Wildlife conservation in Australia owes much to the ideas of a controversial mathematics professor whose attention-grabbing actions made him at once famous and widely vilified. John Wamsley overcame childhood disadvantage and trauma to create first a private sanctuary called Warrawong, then Earth Sanctuaries Limited, the world’s first publicly listed company devoted solely to wildlife conservation. His company fell from a great height, but its influence has been enormous. This is the story of that enterprise and the man who founded it.
In The Edge of Extinction, Jules Pretty explores life and change in a dozen environments and cultures across the world, taking us on a series of remarkable journeys through deserts, coasts, mountains, steppes, snowscapes, marshes, and farms to show that there are many different ways to live in cooperation with nature. From these accounts of people living close to the land and close to the edge emerge a larger story about sustainability and the future of the planet. Pretty addresses not only current threats to natural and cultural diversity but also the unsustainability of modern lifestyles typical of industrialized countries. In a very real sense, Pretty discovers, what we manage to preserve now may well save us later.Jules Pretty's travels take him among the Maori people along the coasts of the Pacific, into the mountains of China, and across petroglyph-rich deserts of Australia. He treks with nomads over the continent-wide steppes of Tuva in southern Siberia, walks and boats in the wildlife-rich inland swamps of southern Africa, and experiences the Arctic with ice fishermen in Finland. He explores the coasts and inland marshes of eastern England and Northern Ireland and accompanies Innu people across the taiga’s snowy forests and the lakes of the Labrador interior. Pretty concludes his global journey immersed in the discrete cultures and landscapes embedded within the American landscape: the small farms of the Amish, the swamps of the Cajuns in the deep South, and the deserts of California.The diverse people Pretty meets in The Edge of Extinction display deep pride in their relationships with the land and are only willing to join with the modern world on their own terms. By the examples they set, they offer valuable lessons for anyone seeking to find harmony in a world cracking under the pressures of apparently insatiable consumption patterns of the affluent.
Through readings of King Lear, Hamlet, Henry VI and other works, this volume employs psychoanalytic theory to arrive at new understandings of the emergence of early modern subjectivities.
Professor Mommy is designed as a guide for women who want to combine the life of the mind with the joys of motherhood. The book provides practical suggestions from the authors' experiences together with those of other women who have successfully combined parenting with professorships. Professor Mommy addresses key questions—when to have children and how many, what kinds of academic institutions are the most family friendly, how to negotiate around the myths that many people hold about academic life, etc.—for women throughout all stages of their academic careers, from graduate school through full professor. The authors follow the demands of motherhood all the way from the infant stages through the empty nest. At each stage, the authors offer invaluable advice and tested strategies from women who have successfully juggled the demands and rewards of an academic career and motherhood. Written in clear, jargon-free prose, the book is accessible to women in all disciplines, with concise chapters for the time-constrained academic. The book's conversational tone is supplemented with a review of the most current scholarship on work/family balance and a survey of emerging family-friendly practices at U.S. colleges and universities. Professor Mommy asserts that the faculty mother has become and will remain a permanent fixture on the landscape of the American academy.The paperback edition features a new Preface that addresses the public conversation about mothers and work raised in Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and Ann Marie Slaughter’s Why Women Still Can’t Have it All. The new Preface also answers frequently asked questions from readers.
The groundbreaking book that launched America's urban legend obsession! Folklore scholar Jan Harold Brunvand assembles the best-known urban legends—including "The Hook," "The Spider in the Hairdo," and "The Baby-Sitter and the Man Upstairs"—and provides an enlightening and entertaining analysis of their variants and evolution. The Vanishing Hitchhiker was Professor Brunvand's first popular book on urban legends, and it remains a classic. The culmination of twenty years of collection and research, this book is a must-have for urban legend lovers.
