Half of Tanzania's elephants have been killed for their ivory since 2007. A similar alarming story can be told of the herds in northern Mozambique and across swathes of central Africa, with forest elephants losing almost two-thirds of their numbers to the tusk trade. The huge rise in poaching and ivory smuggling in the new millennium has destroyed the hope that the 1989 ivory trade ban had capped poaching and would lead to a long-term fall in demand. But why the new upsurge? The answer is not simple. Since ancient times, large-scale killing of elephants for their tusks has been driven by demand outside Africa's elephant ranges - from the Egyptian pharaohs through Imperial Rome and industrialising Europe and North America to the new wealthy business class of China. And, who poaches and why do they do it? In recent years lurid press reports have blamed mass poaching on rebel movements and armed militias, especially Somalia's Al Shabaab, tying two together two evils - poaching and terrorism. But does this account stand up to scrutiny? This new and ground-breaking examination of the history and politics of ivory in Africa forensically examines why poaching happens in Africa and why it is corruption, crime and politics, rather than insurgency, that we should worry about.
The irreverent, brilliant memoirs of the legendary filmmaker James Ivory In Solid Ivory, a carefully crafted mosaic of memories, portraits, and reflections, the Academy Award–winning filmmaker James Ivory, a partner in the legendary Merchant Ivory Productions and the director of A Room with a View, Howards End, Maurice, and The Remains of the Day, tells stories from his remarkable life and career as one of the most influential directors of his time. At times, he touches on his love affairs, looking back coolly and with unexpected frankness. From first meeting his collaborator and life partner, Ismail Merchant, at the Indian Consulate in New York to winning an Academy Award at age eighty-nine for Call Me by Your Name; from seeing his first film at age five in Klamath Falls, Oregon, to memories of Satyajit Ray, Jean Renoir, The New Yorker magazine’s film critic Pauline Kael (his longtime enemy), Vanessa Redgrave, J. D. Salinger, George Cukor, Kenneth Clark, Bruce Chatwin, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and Merchant—Ivory writes with invariable fluency, wit, and perception about what made him who he is and how he made the movies for which he is known and loved. Solid Ivory, edited by Peter Cameron, is an utterly winning portrait of an extraordinary life told by an unmatched storyteller.
From the New York Times bestselling author of A Deadly Education comes the fourth volume of the Temeraire series, as the Napoleonic Wars bring Will Laurence and Temeraire to Africa in search of aid. “Temeraire is a dragon for the ages.”—Terry Brooks Tragedy has struck His Majesty's Aerial Corps, whose magnificent fleet of fighting dragons and their human captains valiantly defends England’s shores against the encroaching armies of Napoleon Bonaparte. An epidemic of unknown origin and no known cure is decimating the noble dragons’ ranks—forcing the hopelessly stricken into quarantine. Now only Temeraire and a pack of newly recruited dragons remain uninfected—and stand as the only means of an airborne defense against France's ever bolder sorties. Bonaparte’s dragons are already harrowing Britain’s ships at sea. Only one recourse remains: Temeraire and his captain, Will Laurence, must take wing to Africa, whose shores may hold the cure for the mysterious and deadly contagion. On this mission there is no time to waste, and no telling what Don’t miss any of Naomi Novik’s magical Temeraire series HIS MAJESTY’S DRAGON • THRONE OF JADE • BLACK POWDER WAR • EMPIRE OF IVORY • VICTORY OF EAGLES • TONGUES OF SERPENTS • CRUCIBLE OF GOLD • BLOOD OF TYRANTS • LEAGUE OF DRAGONS
Set in Cuba's Sierra Maestra in the 1950s, in the days leading up to the Revolution--Manchette's unfinished masterpiece with a fearless female protagonist. Out of the wreckage of World War II swaggers Ivory Pearl, so named (rhymes with girl) by some British soldiers who made her their mascot, a mere kid, orphaned, survivor of God knows what, but fluent in French, English, smoking, and drinking. In Berlin, Ivy meets Samuel Farakhan, a rich closeted intelligence officer. Farakhan proposes to adopt her and help her to become the photographer she wants to be; his relationship to her will provide a certain cover for him. And she is an asset. The deal is struck... 1956: Ivy has seen every conflict the postwar world has on offer, from Vietnam to East Berlin, and has published her photographs in slick periodicals, but she is sick to death of death and bored with life and love. It’s time for a break. Ivy heads to Cuba, the Sierra Maestra. History, however, doesn’t take vacations. Ivory Pearl was Jean-Patrick Manchette’s last book, representing a new turn in his writing. It was to be the first of a series of ambitious historical thrillers about the “wrong times” we live in. Though left unfinished when Manchette died, the book, whose full plot has been filled in here from the author’s notes, is a masterpiece of bold suspense and black comedy: chilling, caustic, and perfectly choreographed.
Here in one omnibus edition is the complete Ivory saga-the adventures and loves of a scholarly woman who travels to the only planet in the galaxy where magic actually works ...
Across America, universities have become big businesses—and our cities their company towns. But there is a cost to those who live in their shadow. Urban universities play an outsized role in America’s cities. They bring diverse ideas and people together and they generate new innovations. But they also gentrify neighborhoods and exacerbate housing inequality in an effort to enrich their campuses and attract students. They maintain private police forces that target the Black and Latinx neighborhoods nearby. They become the primary employers, dictating labor practices and suppressing wages. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower takes readers from Hartford to Chicago and from Phoenix to Manhattan, revealing the increasingly parasitic relationship between universities and our cities. Through eye-opening conversations with city leaders, low-wage workers tending to students’ needs, and local activists fighting encroachment, scholar Davarian L. Baldwin makes clear who benefits from unchecked university power—and who is made vulnerable. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower is a wake-up call to the reality that higher education is no longer the ubiquitous public good it was once thought to be. But as Baldwin shows, there is an alternative vision for urban life, one that necessitates a more equitable relationship between our cities and our universities.
Parts of crossed-leg chairs and richly decorated fragments of bone and ivory excavated at Kenchreai, the Eastern port of Corinth, include scenes of an emperor and a miniature ivory Corinthian arcade that decorated luxurious furniture produced in late Roman Egypt.
James Ivory in Conversation is an exclusive series of interviews with a director known for the international scope of his filmmaking on several continents. Three-time Academy Award nominee for best director, responsible for such film classics as A Room with a View and The Remains of the Day, Ivory speaks with remarkable candor and wit about his more than forty years as an independent filmmaker. In this deeply engaging book, he comments on the many aspects of his world-traveling career: his growing up in Oregon (he is not an Englishman, as most Europeans and many Americans think), his early involvement with documentary films that first brought attention to him, his discovery of India, his friendships with celebrated figures here and abroad, his skirmishes with the Picasso family and Thomas Jefferson scholars, his usually candid yet at times explosive relations with actors. Supported by seventy illuminating photographs selected by Ivory himself, the book offers a wealth of previously unavailable information about the director's life and the art of making movies. James Ivory on: On the Merchant Ivory Jhabvala partnership: "I've always said that Merchant Ivory is a bit like the U. S. Govenment; I'm the President, Ismail is the Congress, and Ruth is the Supreme Court. Though Ismail and I disagree sometimes, Ruth acts as a referee, or she and I may gang up on him, or vice versa. The main thing is, no one ever truly interferes in the area of work of the other." On Shooting Mr. and Mrs. Bridge: "Who told you we had long 18 hour days? We had a regular schedule, not at all rushed, worked regular hours and had regular two-day weekends, during which the crew shopped in the excellent malls of Kansas City, Paul Newman raced cars somewhere, unknown to us and the insurance company, and I lay on a couch reading The Remains of the Day." On Jessica Tandy as Miss Birdseye in The Bostonians: "Jessica Tandy was seventy-two or something, and she felt she had to 'play' being an old woman, to 'act' an old woman. Unfortunately, I'couldn't say to her, 'You don't have to 'act' this, just 'be,' that will be sufficient.' You can't tell the former Blanche Du Bois that she's an old woman now." On Adapting E. M. Forster's novels "His was a very pleasing voice, and it was easy to follow. Why turn his books into films unless you want to do that? But I suppose my voice was there, too; it was a kind of duet, you could say, and he provided the melody." On India: "If you see my Indian movies then you get some idea of what it was that attracted me about India and Indians...any explanation would sound lamer than the thing warrants. The mood was so great and overwhelming that any explanation of it would seem physically thin....I put all my feeling about India into several Indian films, and if you know those films and like them, you see from these films what it was that attracted me to India." On whether he was influenced by Renoir in filming A Room with a View "I was certainly not influenced by Renoir in that film. But if you put some good looking women in long white dresses in a field dotted with red poppies, andthey're holding parasols, then people will say, ‘Renoir.’" On the Critics: "I came to believe that to have a powerful enemy like Pauline Kael only made me stronger. You know, like a kind of voodoo. I wonder if it worked that way in those days for any of her other victims—Woody Allen, for instance, or Stanley Kubrick." On Andy Warhol as a dinner guest: "I met him many times over the last twenty years of his life, but I can't say I knew him, which is what most people say, even those who were his intimates. Once he came to dinner with a group of his Factory friends at my apartment. I remember that he or someone else left a dirty plate, with chicken bones and knife and fork, in my bathroom wash basin. It seemed to be a symbolic gesture, to be a matter of style, and not just bad manners."
The economic prosperity of two nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century New England towns rested on factories that manufactured piano keys, billiard balls, combs, and other items made of ivory imported from East Africa. Yet while towns like Ivoryton and Deep River, Connecticut, thrived, the African ivory trade left in its wake massive human exploitation and ecological devastation. At the same time, dynamic East African engagement with capitalism and imperialism took place within these trade histories. Drawing from extensive archival and field research in New England, Great Britain, and Tanzania, Alexandra Kelly investigates the complex global legacies of the historical ivory trade. She not only explains the complexities of this trade but also analyzes Anglo-American narratives about Africa, questioning why elephants and ivory feature so centrally in those representations. From elephant conservation efforts to the cultural heritage industries in New England and East Africa, her study reveals the ongoing global repercussions of the ivory craze and will be of interest to anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and conservationists.
Ivory is big business, and in some parts of Africa elephants have been hunted almost to extinction in the quest for it. The losses to African economies have been catastrophic. Now there is an international ban on the trade and conservation is. the principal goal. This should be a matter for rejoicing, but nothing is quite so simple. The authors of this book have looked at the overall statistics, including those for countries where the elephant population is stable. They have considered the multiplicity of economic and social functions fulfilled by ensuring that elephant herds survive, tourism, a variety of ecological purpose. and, finally, as a source of ivory. They show how the careful management of elephants as a resource can best serve African interests. This book is at the cutting edge of economic thinking and provides a model for the consideration of the difficult relationship between people and wildlife. Originally published in 19990
