The Alpine Casanovas
The Alpine Casanovas

Author: Toni Davidson

Publisher: Cargo Publishing

Published: 2015-09-14

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1910449199

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The Alpine Casanovas is a stunning, sophisticated tour de force of sex, drugs, violence and death, exploring the lives of those caught between East and West. The Amerasian Beat and the Eurasian Quyn share the same heritage - both are half Vietnamese. Beat is a star of Asian action movies who lives in the US, relying on sex, drugs and acclaim to survive. Whilst filming in Vietnam he fakes his own death and then watches the media circus from the refuge of a chalet high in the mountains. Quyn is the product of an adulterous affair between his father, a bootlegger, and a Vietnamese refugee. Brought up in the family barn, when Quyn’s father immolates, Quyn is left itinerant. He drifts through corrosive casual jobs before returning to the mountain, building a treehouse close to his birthplace. Toni Davidson follows his acclaimed novels Scar Culture and My Gun Was As Tall As Me with his most accomplished and mature work to date; a bold, challenging and timely exploration of the loss of heritage, identity and community. As Davidson weaves a beguiling and complex web, both men are driven to near madness by the circumstances of their births, culminating in an explosive, shocking climax.

Adventurer
Adventurer

Author: Leo Damrosch

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2022-01-01

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 0300248288

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A fast-paced narrative about the world-famous libertine Giacomo Casanova, from celebrated biographer Leo Damrosch"Fully succeeds in communicating that 'vivid presentness, ' that 'joyful eagerness' for life, which is what keeps us reading Casanova--and reading about him."--Gregory Dowling, Wall Street Journal "A nuanced, deftly contextualized biography of an adventurer, an opportunist, and a man of voracious appetites . . . another top-notch work from Damrosch."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review) The life of the iconic libertine Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) has never been told in the depth it deserves. An alluring representative of the Enlightenment's shadowy underside, Casanova was an aspiring priest, an army officer, a fortune teller, a con man, a magus, a violinist, a mathematician, a Masonic master, an entrepreneur, a diplomat, a gambler, a spy--and the first to tell his own story. In his vivid autobiography Histoire de Ma Vie, he recorded at least a hundred and twenty love affairs, as well as dramatic sagas of duels, swindles, arrests, and escapes. He knew kings and an empress, Catherine the Great, and most of the famous writers of the time, including Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin. Drawing on seldom used materials, including the original French and Italian primary sources, and probing deeply into the psychology, self-conceptions, and self-deceptions of one of the world's most famous con men and seducers, Leo Damrosch offers a gripping, mature, and devastating account of an Enlightenment man, freed from the bounds of moral convictions.

Vegetation-based Degradation and Restoration on the Alpine Grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau
Vegetation-based Degradation and Restoration on the Alpine Grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau

Author: Yanfu Bai

Publisher: Frontiers Media SA

Published: 2024-08-13

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 2832553109

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Known as the “roof of the world,” the Tibetan Plateau is the highest and largest plateau on Earth. Tibetan Plateau hosts several mountain ecosystems characterized by high elevations, cold conditions, and a wide range in water availability. Its unique physical and geographical environment includes ecosystems typical for alpine regions, classified as alpine grasslands, which account for 50-70% of the total land area of the Tibetan plateau. Most of these grasslands contain fragile tundra-like environments which are seriously affected by anthropogenic modifications and whose restoration presents a challenge. These natural grassland types include alpine deserts, alpine steppes, alpine meadows, and alpine swamp meadows along precipitation gradients, as well as the transition types between them. Alpine grasslands remain subject to severe degradation by multiple factors, mainly overgrazing and climate warming. As a result, grasslands exhibit a decreased capacity to support biodiversity and complexity, and more generally, ecosystem functions. Therefore, these changes also affect social and recreational activities and restrict access to clean water and food by local communities.

Casanova
Casanova

Author: Laurence Bergreen

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2016-11-01

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 1476716528

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“Sexy, surprising, funny, insightful, and wildly entertaining” (Huffington Post)—the definitive biography of Giacomo Casanova, the impoverished boy who became the famous writer, notorious libertine, and self-invented genius in decadent eighteenth-century Europe. Today, “Casanova” is a synonym for “great lover,” yet the real story of this remarkable figure is little known. A figure straight out of a Henry Fielding novel, Giacomo Casanova was erotic, brilliant, impulsive, and desperate for recognition; a self-destructive genius. Over the course of his lifetime, he claimed to have seduced more than one hundred women, among them married women, young women in convents, girls just barely in their teens, women of high and low birth alike. Abandoned by his mother, an actress and courtesan, Casanova was raised by his illiterate grandmother, coming of age in a Venice filled with spies and political intrigue. He was intellectually curious and read forbidden books, for which he was jailed. He staged a dramatic escape from Venice’s notorious prison, I Piombi, the only person known to have done so. He then fled to France, ingratiated himself at the royal court, and invented the national lottery that still exists to this day. He crisscrossed Europe, landing for a while in St. Petersburg, where he was admitted to the court of Catherine the Great. He corresponded with Voltaire and met Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte—assisting them as they composed the timeless opera Don Giovanni. And he wrote what many consider the greatest memoir of the era, the twelve-volume Story of My Life. Laurence Bergreen’s Casanova recounts this astonishing life in rich, intimate detail, and at the same time, paints a dazzling portrait of eighteenth-century Europe, filled with a cast characters from serving girls to kings and courtiers, “great fun for any history lover” (Kirkus Reviews).