The Stripeless Zebra is a story of an imperfect zebra who is rejected by his zeal but fights the odds to discover his true self. In the process, he is instrumental in leading his zeal back from the brink of extinction. The story is narrated by the protagonist, Hatim, the COO of an IT company in India, who is at crossroads after losing a large gamechanger project due to the unprofessional attitude of his colleague. Hatim who is obsessed with the idea of being ‘Perfect’, takes a sabbatical and travels to the desert of Tanzania. He loses his way in the desert and destiny opens some unbelievable life-changing experiences. He is short of being killed by a mountain lion but is rescued by a stripeless zebra. With a sequence of events, experiences, and dreams, he returns home a transformed man. Hatim implements the learning from the stripeless zebra to discover himself and build an incredible team of unlike-minded individuals. Together they transform a school that is at the mercy of a don.
Aesthetics: 50 Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Thought Experiments is a teaching-focused resource, which highlights the contributions that imaginative scenarios—paradoxes, puzzles, and thought experiments alike—have made to the development of contemporary analytic aesthetics. The book is divided into sections pertaining to art-making, ontology, aesthetic judgements, appreciation and interpretation, and ethics and value, and offers an accessible summary of ten debates falling under each section. Each entry also features a detailed annotated bibliography, making it an ideal companion for courses surveying a broad collection of topics and readings in aesthetics. Key Features: Uses a problem-centered approach to aesthetics (rather than author- or theory-centered) making the text more inviting to first-time students of the subject Offers stand-alone chapters, allowing students to quickly understand an issue and giving instructors flexibility in assigning readings to match the themes of the course Provides up-to-date, annotated bibliographies at the end of each entry, amounting to an extensive review of the literature on contemporary analytic aesthetics
“Prepare to laugh, cry, and smile with satisfaction as you follow Fitzgerald’s heartwarming stories. Hilarious, playful, and outright adorable…the book has an instantly uplifting effect that keeps you floating every time you remember it.” — Foluso Falaye, Readers' Favorite Five-Star Review Every dog deserves the happily ever after of a fairy-tale life, preferably without first being turned into a footman for a cucurbit carriage. After all, it’s no picnic getting post-midnight pumpkin slime out of those harder-to-reach furry places. (Not to suggest that pre-midnight slime is magically self-cleansing, at least not without the benefit of a wand-wielding godmother.) Yet, even servant to a fresh-off-the-vine conveyance beats the fate of many dogs. All too often, wonderful animals end up at the mercy of the evil queens, the wicked stepmothers, the big bad wolves, and other nefarious villains. The Sun Orbits My Dog is the lively narrative of three such animals—dogs who, by no fault of their own, had only experienced the cruel beginnings inflicted upon fairy tale protagonists. Maybe they’d dreamed of better days. Maybe they’d forgotten how to dream. Ultimately, however, they discovered true love—each adopted by a family that was neither evil nor wicked, neither bad nor nefarious, but decidedly eccentric and doggedly devoted. For Jake, Sadie, and Georgiana, this is where their waggly-tailed tales begin. Told in a style that is, at once, self-deprecating and humorous, poignant and relatable, former journalist J. B. Fitzgerald regales readers with twenty years of dog-parenting anecdotes: the laughter and excitement, the hardships and fears, and, of course, an array of comically undignified mishaps as she nurtures three very different souls through their unique challenges and watches them grow out of their sorrow and into infinitely happy and loving companions. This illustrated edition features more than 130 artistically displayed photographs. “...J.B. Fitzgerald’s warmth and affection for these companions can be felt in every sentence of this book...if ever there was a literary advocate for adopting a dog from your local shelter, it is The Sun Orbits My Dog...” — K.C. Finn, Readers' Favorite Five-Star Review
William Temple Hornaday was the Director of the New York Zoological Society and the nation's leading advocate of wildlife conservation in this era. This unsparing manifesto was written to accompany Hornaday's launching of the Permanent Wildlife Protection Fund; it is thus (in the words of the historian Stephen Fox) both "a campaign tract" and "one of the first books wholly devoted to endangered wild animals" (John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement [Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1981], p. 149). It is also a landmark of conservation history which had a profound effect on the thought of Aldo Leopold, among others. The book surveys the history and causes of wildlife destruction in America and elsewhere, and sets forth a lengthy program to ensure the protection of remaining wildlife for the future, often in militant and moralistic terms. The work also throws light on some of the complexities inherent in the conservation movement at this time: for example, Hornaday accepts the classification of certain bird and mammalian predators as "noxious" or "vermin" and appropriate for destruction (pp. 77-81); there is no criticism here of the massive campaign for the extermination of wolves and coyotes being sponsored at the time by the Bureau of Biological Survey. On a more general level, Hornaday's fulminations against Italian immigrants as incorrigible bird-killers suggest a connection between nativism and conservationism, while his excoriations of market hunters set forth a deeply-rooted class bias shared by many leading conservationists.
A delightful story of growing up, getting old, and every step in between, from the acclaimed author of Man at the Helm and Love, Nina. After succeeding in her quest to help her unconventional mother find a new "man at the helm," fifteen-year-old Lizzie Vogel simply wants to be a normal teenager. Just when it looks as if things have settled down, her mother goes and has another baby. On top of that, Lizzie's best friend has deserted her for the punk craze, which Lizzie finds too exhausting to commit to herself. But Lizzie soon gets more commitment than she bargained for when she takes a job as a junior nurse at Paradise Lodge, a ramshackle refuge for the elderly that has seen better days. It's no place for a teenager, much less one with as little experience emptying a bedpan as Lizzie. What begins as away to avoid school and earn some spending money (for the finer things in life, like real coffee and beer shampoo) quickly turns into the education of a lifetime. Lizzie encounters a colorful cast of eccentric characters -- including a nurse determined to turn one of the patients into a husband (and a retirement plan); an efficient but clueless nun trying to modernize the place; and Lizzie's unlikely first love -- who become her surrogate family. When Paradise Lodge faces a crisis in the form of a rival nursing home with enough amenities to make even the comatose jealous, Lizzie must find a way to save her job before she loses the only place she's ever felt she belongs. A hilarious and heartfelt coming-of-age tale, Paradise Lodge proves that it's never too early -- or too late -- to grow up.
Looks at every aspect of the horse, discussing its evolution, biology, history, characteristics, behavior, and relationship with humankind in the areas of work, sport, and leisure, providing essential facts, trivia, and lore.
The biological functions debate is a perennial topic in the philosophy of science. In the first full-length account of the nature and importance of biological functions for many years, Justin Garson presents an innovative new theory, the 'generalized selected effects theory of function', which seamlessly integrates evolutionary and developmental perspectives on biological functions. He develops the implications of the theory for contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of medicine and psychiatry, the philosophy of biology, and biology itself, addressing issues ranging from the nature of mental representation to our understanding of the function of the human genome. Clear, jargon-free, and engagingly written, with accessible examples and explanatory diagrams to illustrate the discussion, his book will be highly valuable for readers across philosophical and scientific disciplines.