This is an intimate portrait of Charlie Russell's philosophy of nature. Accompanied by stunning photography, the book is written in narrative form, the way Charlie spoke and shared his stories and knowledge with others. Each of the chapters describes some facet of Charlie's philosophy and experiences through the stories of individual bears and what they taught him: the meaning of trust, respect, attention, love, and much more.
The story starts in a land known to bears as the Great Northern Forest of the East. Humans will know it as the Siberian Region of Russia. Young Lily discovers a bear cub named Boris hiding in her garden shed and finds that he can talk. On listening to his story, she learns of a mystical man coming in contact with the bear community in their forest in Russia who gave the bears power of speech through a magical talisman. Boriss father, Grigor, was the leader of the group until an evil bear named Zal stole the talisman and used its powers to overthrow him. Boriss mother fled the area with her cub and hid him in the back of a lorry whilst looking for food. The lorry left on a journey to England with Boris on board. Lily endeavors to return Boris to his mother in Russia with the help of her cousin Tyler, and they encounter various adventures along the way. They eventually get there and find Boriss mum and then proceed to tackle and defeat the wicked Zal.
The final Toby Peters Hollywood whodunit from the Edgar Award–winning author is “a marvelous magic trick of a mystery” featuring Harry Blackstone (Booklist, starred review). When an anonymous rival demands that master illusionist Harry Blackstone reveal his secrets on stage or die, the magician hires Toby Peters and his brother, ex-cop Phil Pevsner, to run security for his show at the famous Pantages Theater in Hollywood. Of course, Peters doesn’t expect the job to include replacing a showgirl for Blackstone’s show-stopping sawing-a-woman-in-half trick after the saboteur has stolen the blade. Peters’s brief career in magic is only the first surprise as a blackmailing con man turns up shot in a dressing room backstage and one of Blackstone’s competitors ends up dead at a testimonial dinner. With “The Great Blackstone” now a murder suspect, the sleuth will need to pull a rabbit out of a hat to solve this mystery . . .
Bear Speaks is a marvelous, fantastical teaching tale in the tradition of The Celestine Prophecy. A young professional woman from Los Angeles goes camping in the Montana wilderness to “find herself” and escape the pressures of family and fiancé, about whom she’s having some doubts. Once in the forest, she discovers that she is anything but alone. As she explores the natural world around her, she encounters the trickster coyote, a wise old spider and an adventurous raven, all of whom have the ability to shape shift and communicate with her, mind to mind. And soon she finds herself falling in love with a magnificent bear named Ishmel. As she gets to know Ishmel, he transmits to her seven sacred lessons: 1) All your needs will be met. 2) Time is an illusion. 3) Have no fear. 4) Release into love. 5) Create a loving reality. 6) Connect energy lines to heal the world. 7) Vibrate with joy. These lessons are both familiar and new, with the ring of truth from various spiritual traditions. Above all she learns, and teaches us, that the source of your fear can become the guide for your life. Bear Speaks tells an enchanted tale about trusting what life presents us.
Fargo’s on the lookout for a killer… When Skye Fargo gets a letter from an old friend and fellow scout, he finds he’s not alone. It seems that every sharp-eyed pathfinder worth his buckskins has been asked to Fort Carlson. But it’s soon revealed that someone has brought them together for a very special reason—to take them out, one by one…
A Special Prince Is Born Something exciting was happening in the big wildlife animal preserve. You could hear it first in the tumbling of the brooks and the waterfalls, and then in the rustling of tiny feet scurrying here and there throughout the forests and across the meadows. You could also see it in the bright green and yellow colors appearing across the valleys and on the lofty meadows, and then in the soft gold light that was replacing some of the shadows in the vast forests on the mountainsides. Even on most of the mountaintops, against the smooth, brilliant white of the snow, gold, rusty orange, red, and silver gray jagged peaks and bumps were appearing. Across the sky, bright sunlight was peeking through the gray clouds more and more each day, gradually turning the sky to blue and the clouds to white and fluffy. Soon on the meadow, tiny purple, blue, yellow, red, and white flowers were popping up everywhere, right through the melting snow. You could even smell it in the pungent, bittersweet fragrance wafting through the air and feel it like a soft, warm blanket. Signs could be found all over the preserve, indicating that the long winter had ended. It was the beginning of spring. *** Buy the book for the rest of the story.
Ordinary language and scientific language enable us to speak about, in a singular way (using demonstratives and names), what we recognize not to exist: fictions, the contents of our hallucinations, abstract objects, and various idealized but nonexistent objects that our scientific theories are often couched in terms of. Indeed, references to such nonexistent items-especially in the case of the application of mathematics to the sciences-are indispensable. We cannot avoid talking about such things. Scientific and ordinary languages thus enable us to say things about Pegasus or about hallucinated objects that are true (or false), such as "Pegasus was believed by the ancient Greeks to be a flying horse," or "That elf I'm now hallucinating over there is wearing blue shoes." Standard contemporary metaphysical views and semantic analyses of singular idioms on offer in contemporary philosophy of language have not successfully accommodated these routine practices of saying true and false things about the nonexistent while simultaneously honoring the insight that such things do not exist in any way at all (and have no properties). That is, philosophers often feel driven to claim that such objects do exist, or they claim that all our talk isn't genuine truth-apt talk, but only pretence. This book reconfigures metaphysics (and the role of metaphysics in semantics) in radical ways that allow the accommodation of our ordinary ways of speaking of what does not exist while retaining the absolutely crucial presupposition that such objects exist in no way at all, have no properties, and so are not the truth-makers for the truths and falsities that are about them.
Provocative, passionate and populist, RMB Manifestos are short and concise non-fiction books of literary, critical, and cultural studies. The grizzly bear, once the archetype for all that is wild, is quickly becoming a symbol of nature’s fierce but flagging resilience in the face of human greed and ignorance—and the difficulty a wealth-addicted society has in changing its ways. North America’s grizzlies have been under siege ever since Europeans arrived. They’d survived the arrival of spear-wielding humans 13,000 years ago, outlived the short-faced bear, the dire wolf and the sabre-tooth cat—not to mention mastodons, mammoths and giant ground sloths the size of elephants—but grizzly bears in much of Turtle Island succumbed to 375 years of unrelenting commercialization and industrialization, disappearing from the Great Plains and much of the mountain West. Despite their relatively successful recovery in Yellowstone National Park, the bears’ decline continues largely unchecked. And the front line in this centuries-old battle for survival has shifted to western Alberta and southern BC, where outdated mythologies, rapacious industry and disingenuous governments continue to push the Great Bear into the mountains and toward a future that may not have room for them at all.
