“This text reveals [Fontana’s] interaction with his [Tohono O’odham] neighbors and how geography and climate define life and culture in this piece of dry land. Fontana’s words introduce the reader to people and provide an excellent overview of tribal history, but no notice of this book can overlook John P. Schaefer’s photographs . . . [which] give the reader a feeling for what day-to-day life is like . . . for the 12,000 or so people who call Papaguería their homeland.”—Journal of Arizona History
“An unusual and beautiful book,” the first novel by the bestselling author of A Wrinkle in Time explores the life of a young artist (Los Angeles Times). At only ten years old, Katherine Forrester has already experienced her fair share of upheaval. It has been three years since she last saw her mother, a concert pianist whose career was cut short by a terrible accident. After a brief reunion, tragedy strikes once more, forcing Katherine from the familiarity of New York City to a foreign Swiss boarding school. Far from home, she struggles with the challenges of growing up. Stifled by her daily routine and the pettiness of her classmates, Katherine’s piano lessons with a gifted young teacher provide an anchor in the storm. After graduation, she follows in her mother’s footsteps, pursuing a career as a pianist in Greenwich Village. There, she must learn to reconcile her blossoming relationship with her fiancé with the one consistent and dominant force in her life: music. Inspired by the author’s time living among artists, The Small Rain follows Katherine’s journey from a distraught girl to an exuberant and talented woman with the breadth and poignancy that defines Madeleine L’Engle’s signature style. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Madeleine L’Engle including rare images from the author’s estate.
The gods of poetry and death descend on a house in India to vie for the soul of a wounded monkey. A bargain is struck: the monkey must tell a story, and if he can keep his audience entertained, he shall live. The result is Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Vikram Chandra's astonishing, vibrant novel. Interweaving tales of nineteenth-century India with modern America, it stands in the tradition of The Thousand and One Nights, a work of vivid imagination and a celebration of the power of storytelling itself. 'A dazzling first novel written with such originality and intensity as to be not merely drawing on myth but making it.' Sunday Times
Rain is elemental, mysterious, precious, destructive. It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of the world's water. Yet this is the first book to tell the story of rain. Cynthia Barnett's Rain begins four billion years ago with the torrents that filled the oceans, and builds to the storms of climate change. It weaves together science—the true shape of a raindrop, the mysteries of frog and fish rains—with the human story of our ambition to control rain, from ancient rain dances to the 2,203 miles of levees that attempt to straitjacket the Mississippi River. It offers a glimpse of our "founding forecaster," Thomas Jefferson, who measured every drizzle long before modern meteorology. Two centuries later, rainy skies would help inspire Morrissey’s mopes and Kurt Cobain’s grunge. Rain is also a travelogue, taking readers to Scotland to tell the surprising story of the mackintosh raincoat, and to India, where villagers extract the scent of rain from the monsoon-drenched earth and turn it into perfume. Now, after thousands of years spent praying for rain or worshiping it; burning witches at the stake to stop rain or sacrificing small children to bring it; mocking rain with irrigated agriculture and cities built in floodplains; even trying to blast rain out of the sky with mortars meant for war, humanity has finally managed to change the rain. Only not in ways we intended. As climate change upends rainfall patterns and unleashes increasingly severe storms and drought, Barnett shows rain to be a unifying force in a fractured world. Too much and not nearly enough, rain is a conversation we share, and this is a book for everyone who has ever experienced it.
First published in 1903, it contains a series of interrelated lyrical essays about the inhabitants of the American Southwest, both human and otherwise.
