The Flight of the Iguana

The Flight of the Iguana

Author: David Quammen

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 1998-02-16

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 0684836262

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The author brings to life the weird and wonderful pageant of nature in essays ranging from tales of vegetarian piranha to dogs without voices.


The Flight of the Iguana

The Flight of the Iguana

Author: David Quammen

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2012-10-16

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1476728739

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The award-winning author of The Song of the Dodo examines weird and wonderful aspects of nature in this collection of wise, witty, and insightful essays. From tales of vegetarian piranha fish and voiceless dogs to the scientific search for the genes that threaten to destroy the cheetah, David Quammen captures the natural world with precision. Throughout, he illuminates the surprising intricacies of the natural world, and our human attitudes towards those intricacies. A distinguished essayist, Quammen’s reporting is masterful and thought provoking and his curiosity and fascination with the world of living things is infectious.


The Flight of the Vernacular

The Flight of the Vernacular

Author: Maria Cristina Fumagalli

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9789042014763

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In this book, Dante, Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott engage in an eloquent and meaningful conversation. Dante's capacity for being faithful to the collective historical experience and true to the recognitions of the emerging self, the permanent immediacy of his poetry, the healthy state of his language, which is so close to the object that the two are identified, and his adamant refusal to get lost in the wide and open sea of abstraction - all these are shown to have affected, and to continue to affect, Heaney's and Walcott's work. The Flight of the Vemacular, however, is not only a record of what Dante means to the two contemporary poets but also a cogent study of Heaney's and Walcott's attitude towards language and of their views on the function of poetry in our time. Heaney's programmatic endeavour to be adept at dialect and Walcott's idiosyncratic redefinition of the vernacular in poetry as tone rather than as dialect - apart from having Dantean overtones - are presented as being associated with the belief that poetry is a social reality and that langauge is a living alphabet bound to the opened ground of the world.


The Thing with Feathers

The Thing with Feathers

Author: Noah Strycker

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2015-03-03

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 159463341X

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"[Strycker] thinks like a biologist but writes like a poet." -- Wall Street Journal An entertaining and profound look at the lives of birds, illuminating their surprising world—and deep connection with humanity. Birds are highly intelligent animals, yet their intelligence is dramatically different from our own and has been little understood. As we learn more about the secrets of bird life, we are unlocking fascinating insights into memory, relationships, game theory, and the nature of intelligence itself. The Thing with Feathers explores the astonishing homing abilities of pigeons, the good deeds of fairy-wrens, the influential flocking abilities of starlings, the deft artistry of bowerbirds, the extraordinary memories of nutcrackers, the lifelong loves of albatrosses, and other mysteries—revealing why birds do what they do, and offering a glimpse into our own nature. Drawing deep from personal experience, cutting-edge science, and colorful history, Noah Strycker spins captivating stories about the birds in our midst and shares the startlingly intimate coexistence of birds and humans. With humor, style, and grace, he shows how our view of the world is often, and remarkably, through the experience of birds. You’ve never read a book about birds like this one.


The Boilerplate Rhino

The Boilerplate Rhino

Author: David Quammen

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2001-04-17

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0743200322

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In 1981 David Quammen began what might be every freelance writer's dream: a monthly column for Outside magazine in which he was given free rein to write about anything that interested him in the natural world. His column was called "Natural Acts," and for the next fifteen years he delighted Outside's readers with his fascinating ruminations on the world around us. The Boilerplate Rhino brings together twenty-six of Quammen's most thoughtful and engaging essays from that column, none previously printed in any of his earlier books. In lucid, penetrating, and often quirkily idiosyncratic prose, David Quammen takes his readers with him as he explores the world. His travels lead him to rattlesnake handlers in Texas; a lizard specialist in Baja; the dinosaur museum in Jordan, Montana; and halfway across Indonesia in search of the perfect Durian fruit. He ponders the history of nutmeg in the southern Moluccas, meditates on bioluminescent beetles while soaking in the waters of the Amazon, and delivers "The Dope on Eggs" from a chicken ranch near his hometown in Montana. Quammen's travels are always jumping-off points to explore the rich and sometimes horrifying tension between humankind and the natural world, in all its complexity and ambivalence. The result is another irrepressible assortment of ideas to explore, conundrums to contemplate, and wondrous creatures to behold.


Going Places

Going Places

Author: Robert Burgin

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2013-01-08

Total Pages: 837

ISBN-13:

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Successfully navigate the rich world of travel narratives and identify fiction and nonfiction read-alikes with this detailed and expertly constructed guide. Just as savvy travelers make use of guidebooks to help navigate the hundreds of countries around the globe, smart librarians need a guidebook that makes sense of the world of travel narratives. Going Places: A Reader's Guide to Travel Narratives meets that demand, helping librarians assist patrons in finding the nonfiction books that most interest them. It will also serve to help users better understand the genre and their own reading interests. The book examines the subgenres of the travel narrative genre in its seven chapters, categorizing and describing approximately 600 titles according to genres and broad reading interests, and identifying hundreds of other fiction and nonfiction titles as read-alikes and related reads by shared key topics. The author has also identified award-winning titles and spotlighted further resources on travel lit, making this work an ideal guide for readers' advisors as well a book general readers will enjoy browsing.


Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams

Author: Robert Gross

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-09-19

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1135673616

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Tennessee Williams' plays are performed around the world, and are staples of the standard American repertory. His famous portrayals of women engage feminist critics, and as America's leading gay playwright from the repressive postwar period, through Stonewall, to the growth of gay liberation, he represents an important and controversial figure for queer theorists. Gross and his contributors have included all of his plays, a chronology, introduction and bibliography.


Ten Million Aliens

Ten Million Aliens

Author: Simon Barnes

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2015-02-17

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 1476730350

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"Originally published in 2014 in Great Britain by Short Books."--Title page verso.