From the bestselling author of Mexican Gothic comes a novella about the price of dreams in a ravaged near-future. “A subtle and powerful tale of Mars, movies, and Mexico City which stands amongst the best novellas of the past few years.” —Jonathan Strahan, Locus Amelia dreams of Mars. The Mars of the movies and the imagination, an endless bastion of opportunities for a colonist with some guts. But she’s trapped in Mexico City, enduring the drudgery of an unkind metropolis, working as a rent-a-friend, selling her blood to old folks with money who hope to rejuvenate themselves with it, enacting a fractured love story. And yet there’s Mars, at the edge of the silver screen, of life.
Space and time on earth are regulated by the prime meridian, 0°, which is, by convention, based at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. But the meridian’s location in southeast London is not a simple legacy of Britain’s imperial past. Before the nineteenth century, more than twenty-five different prime meridians were in use around the world, including Paris, Beijing, Greenwich, Washington, and the location traditional in Europe since Ptolemy, the Canary Islands. Charles Withers explains how the choice of Greenwich to mark 0° longitude solved complex problems of global measurement that had engaged geographers, astronomers, and mariners since ancient times. Withers guides readers through the navigation and astronomy associated with diverse meridians and explains the problems that these cartographic lines both solved and created. He shows that as science and commerce became more global and as railway and telegraph networks tied the world closer together, the multiplicity of prime meridians led to ever greater confusion in the coordination of time and the geographical division of space. After a series of international scientific meetings, notably the 1884 International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC, Greenwich emerged as the most pragmatic choice for a global prime meridian, though not unanimously or without acrimony. Even after 1884, other prime meridians remained in use for decades. As Zero Degrees shows, geographies of the prime meridian are a testament to the power of maps, the challenges of accurate measurement on a global scale, and the role of scientific authority in creating the modern world.
These poems are of a seer - unwrapping time, being, the Change we are igniting. The considerations are hard-won -- who we are, what is coming upon us in this age, the passage we are entering and the exit - the seer knows it. There are no exhortations, no longings or forecasts, only the seeing, and the forthcoming Being that envelopes us more and more, "until all that is left of us." We need this wisdom book, clear elixirs from the Source. True mind-beauty, carved with Humanity - beam, everyone must touch this volume in order to traverse the present age. Bravissimo! --Juan Herrera, 21st Poet Laureate of the United States
The explosion of a hidden land mine 6,000 miles away should have had no effect on Jenna. She neither knew anyone fighting in the Iraq War nor felt any strong political connection to the quagmire that was daily splashed across the newspapers' front pages. But the running loop segment on CNN, and the photojournalist peering out from every frame, brought Jenna back to another life and the boy who challenged her to be more. Danny was gone and the what ifs that she had years ago suppressed, came flooding back. Married with a young daughter, Jenna lives in tiny Meridian and works part time at the local newspaper penning to a readership which worries more about landscapes than landmines. Until Danny's death, Jenna had considered her life full. But now, she wonders if within the cocoon of suburbia, she hasn't allowed herself to become the very person against whom Danny once railed. And when another man challenges her to try more, to be more, Jenna is reminded of the potential she once saw in herself and for her life-all the paths she did not take. As Jenna sets off in a in a directionless quest for answers to questions she's only just beginning to formulate, she wonders if it isn't too late to take that other road.
An invaluable resource for those interested in the history of the celebrated Prime Meridian, this book is packed with information on the different ways in which 0° longitude has been marked across the world. It explains the origins of longitude and what the ability to determine it has meant for navigation.
25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.
A culinary tour of Meridian, Mississippi's, "Queen City," this cookbook for all occasions includes delicious gourmet fare as well as easy, everyday dishes even children will love. Illustrated by nationally renowned artist Greg Cartmell, this book also contains a collection of regional game recipes and a children's party-planning section.
The dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of one man's forty-year obsession to find a solution to the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day--"the longitude problem." Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that "the longitude problem" was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day-and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration had been literally lost at sea as soon as they lost sight of land. Thousands of lives and the increasing fortunes of nations hung on a resolution. One man, John Harrison, in complete opposition to the scientific community, dared to imagine a mechanical solution-a clock that would keep precise time at sea, something no clock had ever been able to do on land. Longitude is the dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of Harrison's forty-year obsession with building his perfect timekeeper, known today as the chronometer. Full of heroism and chicanery, it is also a fascinating brief history of astronomy, navigation, and clockmaking, and opens a new window on our world.
