Penguins, Pineapples & Pangolins

Penguins, Pineapples & Pangolins

Author: Claire Cock-Starkey

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780712356367

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In these modern times knowledge is at our fingertips and it can sometimes feel as if there is nothing new to discover. The awe and excitement from that moment has been lost because these objects and experiences have become ordinary to us. But if we travel back in time just a few hundred years, adventurers were exploring the world during a period when most people rarely travelled further than their nearest market town. Penguins, Pineapples and Pangolins captures the wonderment these intrepid explorers felt as they struggled to record their new experiences. The eyewitness accounts in this collection reveal the reactions and thoughts of Europeans as they visited new places, tasted new foods and encountered strange animals, peoples and plants for the very first time.


I Am Not a Penguin: A Pangolin's Lament

I Am Not a Penguin: A Pangolin's Lament

Author: Liz Wong

Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers

Published: 2021-01-19

Total Pages: 22

ISBN-13: 0593127420

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This hilarious story of a pangolin with an identity crisis will be loved by fans of Penguin Problems and Unicorn Thinks He's Pretty Great. Poor pangolin--he's trying to explain who he is, but all the other animals keep getting confused. You have scales--like a snake? A long tongue--like a frog? A strong scent--like a skunk? You can roll in a ball--like an armadillo? And a name that sounds a lot like...penguin? We love penguins! "No, no, no! I am not a penguin! There are no penguins here!" But then, just when it couldn't get worse, a penguin arrives!! What's a poor pangolin got to do to be understood?!


Food and World Culture [2 volumes]

Food and World Culture [2 volumes]

Author: Linda S. Watts

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2022-08-23

Total Pages: 810

ISBN-13:

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This book uses food as a lens through which to explore important matters of society and culture. In exploring why and how people eat around the globe, the text focuses on issues of health, conflict, struggle, contest, inequality, and power. Whether because of its necessity, pleasure, or ubiquity, the world of food (and its lore) proves endlessly fascinating to most people. The story of food is a narrative filled with both human striving and human suffering. However, many of today's diners are only dimly aware of the human price exacted for that comforting distance from the lived-world realities of food justice struggles. With attention to food issues ranging from local farming practices to global supply chains, this book examines how food’s history and geography remain inextricably linked to sociopolitical experiences of trauma connected with globalization, such as colonization, conquest, enslavement, and oppression. The main text is structured alphabetically around a set of 70 ingredients, from almonds to yeast. Each ingredient's story is accompanied by recipes. Along with the food profiles, the encyclopedia features sidebars. These are short discussions of topics of interest related to food, including automats, diners, victory gardens, and food at world’s fairs. This project also brings a social justice perspective to its content—weighing debates concerning food access, equity, insecurity, and politics.


Virtual Menageries

Virtual Menageries

Author: Jody Berland

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2019-04-16

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0262039605

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The close interdependency of animal emissaries and new media from early European colonial encounters with the exotic to today's proliferation of animals in digital networks. From cat videos to corporate logos, digital screens and spaces are crowded with animal bodies. In Virtual Menageries, Jody Berland examines the role of animals in the spread of global communications. Her richly illustrated study links the contemporary proliferation of animals on social media to the collection of exotic animals in the formative years of transcontinental exploration and expansion. By tracing previously unseen parallels across the history of exotic and digital menageries, Berland shows how and why animals came to bridge peoples, territories, and technologies in the expansion of colonial and capitalist cultures. Berland's genealogy of the virtual menagerie begins in 1414 when a ruler in Bengal sent a Kenyan giraffe to join a Chinese emperor's menagerie. It maps the beaver's role in the colonial conquest of Canada and examines the appearances of animals in early moving pictures. The menagerie is reinvented for the digital age when image and sound designers use parts or images of animals to ensure the affective promise and commercial spread of an emergent digital infrastructure. These animal images are emissaries that enliven and domesticate the ever-expanding field of mediation. Virtual Menageries offers a unique account of animals and animal images as mediators that encourage complicated emotional, economic, and aesthetic investment in changing practices of connection.


Lore of the Wild

Lore of the Wild

Author: Claire Cock-Starkey

Publisher:

Published: 2021-09-21

Total Pages: 76

ISBN-13: 0711260710

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Delves into nature folklore from around the world in six topical categories, featuring for each category one traditional tale and extensive ancient lore about that topic.


A Friend of the Earth

A Friend of the Earth

Author: T. C. Boyle

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2011-08-01

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 1408826836

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_______________________ 'A comedy with teeth ... razor sharp and darkly funny' (TIMES) 'Boyle's prose is so good and his imagination so fertile that after a while you just sit back and are swept along' (TELEGRAPH) 'Surreal, daring and compassionate. Easily one of the best books of the year' (MAIL) 'Superb ... if Boyle was from this side of the pond, this is the book they'd all have to beat for the Booker Prize' (SUNDAY TIMES) It's 2025, and 75-year-old environmentalist and retired eco-terrorist Ty Tierwater is eking out a bleak living managing a pop star's private zoo. It is the last one in southern California, and vital for the cloning of its captive species. Once, Ty was so serious about environmental causes that as a radical activist committed to Earth Forever! he endangered the lives of both his daughter, Sierra, and his wife, Andrea. Now, when he's just trying to survive in a world cursed by storm and drought, Andrea re-enters his life. Frightening, funny, surreal and gripping, T.C. Boyle's story is both a modern morality tale, and a provocative vision of the future.


Cute as an Axolotl

Cute as an Axolotl

Author: Jess Keating

Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers

Published: 2018-08-28

Total Pages: 49

ISBN-13: 1524764477

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"Cats of Instagram" meets National Geographic in this hilarious picture book about nature's cutest weirdos from the author of Pink Is for Blobfish! The Internet pretty much runs on cute animal photos, but "cute" is so much more than clickbait kittens and insta-pups. Cute is for feathery-gilled axolotls (pronounced: ax-uh-LOT-ulz), shy pygmy hippos, poisonous blue dragons, and armored pangolins. All of these animals are cute, but they've also adapted remarkable ways to survive in their unique environments. With her signature blend of humor and zoological know-how, Pink Is for Blobfish author Jess Keating shows how cute animals can be more than just a pretty face in this latest installment of the World of Weird Animals.


Unconventional Warfare (Special Forces, Book 1)

Unconventional Warfare (Special Forces, Book 1)

Author: Chris Lynch

Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

Published: 2018-11-27

Total Pages: 122

ISBN-13: 0545861632

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"All the sizzle, chaos, noise and scariness of war is clay in the hands of ace storyteller Lynch." -- Kirkus Reviews for the World War II series Discover the secret missions behind America's greatest conflicts.Danny Manion has been fighting his entire life. Sometimes with his fists. Sometimes with his words. But when his actions finally land him in real trouble, he can't fight the judge who offers him a choice: jail... or the army.Turns out there's a perfect place for him in the US military: the Studies and Observation Group (SOG), an elite volunteer-only task force comprised of US Air Force Commandos, Army Green Berets, Navy SEALS, and even a CIA agent or two. With the SOG's focus on covert action and psychological warfare, Danny is guaranteed an unusual tour of duty, and a hugely dangerous one. Fortunately, the very same qualities that got him in trouble at home make him a natural-born commando in a secret war. Even if almost nobody knows he's there.National Book Award finalist Chris Lynch begins a new, explosive fiction series based on the real-life, top-secret history of US black ops.


Bodleianalia

Bodleianalia

Author: Claire Cock-Starkey

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781851242528

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Which is the smallest book in the Bodleian Library? Who complained when their secret pen name was revealed in the library's catalogue? How many miles of shelving are there in the Book Storage Facility? What is the story behind the library's refusal to lend a book to King Charles I? And, what is fasciculing? The answers to these questions and many more can be found inside this intriguing miscellaneous collection of curious facts and stories about the Bodleian Library in Oxford.Home to more than 12 million books and a vast array of treasures including the Gutenberg bible, J.R.R. Tolkien's hand-painted watercolours for 'The Hobbit', Shakespeare's First Folio and four thirteenth-century copies of Magna Carta, the Bodleian Library is one of the most magnificent libraries in the world with a fascinating history.'Bodleianalia' delights in uncovering some of the lesser known facts about Britain's oldest university library. Through a combination of lists, statistics, and bitesize nuggets of information, it reveals many of the quirks of fate, eccentric characters, and remarkable events which have contributed to the making of this renowned institution. The perfect book for trivia-lovers and bibliophiles, it also offers readers a behind-the-scenes peek into the complex workings of a modern, world-class library in the twenty-first century.


Popish Midwife

Popish Midwife

Author: Annelisa Christensen

Publisher: eBook Partnership

Published: 2016-08-01

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1783019670

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In seventeenth-century London, thirteen years after the plague and twelve years after the Great Fire, the restoration of King Charles II has dulled the memory of Cromwell's puritan rule, yet fear and suspicion are rife. Religious turmoil is rarely far from tipping the scales into hysteria.Elizabeth Cellier, a bold and outspoken midwife, regularly visits Newgate Prison to distribute alms to victims of religious persecution. There she falls in with the charming Captain Willoughby, a debtor, whom she enlists to gather information about crimes against prisoners, so she might involve herself in petitioning the king in their name.''Tis a plot, Madam, of the direst sort.' With these whispered words Willoughby draws Elizabeth unwittingly into the infamous Popish Plot and soon not even the fearful warnings of her husband, Pierre, can loosen her bond with it.This is the incredible true story of one woman ahead of her time and her fight against prejudice and injustice.