This eccentric Victorian book argues a strong case for the universal wearing of a beard – that essential symbol of manly distinction since ancient times. Thomas S. Gowing contrasts the vigour and daring of bearded men through history with the undeniable effeminacy of the clean-shaven. He reminds the modern man that and 'ladies, by their very nature, like everything manly and ', and cannot fail to be charmed by a and 'fine flow of curling comeliness and '.
The Water Babes is the book for anyone who ever joined – or ever thought of joining – a group, perhaps for exercising, reading, quizzing, or playing cards. This novel is about ‘The Water Babes’, a group who get together each week for a lesson in aquarobics, a series of light exercises in water. The novel brings together people of different cultural, religious, racial and class backgrounds. The story unfolds over the last day of the class. In the morning we see the group’s final lesson. In the afternoon we see some of them split up and take tea in different parts of town. In the evening we see their farewell party for their instructor, who is about to return home to Australia. Throughout the day we are witness to laughter and tears, and to various incidents and accidents, some amusing, others less so. At the evening party, more than food and drink are shared…We hear confessional surprises and endure outright shocks. All this from just one group of very different people. But are people so very different from each other? The evidence from this slice of life of contemporary Britain is that each of us is not so different or unique as we may think. We learn that apparently different individuals may be connected to other members of their group in more ways than might at first appear. This novel demonstrates the old adage that no man – or woman – is an island. On the contrary, the story shows that we are all in this together. The Water Babes is a story to make you think.
My Dog Has a Beard is the first book to be released in a series of fun children's book all about funny traits of our favorite four-legged friends. This adorable story is told by a little girl who owns a Brussels Griffon who always seems to get things stuck in his beard! It is a story not only for children, but for dog lovers alike.
Frozen mammals of the Ice Age, preserved for millennia in the tundra, have been a source of fascination and mystery since their first discovery over two centuries ago. These mummies, their ecology, and their preservation are the subject of this compelling book by paleontologist Dale Guthrie. The 1979 find of a frozen, extinct steppe bison in an Alaskan gold mine allowed him to undertake the first scientific excavation of an Ice Age mummy in North America and to test theories about these enigmatic frozen fauna. The 36,000-year-old bison mummy, coated with blue mineral crystals, was dubbed "Blue Babe." Guthrie conveys the excitement of its excavation and shows how he made use of evidence from living animals, other Pleistocene mummies, Paleolithic art, and geological data. With photographs and scores of detailed drawings, he takes the reader through the excavation and subsequent detective work, analyzing the animal's carcass and its surroundings, the circumstances of its death, its appearance in life, the landscape it inhabited, and the processes of preservation by freezing. His examination shows that Blue Babe died in early winter, falling prey to lions that inhabited the Arctic during the Pleistocene era. Guthrie uses information gleaned from his study of Blue Babe to provide a broad picture of bison evolutionary history and ecology, including speculations on the interactions of bison and Ice Age peoples. His description of the Mammoth Steppe as a cold, dry, grassy plain is based on an entirely new way of reading the fossil record.
In 1865, Wild Bill Hickok killed Dave Tutt in a Missouri public square in the West’s first notable "walkdown." One hundred and twenty-nine years later, Bernard Goetz shot four threatening young men in a New York subway car. Apart from gunfire, what do the two events have in common? Goetz, writes Richard Maxwell Brown, was acquitted of wrongdoing in the spirit of a uniquely American view of self-defense, a view forged in frontier gunfights like Hickok’s. When faced with a deadly threat, we have the right to stand our ground and fight. We have no duty to retreat.
