Writing at a time when the further destruction of community gardens had been legally forbidden, but the city council was voting to continue replacing them with development, Hassell (behavioral sciences, Suffolk County Community College, New York) presents one perspective on the history and current status of urban community gardens on the Lower East Side of New York City. He concentrates on the last two decades of the 20th century. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.
Writing at a time when the further destruction of community gardens had been legally forbidden, but the city council was voting to continue replacing them with development, Hassell (behavioral sciences, Suffolk County Community College, New York) presents one perspective on the history and current status of urban community gardens on the Lower East Side of New York City. He concentrates on the last two decades of the 20th century. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.
The fascinating story of a trial that opened a window onto the century-long battle to control nature in the national parks. When twenty-five-year-old Harry Walker was killed by a bear in Yellowstone Park in 1972, the civil trial prompted by his death became a proxy for bigger questions about American wilderness management that had been boiling for a century. At immediate issue was whether the Park Service should have done more to keep bears away from humans, but what was revealed as the trial unfolded was just how fruitless our efforts to regulate nature in the parks had always been. The proceedings drew to the witness stand some of the most important figures in twentieth century wilderness management, including the eminent zoologist A. Starker Leopold, who had produced a landmark conservationist document in the 1950s, and all-American twin researchers John and Frank Craighead, who ran groundbreaking bear studies at Yellowstone. Their testimony would help decide whether the government owed the Walker family restitution for Harry's death, but it would also illuminate decades of patchwork efforts to preserve an idea of nature that had never existed in the first place. In this remarkable excavation of American environmental history, nature writer and former park ranger Jordan Fisher Smith uses Harry Walker's story to tell the larger narrative of the futile, sometimes fatal, attempts to remake wilderness in the name of preserving it. Tracing a course from the founding of the national parks through the tangled twentieth-century growth of the conservationist movement, Smith gives the lie to the portrayal of national parks as Edenic wonderlands unspoiled until the arrival of Europeans, and shows how virtually every attempt to manage nature in the parks has only created cascading effects that require even more management. Moving across time and between Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier national parks, Engineering Eden shows how efforts at wilderness management have always been undone by one fundamental problem--that the idea of what is "wild" dissolves as soon as we begin to examine it, leaving us with little framework to say what wilderness should look like and which human interventions are acceptable in trying to preserve it. In the tradition of John McPhee's The Control of Nature and Alan Burdick's Out of Eden, Jordan Fisher Smith has produced a powerful work of popular science and environmental history, grappling with critical issues that we have even now yet to resolve.
“Patiently, and unflinchingly, Ackerman is becoming one of the great poet laureates of America’s tragic adventurism across the globe.” —Pico Iyer Eden lies in a hospital bed, unable to move or speak. His wife Mary spends every day on the sofa in his room. We see them through the eyes of Eden’s best friend, a fellow Marine who didn’t make it back home—and who must relive the secrets held between all three of them as he waits for Eden to finally, mercifully die and join him in whatever comes after. A breathtakingly spare and shattering novel that explores the unseen aftereffects—and unacknowledged casualties—of war, Waiting for Eden is a piercingly insightful, deeply felt meditation on loyalty, friendship, betrayal, and love. “The Tim O’Brien of our era.” —Vogue “Devastating.” —The Wall Street Journal “Haunting. . . . Daring.” —The Boston Globe “Heart-wrenching.” —NPR
Lord of the Flies comes to Club Med in the year?s most exciting and original thriller. Charles Spencer is a fifty-five year old college professor, going on vacation with his wife and their two almost-grown children to the sunny Caribbean isle of St. Bart?s. But when they land, Charles and his family find only chaos. Rumors circulate of an attack on the United States. Communications are down. People are panicked beyond comprehension. It is in this madness that Charles uses his intellect and articulate nature to bring the locals and tourists together, and maintain a semblance of order and society in the face of disaster. But humanity is not as civilized as Charles believes. Distrust, animosity, and prejudice splinter the survivors into factions who battle over supplies, technology, and control. And even as Charles confronts those who would doom them all, a greater threat is on the horizon. A threat that will force them all to fight not only for their lives?but for the future of their world.
This collection of letters forms a fascinating day-by-day account of Steinbeck's writing of EAST OF EDEN, his longest and most ambitious novel. The letters, ranging over many subjects - textual discussion, trial flights of workmanship, family matters - provide an illuminating perspective on Steinbeck, the creative genius, and a private glimpse of Steinbeck, the man.
Before the creation of Earth, God's realm is peaceful and tranquil, and Lucifer is a trusted advisor of angels. Then Lucifer rebels, the heavenly world is irrevocably divided, and the angels must choose between good and evil. Based on 1 Corinthians 6:1-3, Before Eden shows how angels, like man, battle temptations, fears and doubts as they try to understand God's plan.
2017 Beverly Hills Book Award Winner in New Fiction 2017 Beverly Hills Book Award Winner in Women's Fiction 2018 IBPA Ben Franklin Finalist in Best New Voices: Fiction Becca Meister Fitzpatrick—wife, mother, grandmother, and pillar of the community—is the dutiful steward of her family’s iconic summer tradition . . . until she discovers her recently deceased husband squandered their nest egg. As she struggles to accept that this is likely her last season in Long Harbor, Becca is inspired by her granddaughter’s boldness in the face of impending single-motherhood, and summons the courage to reveal a secret she was forced to bury long ago: the existence of a daughter she gave up fifty years ago. The question now is how her other daughter, Rachel—with whom Becca has always had a strained relationship—will react. Eden is the account of the days leading up to the Fourth of July weekend, as Becca prepares to disclose her secret and her son and brothers conspire to put the estate on the market, interwoven with the century-old history of Becca’s family—her parents’ beginnings and ascent into affluence, and her mother’s own secret struggles in the grand home her father named “Eden.”
Sixty-five million years ago, a disastrous cataclysm eliminated three quarters of all life on Earth. Overnight, the age of dinosaurs ended. The age of mammals had begun. But what if history had happened differently? What if the reptiles had survived to evolve intelligent life? In West of Eden, bestselling author Harry Harrison has created a rich, dramatic saga of a world where the descendents of the dinosaurs struggled with a clan of humans in a battle for survival. Here is the story of Kerrick, a young hunter who grows to manhood among the dinosaurs, escaping at last to rejoin his own kind. His knowledge of their strange customs makes him the humans' leader...and the dinosaurs' greatest enemy. Rivalling Frank Herbert's Dune in the majesty of its scope and conception, West of Eden is a monumental epic of love and savagery, bravery and hope. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Almost to Eden is the captivating fictional narrative of an Irish immigrant, Maggie O'Brien, whose life intertwines with members and workers of the historic Jekyll Island Club. Seeking a new Eden in America, she discovers that freedom and justice, even in the new world, do not always triumph over wealth and power. In the process of her journey, Maggie finds and loses the things she loves most, but grace and courage lead her toward a fulfillment she never thought to find.
