JACK FLETCHER IS ON THE RUN With no sensei to guide him, he has just his wits and his swords against many new and unknown enemies, as he journeys along the treacherous road to the port of Nagasaki and perhaps home... But the Shogun's samurai are hot on his trail. Barely escaping their clutches, Jack runs headlong into a trap. Kidnapped by ninja and led to their village deep in the mountains, Jack has no means of escape. The only question is who will kill him first - the ninja or samurai?
Humankind confronts its fraught relationship with the natural world in the stories of Ring of Earth, where William Woolfitt traces the history of survival and resistance in his home region of Appalachia. Woolfitt’s characters find ways to reclaim, repossess, and re-sacralize what’s been taken from them, to reckon with the destruction of their environments, cultures, homes, and bodies. “The Sinks of Gandy” is based on historical accounts of a woman who shot one of the last eastern elks near Spruce Knob in the 1830s; in “Fire Season,” a dying father watches through his window the red spruce forests burning. Clay eaters, orphans, child miners, immigrant laborers, and the victims of illegal sterilizations are among the survivors in Ring of Earth who bear witness to our broken land as they search for the hope and the mystery that might still be “running and running beneath the shell of the earth.”
The beauty of the seasons is shown through the eyes of nature. The circle of seasons is presented in a poetic way--deeply rooted to the earth and connected to nature.
Larry Chao, experimenting with gravity control and the manufacture of black holes on a research station on Pluto, is dumbfounded when his instruments show planet Earth to have disappeared. But the horror has only just begun. Could the entire Solar System be about to disappear?
Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novel Four travelers come to the ringworld. . . Louis Wu: human and old; bored with having lived too fully for far too many years. Seeking a challenge, and all too capable of handling it. Nessus: a trembling coward, a puppeteer with a built-in survival pattern of nonviolence. Except that this particular puppeteer is insane. Teela Brown: human; a wide-eyed youngster with no allegiances, no experience, no abilities. And all the luck in the world. Speaker-To-Animals: kzin; large, orange-furred, and carnivorous. And one of the most savage life-forms known in the galaxy. Why did these disparate individuals come together? How could they possibly function together? And where, in the name of anything sane, were they headed?
Few settings in literature are as widely known or celebrated as J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth. The natural landscape plays a major role in nearly all of Tolkien's major works, and readers have come to view the geography of this fictional universe as integral to understanding and enjoying Tolkien's works. And in laying out this continent, Tolkien paid special attention to its plant life; in total, over 160 plants are explicitly mentioned and described as a part of Middle-Earth. Nearly all of these plants are real species, and many of the fictional plants are based on scientifically grounded botanic principles. In Flora of Middle Earth: Plants of Tolkien's Legendarium, botanist Walter Judd gives a detailed species account of every plant found in Tolkien's universe, complete with the etymology of the plant's name, a discussion of its significance within Tolkien's work, a description of the plant's distribution and ecology, and an original hand-drawn illustration by artist Graham Judd in the style of a woodcut print. Among the over three-thousand vascular plants Tolkien would have seen in the British Isles, the authors show why Tolkien may have selected certain plants for inclusion in his universe over others, in terms of their botanic properties and traditional uses. The clear, comprehensive alphabetical listing of each species, along with the visual identification key of the plant drawings, adds to the reader's understanding and appreciation of the Tolkien canon.
This absorbing guide to the mind behind Middle-earth will introduce or remind readers of the abundance that exists in Tolkien's thought and imagination. +
'The Fellowship of the Ring' is the first part of JRR Tolkien's epic masterpiece 'The Lord of the Rings'. This 50th anniversary edition features special packaging and includes the definitive edition of the text.|PB
It is well known that J.R.R. Tolkien published The Hobbit in 1937 and The Lord of the Rings in 1954-5. What may be less known is that he continued to write about Middle-earth in the decades that followed, right up until the years before his death in 1973. For him, Middle-earth was part of an entire world to be explored, and the writings in The Nature of Middle-earth reveal the journeys that he took as he sought to better understand his unique creation. He discusses sweeping themes as profound as Elvish immortality and reincarnation, and the Powers of the Valar, to the more earth-bound subjects of the lands and beasts of Númenor and the geography of the Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor.
