This much is clear to me. If I can't change my own life in response to the greatest challenge now facing our human family, who can? And if I won't make the effort to try, why should anyone else? So I've decided to start at home, and begin with myself. The question is no longer whether I must respond. The question is whether I can turn my response into an adventure. After realizing the gaping hole between his convictions about climate change and his own carbon footprint, Kurt Hoelting embarked on a yearlong experiment to rediscover the heart of his own home: He traded his car and jet travel for a kayak, a bicycle, and his own two feet, traveling a radius of 100 kilometers from his home in Puget Sound. This "circumference of home" proved more than enough. Part quest and part guidebook for change, Hoelting's journey is an inspiring reminder that what we need really is close at hand, and that the possibility for adventure lies around every bend.
This electrifying debut thriller delivers a gripping tale of Big Brother gone mad amid a modern world on the verge of endless war. Brimming with high-powered suspense, here is the brilliant, frighteningly believable story of three masterminds locked on a breathtaking collision cours—the outcome of which will determine the fate of the United States. Circumference of Darkness Twenty-two-year-old Jeannie Reese is a computer wunderkind—and the top architect of next-generation security for the Department of Defense. Her latest brainchild is IRIN, the most powerful surveillance technology ever developed. To date, IRIN has remained ultraclassified and inactive. But on the day a shocking act of terrorism strikes U.S. shores, the presidential order comes to launch Jeannie’s creation against the dark forces behind the attack. Known only as Phr33k, forty-one-year-old John Fagan is a legendary, reclusive computer hacker. For years he has expertly hidden himself while operating freely within the shadows of the Internet’s background noise. He has remained in complete seclusion despite his infamy as the author of a slew of massive electronic crimes—and despite his long-ago, now eerily prophetic, scenarios of terrorist warfare against America. Under Jeannie’s direction, IRIN gathers and analyzes endless data—and unearths Phr33k. If she is to stop the next stage of a terror campaign clearly begun years before, Jeannie will have to find the überhacker; but that is only the beginning. For she soon discovers that Phr33k is being held by the leader of a vast terrorist network, who now plans to use this unique genius to conceive and deliver his final, fatal blow: a devastating nationwide wave of unparalleled destruction. For his part, Phr33k is used to working alone. But all that will have to change. He has a new challenge, one unlike any he’s faced before: how to provide Jeannie Reese with one outrageous, impossible shot to short-circuit the perfect, unstoppable scheme he so masterfully—and so unwillingly—helped to create.
How do you measure the size of the planet you're standing on? "Circumference" is the story of what happened when one man asked himself that very question. Nicholas Nicastro brings to life one of history's greatest experiments when an ancient Greek named Eratosthenes first accurately determined the distance around the spherical earth. In this fascinating narrative history, Nicastro takes a look at a deceptively simple but stunning achievement made by one man, millennia ago, with only the simplest of materials at his disposal. How was he able to measure the land at a time when distance was more a matter of a shrug and a guess at the time spent on a donkey's back? How could he be so confident in the assumptions that underlay his calculations: that the earth was round and the sun so far away that its rays struck the ground in parallel lines? Was it luck or pure scientific genius? Nicastro brings readers on a trip into a long-vanished world that prefigured modernity in many ways, where neither Eratosthenes' reputation, nor the validity of his method, nor his leadership of the Great Library of Alexandria were enough to convince all his contemporaries about the dimensions of the earth. Eratosthenes' results were debated for centuries until he was ultimately vindicated almost 2000 years later, during the great voyages of exploration. "Circumference" is a compelling scientific detective story that transports readers back to a time when humans had no idea how big their world was--and the fate of a man who dared to measure the incomprehensible.
A colorfully illustrated biography of the Greek philosopher and scientist Eratosthenes, who compiled the first geography book and accurately measured the globe's circumference.
Twenty-eight contemporary American poets reflect on the poems that have most influenced their own creative vision and offer their best new works in this examination of poetic expression. Each entry includes a new poem from the author, the text of a poem or poems that particularly influenced the development of the new poem, and an essay about that influence. The dialogue created between the new works of the poets and the poems that they love provides insight into the poetic process and speaks to the meaning and endurance of great art.
A 2018 NAACP Image Award nominee and an NPR Best Book of 2017, a moving African-American family drama of love, devotion, and Alzheimer’s disease. Diane Tate never expected to slowly lose her talented husband to the debilitating effects of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. As a respected family court judge, she’s spent her life making tough calls, but when her sixty-eight-year-old husband’s health worsens and Diane is forced to move him into an assisted living facility, it seems her world is spinning out of control. As Gregory’s memory wavers and fades, Diane and her children must reexamine their connection to the man he once was—and learn to love the man he has become. For Diane’ daughter Lauren, it means honoring her father by following in his footsteps as a successful architect. For her son Sean, it means finding a way to repair the strained relationship with his father before it’s too late. Supporting her children in a changing landscape, Diane remains resolute in her goal to keep her family together—until her husband finds love with another resident of the facility. Suddenly faced with an uncertain future, Diane must choose a new path—and discover her own capacity for love.
Selected as a winner of the National Poetry Series by Dean Young John Ashbery called Reveilles, Nathan Hoks’s debut book, a “dazzling” collection and Hoks a poet whose “fine gradations of observation turn the reader into a barometer of strong subtleties like those of the weather, that can be minute even as they affect us powerfully.” The poems in Hoks’s new book, The Narrow Circle, perform a similar magic. In associative lyrics and fabulist prose, Hoks explores inner and outer experiences. The poems frequently focus on the body as a membrane where everything becomes inside-out—where the “face disperses with angels of teeth and loam,” where “sky comes out of the mouth,” where a giant green worm “burrows a hole in the head,” and where the heart is a vestibule that cannot be closed. Suites of pictures within the text further delineate this inward-outward pull, offering visualizations of interior voices and sketches of exterior shadows.
Translated by Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu. Chinese writer Lao Yang's PEE POEMS go deep and dark--with deceptive lightness--into the metaphysical and the social, offering insight and humor along the way. Written over the past decade, this iconoclastic collection is the first of Yang's to be translated from Chinese into English. PEE POEMS is comprised of meditations, fragments, lyrics, and aphorisms, in dialogue with Chan hermit poets and Zen tricksters, with radical grassroots activism, experimental music, and Dada. Yang regards the body's most basic functions and desires as philosophical problems, restoring garbage and bladder-control to the field of politics, inhabiting both epochal and local time. In PEE POEMS vocabulary fights itself, while impossible opposites are lovingly conjoined. Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu, poets both and friends of the author, translate Yang with brave tenderness, revealing a thinker whose observations are as simple and as rich as the languages we speak. In the mythos of Chinese ethnogenesis, the sage king Yu countered the great flood by diverting it into rural irrigation. The contemporary Chinese poet Lao Yang adopts a more irreverent strategy for liquid transport, urination (with an emphasis on the nation). This apocalyptic book reads like the waste journals of a survivalist on the run from carnivorous leviathans, God, and the Chinese state. Calling to mind the work of Raul Zurita and Kim Hyesoon, Yang's PEE POEMS consist of crystalline scatalogy, expressions of a profane piety. I can't quite recall reading another poetry book that felt simultaneously this elemental and funny.--Ken Chen In these irreverent poems, we see a fearless spirit in confronting the darkness and absurdity around the poet. An extraordinary collection.--Ha Jin Burrowing trinkets of sound and fury, these poems shoot inward like velvet claws, evoking a courageous loneliness and despair that spits out flowers in return.--Rob Mazurek These poems eat themselves. There's nothing for me to say. Nonetheless I send them to everyone I know. They're all shaking their heads saying this is so good. These poems are so good I can't point, I can only send them out. They are out there. Truly, yay.--Eileen Myles These crisp, lean and clean words of Yang conjure up a landscape situated in uncertain times and with movable spiritual boundaries. Determined to resist the powerful tides of propaganda from political and commercial life, Yang's poems here, like his struggle in the real world, intrigue, provoke and challenge simultaneously.--Zhang Er Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies.
