A lyrical and affecting family drama which challenges readers to re-examine their perception of nature A striking blend of realism and contemporary myth-making, this unforgettable novel tells the story of marine biologist Leo Kemp. Having lost his teaching position thanks to outspoken views, Leo decides to go on one last field trip with his students. The outing becomes disastrous when the weather turns and Leo is thrown overboard. The evocative description of Leo's journey explores what can happen beyond our perceived knowledge of science. James MacManus's The Language of the Sea tests the bounds of reality with his cunning narrative set within the beautiful community of Cape Cod.
Some aquatic animals are highly social, like dolphins, while others, like sharks, are mostly loners. Read all about how and why dolphins, whales, sea lions, and sharks communicate in the wild, what these different signals mean, and how humans study the language of ocean animals.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News is a vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a “head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips,” is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Here, on desolate Quoyle’s Point, in a house empty except for a few mementos of the family’s unsavory past, the battered members of three generations try to cobble up new lives. Newfoundland is a country of coast and cove where the mercury rarely rises above seventy degrees, the local culinary delicacy is cod cheeks, and it’s easier to travel by boat and snowmobile than on anything with wheels. In this harsh place of cruel storms, a collapsing fishery, and chronic unemployment, the aunt sets up as a yacht upholsterer in nearby Killick-Claw, and Quoyle finds a job reporting the shipping news for the local weekly, the Gammy Bird (a paper that specializes in sexual-abuse stories and grisly photos of car accidents). As the long winter closes its jaws of ice, each of the Quoyles confronts private demons, reels from catastrophe to minor triumph—in the company of the obsequious Mavis Bangs; Diddy Shovel the strongman; drowned Herald Prowse; cane-twirling Beety; Nutbeem, who steals foreign news from the radio; a demented cousin the aunt refuses to recognize; the much-zippered Alvin Yark; silent Wavey; and old Billy Pretty, with his bag of secrets. By the time of the spring storms Quoyle has learned how to gut cod, to escape from a pickle jar, and to tie a true lover’s knot.
"Lords of the Sea revises our understanding of the epochal political, economic, and cultural transformations of Japan's late medieval period (1300-1600) by shifting the conventional land-based analytical framework to one centered on the perspectives of seafarers usually dismissed as 'pirates'"--Provided by publisher.
"Contains 1,248 entries pertaining to life onboard ship, hulls and rigging, shiphandling, sea and weather conditions, and naval and technical terms"--Front flap of jacket.
Told in expressive pencil drawings, provocative symbolism, and a madness that doesn’t just bubble beneath the surface of the water, but drenches the sailor―and the reader―like a tidal wave, this story is about a man, literally and figuratively, lost at sea.
