With The Glass Globe, celebrated poet Margaret Gibson completes a trilogy distinguished by its meditative focus on the author’s experience of her late husband’s Alzheimer’s disease. In this new collection, she blends elegies of personal bereavement with elegies for the earth during the ongoing global crisis wrought by climate change. Gibson’s poems personalize the vastness of climate catastrophe while simultaneously enlarging personal grief beyond the limits of self-absorption. A work of great compassion and vision, The Glass Globe is a necessary, heartbreaking book from one of our most compelling poets.
Eleven-year-old Mary Tucker dreams of visiting the Amazon. But if her father, a museum curator, has his way, she might be a grandmother before she ever gets the chance. One day, while mischievously exploring the museum's warehouse with her brother Ike and best friend Helen, Mary stumbles across an old travel trunk belonging to her grandfather. Inside, they discover an nondescript glass globe. Curious about the simple object, Mary touches the globe, and is shocked when the room is suddenly consumed by the most amazing view of Earth. The magnificent globe lets the friends zoom closer and closer toward the earth's surface, eventually bringing them close enough to touch the trees. That's when the globe entirely disappears, and they find themselves falling. Suddenly, they're far from home, in place that's either a paradise, or the place where they will die. Sleep, water, and food become precious and scarce. A native tribe may hold the keys to their survival as well as clues to help them get back home. But it won't be easy. The rain forest is a big place, and when others find out what the globe can do, Mary, Ike and Helen will need a plan, allies, and a little luck.
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility, an exhilarating novel set at the glittering intersection of two seemingly disparate events—the exposure of a massive criminal enterprise and the mysterious disappearance of a woman from a ship at sea. “The perfect novel ... Freshly mysterious.” —The Washington Post Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby's glass wall: Why don’t you swallow broken glass. High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis's billion-dollar business is really nothing more than a game of smoke and mirrors. When his scheme collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call. In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, service in luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison. Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives. Look for Emily St. John Mandel’s bestselling new novel, Sea of Tranquility!
Discover an unforgettable holiday treasure in Sheila Roberts' heartwarming tale of love and laughter, magic and miracles, friendship and coming home... On a blustery afternoon, Kylie Gray wanders into an antique shop and buys an enchanting snow globe. "There's a story behind that snow globe," the antique dealer tells her. The original owner, he explains, was a German toymaker who lost his wife and son right before Christmas. When the grieving widower received the handcrafted snow globe as a Christmas gift, he saw the image of a beautiful woman beneath the glass—a woman who would come into his life, mend his broken heart and bring him back to the world of the living. For years, the snow globe has passed from generation to generation, somehow always landing in the hands of a person in special need of a Christmas miracle. Kiley could use a miracle herself. This year, all she wants for Christmas is someone to love. A hopeful shake leads her on an adventure that makes a believer out of her. When Kylie shares the story of the snow globe with her best friends—two women with problems of their own—they don't believe it. But they're about to discover that at Christmastime, sometimes the impossible becomes possible and miracles really do come true.
Waking Up to the Earth, edited by Connecticut's Poet Laureate Margaret Gibson, is an anthology of poems by Connecticut poets who write of their relationships with the earth in a time of global climate crisis. The scope of the poems goes far beyond Connecticut to the whole ecosystem we humans share. With praise and wonder, and sometimes with grief or anger, the poems in this collection pay close attention to our planet and its inhabitants, its forests and oceans, its creatures: turtles and dung beetles, bats and bobcats, oak trees, orchards, and rivers. In a time of climate crisis, the poems in this anthology ask everyone to wake up to the earth, and to cherish it.
WINNER OF THE 2017 NASW SCIENCE IN SOCIETY JOURNALISM AWARD A FINALIST FOR THE 2017 PEN/E. O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST SCIENCE BOOK OF THE YEAR “[A] curiously edifying book.” —The New York Times Book Review “With the taut suspense of a spy novel, Voigt paints a vivid world of murder, black market deals, and habitat destruction surrounding a fish that's considered, ironically, to be a good-luck charm.” —Discover “[An] immensely satisfying story, full of surprises and suspense....Things get weird fast.” —The Wall Street Journal An intrepid journalist’s quest to find a wild Asian arowana—the world’s most expensive aquarium fish—takes her on a global tour in this “engaging tale of obsession and perseverance…and an enthralling look at the intersection of science, commercialism, and conservationism” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). A young man is murdered for his pet fish. An Asian tycoon buys a single specimen for $150,000. Meanwhile, a pet detective chases smugglers through the streets of New York. With “the taut suspense of a spy novel” (Discover) The Dragon Behind the Glass tells the story of a fish like none other. Treasured as a status symbol believed to bring good luck, the Asian arowana, or “dragon fish,” is a dramatic example of a modern paradox: the mass-produced endangered species. While hundreds of thousands are bred in captivity, the wild fish as become a near-mythical creature. From the South Bronx to Borneo and beyond, journalist Emily Voigt follows the trail of the arowana to learn its fate in nature. “A fresh, lively look at an obsessive desire to own a piece of the wild” (Kirkus Reviews), The Dragon Behind the Glass traces our fascination with aquarium fish back to the era of exploration when naturalists stood on the cutting edge of modern science. In an age when freshwater fish now comprise one of the most rapidly vanishing groups of animals, Voigt unearths a surprising truth behind the arowana’s rise to fame—one that calls into question how we protect the world’s rarest species. “Not since Candace Millard published The River of Doubt has the world of the Amazon, Borneo, Myanmar, and other exotic locations been so colorfully portrayed as it is now in Emily Voigt’s The Dragon Behind the Glass…a must-read” (Library Journal, starred review).
Much may be gathered, indirectly, from the arguments in these pages, as to the real nature of the Earth on which we live and of the heavenly bodies which were created for us. The reader is requested to be patient in this matter and not expect a whole flood of light to burst in upon him at once, through the dense clouds of opposition and prejudice which hang all around. Old ideas have to be gotten rid of, by some people, before they can entertain the new; and this will especially be the case in the matter of the Sun, about which we are taught, by Mr. Proctor, as follows: “The globe of the Sun is so much larger than that of the Earth that no less than 1,250,000 globes as large as the Earth would be wanted to make up together a globe as large as the Sun.” Whereas, we know that, as it is demonstrated that the Sun moves round over the Earth, its size is proportionately less. We can then easily understand that Day and Night, and the Seasons are brought about by his daily circuits round in a course concentric with the North, diminishing in their extent to the end of June, and increasing until the end of December, the equatorial region being the area covered by the Sun’s mean motion. If, then, these pages serve but to arouse the spirit of enquiry, the author will be satisfied.
The fields of photography could not be greater. There are no limits to imagination and thought, just as there are no limits to creativity. So it's only natural that every year new photography trends find their way to social media. In 2019, this was also the case with glass ball photography. All of a sudden, in every timeline, in all sorts of blogposts and on any profiles, there were photos with the glass ball that caught the attention of every person, even if that person actually has nothing to do with photography. The content of the book is: - Introduction - The history of glass ball photography - Photos with glass balls for everyone - Photographing in public - Conclusion This type and method of photography are meant for everyone, which is why this trend has gone so big. It is not directly easier, but it is not as elaborate and difficult as many other types of photography are. Still, there are some questions that need to be addressed: Should it be better to take pictures with a high-quality camera or is a smartphone perfectly sufficient? How can the background be blurred harmoniously? What equipment is needed? In this book, therefore, the complicated and technical settings of a camera will be explained as well as direct practical knowledge, so that outstanding photos with the glass ball are really outstanding.
The concept of the earth as a sphere has been around for centuries, emerging around the time of Pythagoras in the sixth century BC, and eventually becoming dominant as other thinkers of the ancient world, including Plato and Aristotle, accepted the idea. The first record of an actual globe being made is found in verse, written by the poet Aratus of Soli, who describes a celestial sphere of the stars by Greek astronomer Eudoxus of Cnidus (ca. 408–355 BC). The oldest surviving globe—a celestial globe held up by Atlas’s shoulders—dates back to 150 AD, but in the West, globes were not made again for about a thousand years. It was not until the fifteenth century that terrestrial globes gained importance, culminating when German geographer Martin Behaim created what is thought to be the oldest surviving terrestrial globe. In Globes: 400 Years of Exploration, Navigation, and Power, Sylvia Sumira, beginning with Behaim’s globe, offers a authoritative and striking illustrated history of the subsequent four hundred years of globe making. Showcasing the impressive collection of globes held by the British Library, Sumira traces the inception and progression of globes during the period in which they were most widely used—from the late fifteenth century to the late nineteenth century—shedding light on their purpose, function, influence, and manufacture, as well as the cartographers, printers, and instrument makers who created them. She takes readers on a chronological journey around the world to examine a wide variety of globes, from those of the Renaissance that demonstrated a renewed interest in classical thinkers; to those of James Wilson, the first successful commercial globe maker in America; to those mass-produced in Boston and New York beginning in the 1800s. Along the way, Sumira not only details the historical significance of each globe, but also pays special attention to their materials and methods of manufacture and how these evolved over the centuries. A stunning and accessible guide to one of the great tools of human exploration, Globes will appeal to historians, collectors, and anyone who has ever examined this classroom accessory and wondered when, why, and how they came to be made.
