Set in the present day in the rural community of Feathertown, Tennessee, Flight Behavior tells the story of Dellarobia Turnbow, a petite, razor-sharp 29-year-old who nurtured worldly ambitions before becoming pregnant and marrying at seventeen. Now, after more than a decade of tending to small children on a failing farm, oppressed by poverty, isolation and her husband's antagonistic family, she has mitigated her boredom by surrendering to an obsessive flirtation with a handsome younger man. In the opening scene, Dellarobia is headed for a secluded mountain cabin to meet this man and initiate what she expects will be a self-destructive affair. But the tryst never happens. Instead, she walks into something on the mountainside she cannot explain or understand: a forested valley filled with silent red fire that appears to her a miracle. After years lived entirely in the confines of one small house, Dellarobia finds her path suddenly opening out, chapter by chapter, into blunt and confrontational engagement with her family, her church, her town, her continent, and finally the world at large.
Use DISC to discover profound hidden patterns of human behavioral style, gain deeper self-awareness, maximize your personal strengths, and influence others more powerfully than ever before! Taking Flight illuminates the proven DISC four-style model of human behavior, and shows how to use it to become a far more effective leader, salesperson, or teacher; revitalize your career; build deeper personal relationships; fully leverage your natural gifts, and empower everyone around you. Drawing on their immense experience coaching executives and training world-class organizations, Merrick Rosenberg and Daniel Silvert introduce DISC through a fable that's quick, fun, and easy-to-understand. You'll discover why you "click" with some people and "clank" with others, and what really drives your decisions and actions. You'll learn exactly how to identify others' behavioral styles and choose the best ways to interact with them. You'll walk through creating a personal action plan for improvement -- and then systematically making the most of your strengths, working around your weaknesses, and supercharging your personal performance! If you're already familiar with DISC, this book will help you use it more effectively than ever before. If you're new to DISC, it will change your life -- just as it has for thousands before you!
**NOW INCLUDING THE FIRST CHAPTER OF DEMON COPPERHEAD** TWICE WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION FROM THE WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION THE MULTI-MILLION COPY BESTSELLING AUTHOR 'Lush.' Sunday Times 'Superb.' Daily Mail 'Elegantly written.' Sunday Telegraph From award-winning and internationally bestselling author of Demon Copperhead and Flight Behaviour, The Lacuna is the heartbreaking story of a man torn between the warm heart of Mexico and the cold embrace of 1950s America in the shadow of Senator McCarthy. Born in America and raised in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is a liability to his social-climbing flapper mother, Salome. When he starts work in the household of Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo - where the Bolshevik leader, Lev Trotsky, is also being harboured as a political exile - he inadvertently casts his lot with art, communism and revolution. A compulsive diarist, he records and relates his colourful experiences of life with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Trotsky in the midst of the Mexican revolution. A violent upheaval sends him back to America; but political winds continue to throw him between north and south, in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach - the lacuna - between truth and public presumption.
New York Times Bestseller • Named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, O: The Oprah Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek “Kingsolver brilliantly captures both the price of profound change and how it can pave the way not only for future generations, but also for a radiant, unexpected expansion of the heart.” — O: The Oprah Magazine The acclaimed author of The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees, and recipient of numerous literary awards—including the National Humanities Medal, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Orange Prize—returns with a story about two families, in two centuries, navigating what seems to be the end of the world as they know it. With history as their tantalizing canvas, these characters paint a startlingly relevant portrait of life in precarious times when the foundations of the past have failed to prepare us for the future. How could two hardworking people do everything right in life, a woman asks, and end up destitute? Willa Knox and her husband followed all the rules as responsible parents and professionals, and have nothing to show for it but debts and an inherited brick house that is falling apart. The magazine where Willa worked has folded; the college where her husband had tenure has closed. Their dubious shelter is also the only option for a disabled father-in-law and an exasperating, free-spirited daughter. When the family’s one success story, an Ivy-educated son, is uprooted by tragedy he seems likely to join them, with dark complications of his own. In another time, a troubled husband and public servant asks, How can a man tell the truth, and be reviled for it? A science teacher with a passion for honest investigation, Thatcher Greenwood finds himself under siege: his employer forbids him to speak of the exciting work just published by Charles Darwin. His young bride and social-climbing mother-in-law bristle at the risk of scandal, and dismiss his worries that their elegant house is unsound. In a village ostensibly founded as a benevolent Utopia, Thatcher wants only to honor his duties, but his friendships with a woman scientist and a renegade newspaper editor threaten to draw him into a vendetta with the town’s powerful men. A timely and "utterly captivating" novel (San Francisco Chronicle), Unsheltered interweaves past and present to explore the human capacity for resiliency and compassion in times of great upheaval.
“An emotional masterpiece . . . A novel in which humor, passion, and superb prose conspire to seize a reader by the heart and by the soul.” —New York Daily News From Barbara Kingsolver, the acclaimed author of Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, The Bean Trees, and other modern classics, Animal Dreams is a passionate and complex novel about love, forgiveness, and one woman’s struggle to find her place in the world "Animals dream about the things they do in the daytime just like people do. If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life." So says Loyd Peregrina, a handsome Apache trainman and latter-day philosopher. But when Codi Noline returns to her hometown, Loyd's advice is painfully out of her reach. Dreamless and at the end of her rope, Codi comes back to Grace, Arizona, to confront her past and face her ailing, distant father. What she finds is a town threatened by a silent environmental catastrophe, some startling clues to her own identity, and a man whose view of the world could change the course of her life. Blending flashbacks, dreams, and Native American legends, Animal Dreams is a suspenseful love story and a moving exploration of life's largest commitments. This edition includes a P.S. section with additional insights from Barbara Kingsolver, background material, suggestions for further reading, and more.
Aims to invigorate the field of personality psychology by challenging the contemporary academic view that individuals are best studied as carriers of traits. The theory is then applied to an array of well-known and obscure individuals with ascensionistic inclinations, including Peter Pan.
Hawks fly at very high altitudes, sometimes over water, and thus their flight behavior and migration patterns are extremely difficult to study. Now, based on nearly ten years of research, this book provides the most complete analysis to date of how hawks migrate. Paul Kerlinger has employed both direct observations and radar techniques to obtain a much more accurate understanding of the migratory behavior of hawks and the "decisions" they make in flight. And, he has integrated data on the flight behavior of raptors in general with information about their ecology, physiology, evolution, and nonmigratory behavior. Kerlinger begins with an overview, discussing ecology and geography, research methods, natural history, and evolution, and atmospheric structure. He then addresses specific aspects of flight behavior: aerodynamics, morphology, mechanics, direction, altitude, flocking, water crossing, speed selection, daily distance traveled, and flight strategies. Kerlinger describes each aspect of behavior quantitatively, testing mechanistic hypotheses. In conclusion, he examines how migrants integrate these behavioral components. Throughout the text he draws comparisons between the migratory flight behavior of hawks and that of other taxa. By means of such comparisons, researchers can gain insight into the selective pressures that shape the behavior of migrant species.
Picking up where her modern classic The Bean Trees left off, Barbara Kingsolver’s bestselling Pigs in Heaven continues the tale of Turtle and Taylor Greer, a Native American girl and her adoptive mother who have settled in Tucson, Arizona, as they both try to overcome their difficult pasts. Taking place three years after The Bean Trees, Taylor is now dating a musician named Jax and has officially adopted Turtle. But when a lawyer for the Cherokee Nation begins to investigate the adoption—their new life together begins to crumble. Depicting the clash between fierce family love and tribal law, poverty and means, abandonment and belonging, Pigs in Heaven is a morally wrenching, gently humorous work of fiction that speaks equally to the head and the heart. This edition includes a P.S. section with additional insights from Barbara Kingsolver, background material, suggestions for further reading, and more.
More frisbees are sold each year than baseballs, basketballs and footballs combined. Yet these familiar flying objects have subtle and clever aerodynamic and gyrodynamic properties which are only recently being documented by wind tunnel and other studies. In common with other rotating bodies discussed in this readily accessible book, they are typically not treated in textbooks of aeronautics and the literature is scattered in a variety of places. This book develops the theme of disc-wings and spinning aerospace vehicles in parallel. Since many of the examples are recreational, anyone who enjoys these activities will likely find it profitable and enjoyable. In addition to spinning objects of various shapes, several exotic manned aircraft with disc planforms have been proposed and a prototypes built – these include a Nazi ‘secret weapon’ and the De Havilland Avrocar, also discussed in the book. Boomerangs represent another category of spinning aerodynamic body whose behavior can only be understood by coupling aerodynamics with gyrodynamics. The narrative, supported by equations and graphs, explains how the shape and throw of a boomerang relates to its trajectory. The natural world presents still other examples, namely the samaras or ‘seed-wings’ of many tree species, which autorotate during their descent, like a helicopter whose engine has failed. The flight performance of these spinning wings directly affects the dispersal and thus the evolutionary competitiveness of the trees concerned. Samara-type configurations are also considered for instrumentation and other payload dispersal applications. In short, the book discusses a range of familiar, connected, but largely undeveloped, topics in an accessible, but complete, manner. From the reviews of the first edition: "In his fascinating book Spinning Flight, Ralph Lorenz provides a rich feast of ... examples of spinning bodies ... . The book is well organized ... . The discussion in the book ... should be accessible to readers with some elementary understanding of aerodynamic principles. For the expert, the book is full of open problems ... . Its scope is extensive ... . In this respect, there may be something for everyone within its attractively designed cover ... ." (H. K. Moffatt, Nature, Vol. 444, December, 2006) "If you liked physics at school, then this book is for you. It concerns itself with flying objects that spin through the air, and even tells you how to impress your friends with the biomechanics of Frisbees. ... there is plenty of information at all levels, and the book has a wealth of detail that only an aerospace engineer like Lorenz could have come up with." (Len Fisher, BBC Focus, February, 2007)
