The life and times of Sean Rousseau, all told a nice,but average guy,possessing a few quirky personality traits. Principally among them, a deep objective affinity for practicable analytical thinking and problem solving on all matters from the world of business to his spiritual beliefs, all formulated growing up in the bland 1950s and turbulent 1960s. Through an ill-fated marriage and the passing, one-by-one, of all of his family members, especially the tragic and untimely loss of his beloved little sister, Sean whose sole enjoyment is collecting baseball cards, leads an everyday stoic and solitary life that is pretty much okay, but life is slowly passing him by. Unbeknownst to him, he is being shadowed ominously by an evil greater than he can fully comprehend or even imagine; an evil that lies in wait for his lapses into an unbearable sense of nothingness, for the opportunity to rear up and consume him, mind, body, and soul. But the Blessed Virgin Mary watches over him, through the intercession of a mother's love for her son, and later through a blind date with a woman who becomes the love of his life until her sudden death, followed by a chance meeting with a second woman months later in the remote and mysterious lakeshore Hamlet of Misty Waters, each occurring when he is at the greatest peril of descending despairingly, finally and forever, into the void of nothingness.
Corlie Roux’s farm life in South Africa is not easy: the Transvaal is beautiful, but it is also a harsh place where the heat can be so intense that the very raindrops sizzle. When her beloved father dies, she is left with a mother who is as devoted to her sons as she is cruel to her daughter. Despite this, Corlie finds solace in her friend, Sipho, and in Africa itself and in the stories she conjures for her brothers. But Corlie’s world is about to vanish: the British are invading and driving Boer families like hers from their farms. Some escape into the bush to fight the enemy. The unlucky ones are rounded up and sent to internment camps. Will Corlie’s resilience and devotion to her country sustain her through the suffering and squalor she finds in the camp at Kroonstad? That may depend on a soldier from faraway Canada and on inner resources Corlie never dreamed she had….
Corlie Roux’s farm life in South Africa is not easy: the Transvaal is beautiful, but it is also a harsh place where the heat can be so intense that the very raindrops sizzle. When her beloved father dies, she is left with a mother who is as devoted to her sons as she is cruel to her daughter. Despite this, Corlie finds solace in her friend, Sipho, and in Africa itself and in the stories she conjures for her brothers. But Corlie’s world is about to vanish: the British are invading and driving Boer families like hers from their farms. Some escape into the bush to fight the enemy. The unlucky ones are rounded up and sent to internment camps. Will Corlie’s resilience and devotion to her country sustain her through the suffering and squalor she finds in the camp at Kroonstad? That may depend on a soldier from faraway Canada and on inner resources Corlie never dreamed she had….
Sam Hannigan runs an animal shelter in Clobberstown, Co. Dublin with her creepy-crawlie-crazy best friend Ajay Patel and her just-plain-crazy granny Nanny Gigg. Oh yes, and her big bully brother Bruno. When a mysterious package arrives on the doorstep of Hannigan's Haven, Sam and the gang are astonished to discover that it contains a living, breathing Dodo bird! Where did the dodo come from, who sent it, and, most importantly, how is it not extinct? Being a lover of all animals, Sam immediately falls in love with the dodo (which she names Desmond) and treats it like a member of the family. Unfortunately, a gang of ruthless exotic animal smugglers is near. When Captain Stinky Derriere and his lumbering First Mate Chum get the scent of the miraculously still alive dodo, while Stinky makes it his life mission to catch and eat Desmond! Join Sam, Ajay and the gang as they endeavour to keep Desmond safe and secret until they can deliver him to Uncle Monty, whose one wish is to deliver the dodo to the mythical Dodo Island.
Why have island ecosystems always suffered such high rates of extinction? In our age, with all the world's landscapes, from Tasmania to the Amazon to Yellowstone, now being carved into island-like fragments by human activity, the implications of this question are more urgent than ever. Over the past eight years, David Quammen has followed the threads of island biogeography on a globe-encircling journey of discovery.
"King Glut was a large, fat, greedy king. He loved food, and his favourite food of all was eggs. Boiled, poached, fried, scrambled, and curried - he'd tried every recipe imaginable. Now he was ready for something different! Then one day he heard of the dodo's egg: the biggest, the runniest, the tastiest, and the very last dodo's egg in the whole wide world. King Glut just had to have it for himself!--Back cover.
It took less than a hundred years of human influence in Mauritius to wipe out the Dodo. The delicate balance of nature was suddenly tipped and became a threat to the survival of the Dodo, which had reigned supreme on this island for thousands of years. For nearly two hundred years after its extinction, the Dodo was forgotten, and there were some doubts as to whether it actually lived at all. It seemed that these strange birds had only been part of the imagination and exaggeration of sailors. Today, the once remote island of Mauritius is home top over a million people of European, African, Indian and Chinese origin. It can boast of being one of the most stable democratic countries in the world and it is host to thousands of tourists who find shops full of Dodos in many forms, shapes and sizes. Yet, there is an unfortunate lack of information about this island's unique national icon. This book allows the reader to examine various eyewitness writings, drawings, paintings and skeletal remains, which depict the Dodo as it actually was, and helps us to understand how it was driven to extinction. It also traces what happened after the final demise of the bird, and how worldwide evidence was pieced together to provide a reasonable idea of how the Dodo lived and died.--Back cover.
'The Amazing Alphabet Book of the Last Dodo Bird' is an alphabet book with 31 unique artistic illustrations (watercolor, acrylic, colored pencils and ink). The original artwork is painted on (18 in x 24 in) Arches Watercolor Paper. The narrator, the Dodo Bird, takes readers on a surrealistic, whimsical, A to Z journey through the animal kingdom. Each letter is represented by a myriad of animals, reptiles, and insects. The sophisticated storytelling is fact-filled as well as playful, and suitable for readers of all ages to promote imaginative thoughts and word power.
Four easy-to-read short novels present the irresistible series The Adventures of Cosmo – Our Hero of the Environment. Join Cosmo as he braves all kinds of perils to help save endangered creatures. And who better to act as their champion than a dodo who has faced extinction? Cosmo remembers a time when dodos lived happily on Earth. But with humans came their guns, and soon the only dodos left were Cosmo and two friends. Then comes the terrible day when Cosmo finds himself all alone, the last of the dodos. If he is to survive, he must leave the planet he loves. He is lucky to make a trusty friend in the form of an almost-human space robot, and, together, they set out across the universe to find other dodos. But soon they realize that many creatures, and even the planet Earth, need protection and care. The survival of all living things depends on it. In fast-paced text and eye-catching art, The Adventures of Cosmo encourages children to learn about their environment and the reason why it is important for them to protect it.
*Includes pictures *Includes excerpts of contemporary accounts about the dodo *Includes a bibliography for further reading "The Dodo never had a chance. He seems to have been invented for the sole purpose of becoming extinct and that was all he was good for." - Willy Cuppy, 19th century American humorist and literary critic At one point or another, just about everyone has heard of the dodo bird, which is almost universally described as a cuddly, whimsical creature renowned for its alleged stupidity. This prehistoric avian had been known for hundreds of years before it was made popular around the world in Lewis Carroll's 1865 classic, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The character, the Dodo, satirized the author himself - according to pop culture lore, Carroll, whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, regarded the dodo as his spirit animal due to his alleged stutter, which led to him often presenting himself as "Do-do-dodgson." Carroll was also a frequent patron of the Oxford Museum of Natural History, which served as a fount of inspiration for his memorable anthropomorphic characters. The 1951 Disney animation, Alice in Wonderland, breathed new life into Carroll's Dodo, portrayed as a plump, peach-faced creature with a bulbous pink beak, clad in a purple waistcoat, a powdered wig, and a pipe dangling out of his beak. Like its real-life counterparts, the Dodo was depicted as a flightless bird who crossed paths with Alice, bobbing along inside of a bottle upon the open sea. Owing to its inability to fly, the Dodo uses an upside-down toucan as his boat, and the Dodo is being maneuvered by a green hawk furiously flapping its wings, serving as the boat's propeller. The dimwitted, carefree dodo also made various appearances in film and TV shows over the years, such as Yoyo Dodo in the 1938 black-and-white animation Porky in Wackyland, the short-lived stop-motion animated series Rocky and the Dodos, and the 2002 animated film Ice Age, which depicts the dodos as a silly, clumsy troop of birds who fail to guard three small watermelons. Indeed, the dodo's presence in literature, picture books, music, video games, and general pop culture has been so prevalent that it has secured its own entry on TV Tropes, where it is infamously immortalized as the "Dumb Dodo." This only scratches the surface of the string of misconceptions that has plagued the delightfully peculiar bird for centuries. Along with its stereotypical depictions in literature, film, and other mediums of pop culture, a number of idioms playing on the bird's alleged idiocy, as well as the supposed role it played in its own extinction, have become irreversibly cemented in the English lexicon. "Dodo" and the even less tactful "dumb dodo" are slang terms directed at dense individuals, an explicit reference to the bird's sluggish reflexes and supposedly pint-sized brain. One may have also come across a business venture or a fad that has "gone the way of the dodo" or is "as dead as a dodo," meaning that the venture has become defunct, obsolete, or a thing of the past, most likely due to reckless and half-baked business practices. The phrase "deaf to reality like a dodo" has also been thrown around quite frequently in recent years, used to describe individuals who are overly trusting and blissfully ignorant of unpalatable facts and ugly truths. But were the dodo birds truly as simple-minded as they are often portrayed? And what were the actual factors behind the zany avian's extinction? The Dodo: The History and Legacy of the Extinct Flightless Bird looks at the origins of the bird, human contact with it, and how the species went extinct. Along with pictures depicting important people, places, and events, you will learn about the dodo like never before.
