The Soaring Life of the Lark
The Soaring Life of the Lark

Author: John Lewis-Stempel

Publisher: Doubleday UK

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780857525802

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Skylarks are the heralds of our countryside. Their music is the quintessential sound of spring. The spirit of English pastoralism, they inspire poets, composers and farmers alike. In the trenches of World War I they were a reminder of the chattering meadows of home. Perhaps you were up with the lark, or as happy as one. History has seen us poeticise and musicise the bird, but also capture and eat them. We watch as they climb the sky, delight in their joyful singing, and yet we harm them too. The Soaring life of the Lark explores the music and poetry; the breath-taking heights and struggle to survive of one of Britain's most iconic songbirds"--Publisher's description.

In the Land of the Long White Cloud
In the Land of the Long White Cloud

Author: Sarah Lark

Publisher: Amazon Crossing

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781612184265

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Helen Davenport, governess for a wealthy London household, spots an advertisement seeking young women to marry New Zealand's honorable bachelors and begins correspondence with a gentleman farmer. When her church offers to pay her travels under an unusual arrangement, she jumps at the opportunity. On the ship, she meets Gwyneira Silkham, traveling to meet a New Zealand baron who won her in a game of blackjack. When their new husbands turn out to be very different than expected, the women must help one another find the life they'd hoped for.

The Glorious Life of the Oak
The Glorious Life of the Oak

Author: John Lewis-Stempel

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2018-10-18

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13: 147355862X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

AS FEATURED ON 'BBC RADIO 4 'GOOD READS'. Woodlands Awards 2019: Woodland Books of the Year 'The oak is the wooden tie between heaven and earth. It is the lynch pin of the British landscape.' The oak is our most beloved and most common tree. It has roots that stretch back to all the old European cultures but Britain has more ancient oaks than all the other European countries put together. More than half the ancient oaks in the world are in Britain. Many of our ancestors - the Angles, the Saxons, the Norse - came to the British Isles in longships made of oak. For centuries the oak touched every part of a Briton's life - from cradle to coffin It was oak that made the 'wooden walls' of Nelson's navy, and the navy that allowed Britain to rule the world. Even in the digital Apple age, the real oak has resonance - the word speaks of fortitude, antiquity, pastoralism. The Glorious Life of the Oak explores our long relationship with this iconic tree; it considers the life-cycle of the oak, the flora and fauna that depend on the oak, the oak as medicine, food and drink, where Britain's mightiest oaks can be found, and it tells of oak stories from folklore, myth and legend.

Music and the Forms of Life
Music and the Forms of Life

Author: Lawrence Kramer

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2022-10-04

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 0520389107

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Inventors in the age of the Enlightenment created lifelike androids capable of playing music on real instruments. Music and the Forms of Life examines the link between such simulated life and music, which began in the era's scientific literature and extended into a series of famous musical works by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Music invented auditory metaphors for the scientific elements of life (drive, pulse, sensibility, irritability, even metabolism), investigated the affinities and antagonisms between life and mechanism, and explored questions of whether and how mechanisms can come to life. The resulting changes in the conceptions of both life and music had wide cultural resonance at the time, and those concepts continued to evolve long after. A critical part of that evolution was a nineteenth-century shift in focus from moving androids to the projection of life in motion, culminating in the invention of cinema. Weaving together cultural and musical practices, Lawrence Kramer traces these developments through a collection of case studies ranging from classical symphonies to modernist projections of waltzing specters by Mahler and Ravel to a novel linking Bach's Goldberg Variations to the genetic code.

Song of the Spirits
Song of the Spirits

Author: Sarah Lark

Publisher: AmazonCrossing

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781477807675

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Lark recounts...the sometimes peaceful, sometimes uneasy relationship between the Maori natives and the pakeha--the colonists. And the land, which can be rocky and formidable and also breathtakingly beautiful, is as much a character as anyone else." --Historical Novel Society New Zealand, 1893: William Martyn is better educated and more cultivated than the other men breaking their backs searching for gold near Queenstown. William is the son of landed Irish nobility, and he comes to town ready to invest in the best equipment. On his search for supplies, he encounters spirited and beautiful young Elaine O'Keefe, who promptly falls in love with him. He is captivated by her charms until Kura, Elaine's half-Maori cousin, comes to visit. William succumbs at once to Kura's exotic beauty and free-spiritedness, and tension develops not only between the two cousins but also between the colonial settlers and their Maori neighbors.

The Private Life of the Hare
The Private Life of the Hare

Author: John Lewis-Stempel

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2019-10-17

Total Pages: 112

ISBN-13: 1473542502

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

THE PERFECT GIFT FOR NATURE LOVERS ‘To see a hare sit still as stone, to watch a hare boxing on a frosty March morning, to witness a hare bolt . . . these are great things. Every field should have a hare.’ The hare, a night creature and country-dweller, is a rare sight for most people. We know them only from legends and stories. They are shape-shifters, witches’ familiars and symbols of fertility. They are arrogant, as in Aesop’s The Hare and the Tortoise, and absurd, as in Lewis Carroll’s Mad March Hare. In the absence of observed facts, speculation and fantasy have flourished. But real hares? What are they like? In The Private Life of the Hare, John Lewis-Stempel explores myths, history and the reality of the hare. And in vivid, elegant prose he celebrates how, in an age when television cameras have revealed so much in our landscape, the hare remains as elusive and magical as ever.

Meadowland
Meadowland

Author: John Lewis-Stempel

Publisher: Black Swan

Published: 2015-03-26

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780552778992

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

_________________ 'BRITAIN'S FINEST LIVING NATURE WRITER' - THE TIMES WINNER OF THE THWAITES WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2015 What really goes on in the long grass? Meadowland gives an unique and intimate account of an English meadow's life from January to December, together with its biography. In exquisite prose, John Lewis-Stempel records the passage of the seasons from cowslips in spring to the hay-cutting of summer and grazing in autumn, and includes the biographies of the animals that inhabit the grass and the soil beneath: the badger clan, the fox family, the rabbit warren, the skylark brood and the curlew pair, among others. Their births, lives, and deaths are stories that thread through the book from first page to last.

The Singing, Springing Lark (First Edition)
The Singing, Springing Lark (First Edition)

Author: Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

Publisher: Blackdown Publications

Published: 2015-08-24

Total Pages: 25

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

“I shall eat anyone who tries to steal my singing, springing lark!” Rather than a rose and a beast, the Brothers Grimm version of the Beauty and the Beast fairytale begins with a request for a singing, springing lark and a prince cursed as a lion. The youngest daughter keeps her father’s promise and returns to the lion’s castle, where her adventure is only just beginning. For soon, with the assistance of the Sun, the Moon, and the Four Winds, she is forced to search for her lost love and save him from the grasp of an enchanted princess. Alongside another variant, From the Summer and Winter Garden, also from the first edition of the Brothers Grimm’s Children's and Household Tales, the original version of The Singing, Springing Lark is brought to life for an English readership in this new translation. [Folklore Type: ATU-425C (Beauty and the Beast)]