How still it is! Nobody in the village street, the children all at school, and the very dogs sleeping lazily in the sunshine. Only a south wind blows lightly through the trees, lifting the great fans of the horse-chestnut, tossing the slight branches of the elm against the sky like single feathers of a great plume, and swinging out fragrance from the heavy-hanging linden-blossoms.
The stories mother nature told her Children is a novel written by Jane Andrews. Some of Mother Nature's most priceless secrets are revealed. Children will enjoy hearing about amber, the dragonfly and its fascinating history, water lilies, how Indian corn is grown, the strange antics of the Frost Giants, coral, starfish, coal mines, and many other fascinating topics. You might believe that Mother Nature has so many children that she is helpless, similar to the fabled "old woman who lived in the shoe." But once you get to know her and see how powerful and active she is, and how she can actually be in fifty places at once, tending to a sick tree or a newborn flower, while also building underground palaces, directing the steps of small travelers setting out on long journeys, and sweeping, dusting, and organizing her great house, the earth, you will understand her better. She will continue to work patiently while telling us the most endearing and amazing tales from her youth or about the treasures that are kept in her palace's most remote and hidden closets. These are the same tales that you all enjoy listening to your mother tell when you all gather around her at dusk.
How still it is! Nobody in the village street, the children all at school, and the very dogs sleeping lazily in the sunshine. Only a south wind blows lightly through the trees, lifting the great fans of the horse-chestnut, tossing the slight branches of the elm against the sky like single feathers of a great plume, and swinging out fragrance from the heavy-hanging linden-blossoms.
A fun exploration of the darker side of the natural world reveals the fascinating, weird, often perverted ways that Mother Nature fends only for herself. It may be a wonderful world, but as Dan Riskin (cohost of Discovery Canada’s Daily Planet) explains, it’s also a dangerous, disturbing, and disgusting one. At every turn, it seems, living things are trying to eat us, poison us, use our bodies as their homes, or have us spread their eggs. In Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You, Riskin is our guide through the natural world at its most gloriously ruthless. Using the seven deadly sins as a road map, Riskin offers dozens of jaw-dropping examples that illuminate how brutal nature can truly be. From slothful worms that hide in your body for up to thirty years to wrathful snails with poisonous harpoons that can kill you in less than five minutes to lustful ducks that have orgasms faster than you can blink, these fascinating accounts reveal the candid truth about “gentle” Mother Nature’s true colors. Riskin’s passion for the strange and his enthusiastic expertise bring Earth’s most fascinating flora and fauna into vivid focus. Through his adventures— which include sliding on his back through a thick soup of bat guano just to get face-to-face with a vampire bat, befriending a parasitic maggot that has taken root on his head, and coming to grips with having offspring of his own—Riskin makes unexpected discoveries not just about the world all around us but also about the ways this brutal world has shaped us as humans and what our responsibilities are to this terrible, wonderful planet we call home.
