Unruly Waters
Unruly Waters

Author: Sunil Amrith

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2018-12-11

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0465097731

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From a MacArthur "Genius," a bold new perspective on the history of Asia, highlighting the long quest to tame its waters Asia's history has been shaped by her waters. In Unruly Waters, historian Sunil Amrith reimagines Asia's history through the stories of its rains, rivers, coasts, and seas -- and of the weather-watchers and engineers, mapmakers and farmers who have sought to control them. Looking out from India, he shows how dreams and fears of water shaped visions of political independence and economic development, provoked efforts to reshape nature through dams and pumps, and unleashed powerful tensions within and between nations. Today, Asian nations are racing to construct hundreds of dams in the Himalayas, with dire environmental impacts; hundreds of millions crowd into coastal cities threatened by cyclones and storm surges. In an age of climate change, Unruly Waters is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Asia's past and its future.

Crossing the Bay of Bengal
Crossing the Bay of Bengal

Author: Sunil S. Amrith

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2013-10-07

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 0674728475

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The Indian Ocean was global long before the Atlantic, and today the countries bordering the Bay of Bengal—India, Bangladesh, Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Malaysia—are home to one in four people on Earth. Crossing the Bay of Bengal places this region at the heart of world history for the first time. Integrating human and environmental history, and mining a wealth of sources, Sunil Amrith gives a revelatory and stirring new account of the Bay and those who have inhabited it. For centuries the Bay of Bengal served as a maritime highway between India and China, and then as a battleground for European empires, all while being shaped by the monsoons and by human migration. Imperial powers in the nineteenth century, abetted by the force of capital and the power of steam, reconfigured the Bay in their quest for coffee, rice, and rubber. Millions of Indian migrants crossed the sea, bound by debt or spurred by drought, and filled with ambition. Booming port cities like Singapore and Penang became the most culturally diverse societies of their time. By the 1930s, however, economic, political, and environmental pressures began to erode the Bay’s centuries-old patterns of interconnection. Today, rising waters leave the Bay of Bengal’s shores especially vulnerable to climate change, at the same time that its location makes it central to struggles over Asia’s future. Amrith’s evocative and compelling narrative of the region’s pasts offers insights critical to understanding and confronting the many challenges facing Asia in the decades ahead.

Unruly Waters
Unruly Waters

Author: Kenna Lang Archer

Publisher: UNM Press

Published: 2015-05-01

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0826355889

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Running more than 1,200 miles from headwaters in eastern New Mexico through the middle of Texas to the Gulf of Mexico, the Brazos River has frustrated developers for nearly two centuries. This environmental history of the Brazos traces the techniques that engineers and politicians have repeatedly used to try to manage its flow. The vast majority of projects proposed or constructed in this watershed were failures, undone by the geology of the river as much as the cost of improvement. When developers erected locks, the river changed course. When they built large-scale dams, floodwaters overflowed the concrete rims. When they constructed levees, the soils collapsed. Yet lawmakers and laypeople, boosters and engineers continued to work toward improving the river and harnessing it for various uses. Through the plight of the Brazos River Archer illuminates the broader commentary on the efforts to tame this nation’s rivers as well as its historical perspectives on development and technology. The struggle to overcome nature, Archer notes, reflects a quintessentially American faith in technology.

Fierce Enigmas
Fierce Enigmas

Author: Srinath Raghavan

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2018-10-16

Total Pages: 490

ISBN-13: 1541698819

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The two-hundred-year history of the United States' involvement in South Asia -- the key to understanding contemporary American policy in the region South Asia looms large in American foreign policy. Over the past two decades, we have spent billions of dollars and thousands of human lives in the region, to seemingly little effect. As Srinath Raghavan reveals in Fierce Enigmas, this should not surprise us. For 230 years, America's engagement with India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan has been characterized by short-term thinking and unintended consequences. Beginning with American traders in India in the eighteenth century, the region has become a locus for American efforts -- secular and religious -- to remake the world in its image. The definitive history of US involvement in South Asia, Fierce Enigmas is also a clarion call to fundamentally rethink our approach to the region.

Affinity
Affinity

Author: Sarah Waters

Publisher: Hachette UK

Published: 2011-02-03

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 0748129316

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An eerily brilliant and spooky tale of spiritualism and deception 'Now you know why you are drawn to me - why your flesh comes creeping to mine, and what it comes for. Let it creep.' From the dark heart of a Victorian prison, disgraced spiritualist Selina Dawes weaves an enigmatic spell. Is she a fraud, or a prodigy? By the time it all begins to matter, you'll find yourself desperately wanting to believe in magic. 'Refined, repressed and simmering... a delicious tale of Victorian spiritualism' Independent on Sunday 'Spooky, spellbinding, exquisitely written' Val Hennessy 'Beautifully, atmospherically written, this is a tale to thrill your very soul' Metro 'Sexy, spooky, stylish... a wonderful book' Guardian

Crossing Waters
Crossing Waters

Author: Marisel C. Moreno

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2022-07-26

Total Pages: 421

ISBN-13: 147732562X

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2023 Honorable Mention, Isis Duarte Book Prize, Haiti/ Dominican Republic section (LASA) 2023 Winner, Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Award, Caribbean Studies Association An innovative study of the artistic representations of undocumented migration within the Hispanophone Caribbean Debates over the undocumented migration of Latin Americans invariably focus on the southern US border, but most migrants never cross that arbitrary line. Instead, many travel, via water, among the Caribbean islands. The first study to examine literary and artistic representations of undocumented migration within the Hispanophone Caribbean, Crossing Waters relates a journey that remains silenced and largely unknown. Analyzing works by novelists, short-story writers, poets, and visual artists replete with references to drowning and echoes of the Middle Passage, Marisel Moreno shines a spotlight on the plight that these migrants face. In some cases, Puerto Rico takes on a new role as a stepping-stone to the continental United States and the society migrants will join there. Meanwhile the land border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the only terrestrial border in the Hispanophone Caribbean, emerges as a complex space within this cartography of borders. And while the Border Patrol occupies US headlines, the Coast Guard occupies the nightmares of refugees. An untold story filled with beauty, possibility, and sorrow, Crossing Waters encourages us to rethink the geography and experience of undocumented migration and the role that the Caribbean archipelago plays as a border zone.

Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel
Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel

Author: Lydia Millet

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2014-11-03

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 0393245632

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"Hilariously funny…Lydia Millet’s novels raise the bar for boldness." —Rene Steinke, New York Times Book Review In this “comic masterpiece” (Salon), honeymooners Deb and Chip—our opinionated, skeptical narrator and her cheerful jock husband—befriend a marine biologist who discovers mermaids in a coral reef. As a resort chain swoops in to exploit the shy creatures, the newlyweds unite with other adventurous vacationers to stop the company from turning the reef into a theme park. Mermaids in Paradise is Lydia Millet’s most fun book yet, tempering the sharp satire of her early career with the empathy and subtlety of her more recent novels and short stories.

Waves Across the South
Waves Across the South

Author: Sujit Sivasundaram

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-05-07

Total Pages: 497

ISBN-13: 022679055X

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This is a story of tides and coastlines, winds and waves, islands and beaches. It is also a retelling of indigenous creativity, agency, and resistance in the face of unprecedented globalization and violence. Waves Across the South shifts the narrative of the Age of Revolutions and the origins of the British Empire; it foregrounds a vast southern zone that ranges from the Arabian Sea and southwest Indian Ocean across to the Bay of Bengal, and onward to the South Pacific and the Tasman Sea. As the empires of the Dutch, French, and especially the British reached across these regions, they faced a surge of revolutionary sentiment. Long-standing venerable Eurasian empires, established patterns of trade and commerce, and indigenous practice also served as a context for this transformative era. In addition to bringing long-ignored people and events to the fore, Sujit Sivasundaram opens the door to new and necessary conversations about environmental history, the consequences of historical violence, the legacies of empire, the extraction of resources, and the indigenous futures that Western imperialism cut short. The result is nothing less than a bold new way of understanding our global past, one that also helps us think afresh about our shared future.

The Water Will Come
The Water Will Come

Author: Jeff Goodell

Publisher: Back Bay Books

Published: 2018-08-07

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780316260206

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"An immersive, mildly gonzo and depressingly well-timed book about the drenching effects of global warming, and a powerful reminder that we can bury our heads in the sand about climate change for only so long before the sand itself disappears." (Jennifer Senior, New York Times) A New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2017One of Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction in 2017One of Booklist's Top 10 Science Books of 2017 What if Atlantis wasn't a myth, but an early precursor to a new age of great flooding? Across the globe, scientists and civilians alike are noticing rapidly rising sea levels, and higher and higher tides pushing more water directly into the places we live, from our most vibrant, historic cities to our last remaining traditional coastal villages. With each crack in the great ice sheets of the Arctic and Antarctica, and each tick upwards of Earth's thermometer, we are moving closer to the brink of broad disaster. By century's end, hundreds of millions of people will be retreating from the world's shores as our coasts become inundated and our landscapes transformed. From island nations to the world's major cities, coastal regions will disappear. Engineering projects to hold back the water are bold and may buy some time. Yet despite international efforts and tireless research, there is no permanent solution-no barriers to erect or walls to build-that will protect us in the end from the drowning of the world as we know it. The Water Will Come is the definitive account of the coming water, why and how this will happen, and what it will all mean. As he travels across twelve countries and reports from the front lines, acclaimed journalist Jeff Goodell employs fact, science, and first-person, on-the-ground journalism to show vivid scenes from what already is becoming a water world.

Sato the Rabbit
Sato the Rabbit

Author: Yuki Ainoya

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781592702961

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After becoming a rabbit, Haneru Sato gathers stars at an observatory, sails the sea in a watermelon, tastes the emotions captured in different colors of ice, and more.