgent problems that writers face. In his trademark engaging and entertaining style, Clark offers ten short solutions to each problem. Out of ideas? Read posters, billboards, and graffiti. Can't bear to edit yourself? Watch the deleted scenes feature of a DVD, and ask yourself why those scenes were left on the cutting-room floor. Help! For Writers offers 210 strategies to guide writers to success.
Download or read book The Uninhabitable Earth written by David Wallace-Wells and published by Tim Duggan Books. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • The Economist • The Paris Review • Toronto Star • GQ • The Times Literary Supplement • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD “The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times “Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist “Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times “The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post “The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books
Download or read book The Future written by Al Gore and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-01-29 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the former vice president and #1 New York Times bestselling author comes An Inconvenient Truth for everything—a frank and clear-eyed assessment of six critical drivers of global change in the decades to come. Ours is a time of revolutionary change that has no precedent in history. With the same passion he brought to the challenge of climate change, and with his decades of experience on the front lines of global policy, Al Gore surveys our planet’s beclouded horizon and offers a sober, learned, and ultimately hopeful forecast in the visionary tradition of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and John Naisbitt’s Megatrends. In The Future, Gore identifies the emerging forces that are reshaping our world: • Ever-increasing economic globalization has led to the emergence of what he labels “Earth Inc.”—an integrated holistic entity with a new and different relationship to capital, labor, consumer markets, and national governments than in the past. • The worldwide digital communications, Internet, and computer revolutions have led to the emergence of “the Global Mind,” which links the thoughts and feelings of billions of people and connects intelligent machines, robots, ubiquitous sensors, and databases. • The balance of global political, economic, and military power is shifting more profoundly than at any time in the last five hundred years—from a U.S.-centered system to one with multiple emerging centers of power, from nation-states to private actors, and from political systems to markets. • A deeply flawed economic compass is leading us to unsustainable growth in consumption, pollution flows, and depletion of the planet’s strategic resources of topsoil, freshwater, and living species. • Genomic, biotechnology, neuroscience, and life sciences revolutions are radically transforming the fields of medicine, agriculture, and molecular science—and are putting control of evolution in human hands. • There has been a radical disruption of the relationship between human beings and the earth’s ecosystems, along with the beginning of a revolutionary transformation of energy systems, agriculture, transportation, and construction worldwide. From his earliest days in public life, Al Gore has been warning us of the promise and peril of emergent truths—no matter how “inconvenient” they may seem to be. As absorbing as it is visionary, The Future is a map of the world to come, from a man who has looked ahead before and been proven all too right. Praise for The Future “Magisterial . . . The passion is unmistakable. So is the knowledge. Practically every page offers an illumination.”—Bloomberg “In The Future . . . Gore takes on a subject whose scale matches that of his achievements and ambition.”—The New York Times Book Review “Historically grounded . . . Gore’s strengths lie in his passion for the subject and in his ability to take the long view by putting current events and trends in historical context.”—Publishers Weekly “Provocative, smart, densely argued . . . a tour de force of Big Picture thinking.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A luminously intelligent analysis that is packed with arresting ideas and facts.”—The Guardian
Download or read book William T Vollmann written by Michael Hemmingson and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Talking bugs, electricity, the founding of empires, hobos, Nazis, whores, violence, drugs, murder, secret cabals, Heaven, Hell--William T. Vollmann is a writer of enormous novels that are stuffed with entire worlds of creation and destruction. This first ever book-length critical study traces his career to date with chapters devoted to each of his novels, as well as his short stories and major nonfiction. Vollmann is a writer of obsessions, and this study concentrates on three of them--freedom, redemption, and prostitution--while arguing that the author that dwells on them is worthy of being called one of our greatest living American writers. Also included are seven interviews spanning the years 1991-2007 that reinforce the persistence of Vollmann's attraction to these themes.
Download or read book Copernicus Secret written by Jack Repcheck and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-12-04 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The surprising, little-known story of the scientific revolution that almost didn't happen: how cleric and scientific genius Nicolaus Copernicus's work revolutionized astronomy and altered our understanding of our place in the world. Nicolaus Copernicus gave the world perhaps the most important scientific insight of the modern age, the theory that the earth and the other planets revolve around the sun. He was also the first to proclaim that the earth rotates on its axis once every twenty-four hours. His theory was truly radical: during his lifetime nearly everyone believed that a perfectly still earth rested in the middle of the cosmos, where all the heavenly bodies revolved around it. One of the transcendent geniuses of the early Renaissance, Copernicus was also a flawed and conflicted person. A cleric who lived during the tumultuous years of the early Reformation, he may have been sympathetic to the teachings of the Lutherans. Although he had taken a vow of celibacy, he kept at least one mistress. Supremely confident intellectually, he hesitated to disseminate his work among other scholars. It fact, he kept his astronomical work a secret, revealing it to only a few intimates, and the manuscript containing his revolutionary theory, which he refined for at least twenty years, remained "hidden among my things." It is unlikely that Copernicus' masterwork would ever have been published if not for a young mathematics professor named Georg Joachim Rheticus. He had heard of Copernicus' ideas, and with his imagination on fire he journeyed hundreds of miles to a land where, as a Lutheran, he was forbidden to travel. Rheticus' meeting with Copernicus in a small cathedral town in northern Poland proved to be one of the most important encounters in history. Copernicus' Secret recreates the life and world of the scientific genius whose work revolutionized astronomy and tells the fascinating story behind the dawn of the scientific age.
Download or read book Sustainable Automotive Technologies 2013 written by Jörg Wellnitz and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-09-24 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book captures selected peer reviewed papers presented at the 5th International Conference on Sustainable Automotive Technologies, ICSAT 2013, held in Ingolstadt, Germany. ICSAT is the state-of-the-art conference in the field of new technologies for transportation. The book brings together the work of international researchers and practitioners under the following interrelated headings: fuel transportation and storage, material recycling, manufacturing and management costs, engines and emission reduction. The book provides a very good overview of research and development activities focused on new technologies and approaches capable of meeting the challenges to sustainable mobility.
Download or read book Copernicus Secret written by Jack Repcheck and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-12-04 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nicolaus Copernicus gave the world perhaps the most important scientific insight of the modern age, the theory that the earth and the other planets revolve around the sun. He was also the first to proclaim that the earth rotates on its axis once every twenty-four hours. His theory was truly radical: during his lifetime nearly everyone believed that a perfectly still earth rested in the middle of the cosmos, where all the heavenly bodies revolved around it. One of the transcendent geniuses of the early Renaissance, Copernicus was also a flawed and conflicted person. A cleric who lived during the tumultuous years of the early Reformation, he may have been sympathetic to the teachings of the Lutherans. Although he had taken a vow of celibacy, he kept at least one mistress. Supremely confident intellectually, he hesitated to disseminate his work among other scholars. It fact, he kept his astronomical work a secret, revealing it to only a few intimates, and the manuscript containing his revolutionary theory, which he refined for at least twenty years, remained "hidden among my things." It is unlikely that Copernicus' masterwork would ever have been published if not for a young mathematics professor named Georg Joachim Rheticus. He had heard of Copernicus' ideas, and with his imagination on fire he journeyed hundreds of miles to a land where, as a Lutheran, he was forbidden to travel. Rheticus' meeting with Copernicus in a small cathedral town in northern Poland proved to be one of the most important encounters in history. Copernicus' Secretrecreates the life and world of the scientific genius whose work revolutionized astronomy and altered our understanding of our place in the world. It tells the surprising, little-known story behind the dawn of the scientific age.
Download or read book The Universe written by Giles Sparrow and published by Quercus Publishing. This book was released on 2012-09-20 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This stunning collection of images and essays surveys the key breakthroughs that have shaped our understanding of the universe around us - from the discovery of the solar system, to Supermassive black holes and the remote depths of the cosmos. Beginning with the theories put forward for the origin of our universe - the Big Bang and its rivals - and ending with what the eventual fate of our cosmos might be, this overview of 100 landmark discoveries tells the story of how we have endeavoured to understand the place of our own planet in the wider universe.
Download or read book Concise Major 21st Century Writers written by Tracey L. Matthews and published by Gale Cengage. This book was released on 2006 with total page 758 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents alphabetized profiles of approximately seven hundred authors commonly studied in high school and college English courses, describing their lives and careers, listing their works, and providing mailing addresses.
Download or read book William T Vollmann written by Christopher K. Coffman and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This fascinating, massive, wide-ranging collection that editors Christopher K. Coffman and Daniel Lukes have gathered together into William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion will soon be recognized as one of those rare critical books for which that egregiously overused term 'groundbreaking' is fully justified." —Larry McCaffery, from the preface of William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion The essays in this collection make a case for regarding William T. Vollmann as the most ambitious, productive, and important living author in the US. His oeuvre includes not only outstanding work in numerous literary genres, but also global reportage, ethical treatises, paintings, photographs, and many other productions. His reputation as a daring traveler and his fascination with life on the margins have earned him an extra-literary renown unequaled in our time. Perhaps most importantly, his work is exceptional in relation to the literary moment. Vollmann is a member of a group of authors who are responding to the skeptical ironies of postmodernism with a reinvigoration of fiction’s affective possibilities and moral sensibilities, but he stands out even among this cohort for his prioritization of moral engagement, historical awareness, and geopolitical scope. Included in this book in addition to twelve scholarly critical essays are reflections on Vollmann by many of his peers, confidantes, and collaborators, including Jonathan Franzen, James Franco, and Michael Glawogger. With a preface by Larry McCaffery and an afterword by Michael Hemmingson, this book offers readings of most of Vollmann’s works, includes the first critical engagements with several key titles, and introduces a range of voices from international Vollmann scholarship.
