Yeats wrote four distinct versions of his unfinished novel, The Speckled Bird . This unique edition, draws together all four books, and includes transcripts of recently identified manuscript pages of the second version. The texts are supplemented by detailed explanatory, authorial and textual notes by the editor, William H. O'Donnell. An introduction and chronology provide an overview of the publishing history of the work.
This unique volume takes readers behind the scenes for an "insider/outsider" view of education policymaking in action. Two state-level case studies of social studies curriculum reform and textbook policy (California and New York) illustrate how curriculum decision making becomes an arena in which battles are fought over national values and priorities. Written by a New York education professor and a California journalist, the text offers a rare blend of academic and journalistic voices. The "great speckled bird" is the authors' counter-symbol to the bald eagle--a metaphor representing the racial-ethnic-cultural diversity that has characterized the U.S. since its beginnings and the multicultural reality of American society today. The text breaks new ground by focusing on the intersections of national debates and education policymaking. It situates the case studies within historical and contemporary cultural contexts--with particular attention to questions of power and knowledge control and how influence is exercised. By juxtaposing the contrasting cases of California and New York, the authors illustrate commonalities and differences in education policymaking goals and processes. By sharing stories of participants at and behind the scenes, policymaking comes alive rather than appearing to result from impersonal "forces" or "factors."
"A Speckled Bird" by Augusta J. Evans. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.
Though teenaged Angie lives in a small, wealthy town, she is poor. Deserted in birth by her mother, her father killed in war, she lives in a trailer with her ailing but loving Grandma. Though a gifted athlete, Angie's afraid to compete in her preppie school because she feels like she's "trailer trash." Just as she is threatened by a disliked aunt who has announced she will soon take Angie away to live with her and put Grandma in a facility, Angie meets a boy at school. Theo is brilliant, wealthy, but an awkward loner. His parents have time only for their country club and try buying him off with "things," while his schoolmates taunt him for his eccentric intelligence. His only friends are his computer and his bird, Speckles. As Angie and Theo form a unique bond as soulmates, they gain the courage to begin their journeys toward adulthood, resolving family problems and taking actions to utilize their talents.
I At the end of the ’eighties my father and mother, my brother and sisters and myself, all newly arrived from Dublin, were settled in Bedford Park in a red-brick house with several mantelpieces of wood, copied from marble mantelpieces designed by the brothers Adam, a balcony and a little garden shadowed by a great horse-chestnut tree. Years before we had lived there, when the crooked ostentatiously picturesque streets with great trees casting great shadows had been a new enthusiasm: the Pre-Raphaelite movement at last affecting life. But now exaggerated criticism had taken the place of enthusiasm, the tiled roofs, the first in modern London, were said to leak, which they did not, and the drains to be bad, though that was no longer true; and I imagine that houses were cheap. I remember feeling disappointed because the co-operative stores, with their little seventeenth century panes, had lost the romance they had when I had passed them still unfinished on my way to school; and because the public house, called The Tabard after Chaucer’s Inn, was so plainly a common public house; and because the great sign of a trumpeter designed by Rooke, the Pre-Raphaelite artist, had been freshened by some inferior hand. The big red-brick church had never pleased me, and I was accustomed, when I saw the wooden balustrade that ran along the slanting edge of the roof where nobody ever walked or could walk, to remember the opinion of some architect friend of my father’s, that it had been put there to keep the birds from falling off. Still, however, it had some village characters and helped us to feel not wholly lost in the metropolis. I no longer went to church as a regular habit, but go I sometimes did, for one Sunday morning I saw these words painted on a board in the porch: “The congregation are requested to kneel during prayers; the kneelers are afterwards to be hung upon pegs provided for the purpose.” In front of every seat hung a little cushion and these cushions were called “kneelers.” Presently the joke ran through the community, where there were many artists who considered religion at best an unimportant accessory to good architecture and who disliked that particular church.
The Waldenes were among the first of the people of Europe to obtain a translation of the Holy Scriptures. Hundreds of years before the Reformation they possessed the Bible in manuscript in their native tongue. Here the light of truth was kept burning amid the darkness of the Middle Ages. Here, for a thousand years, witnesses for the truth maintained the ancient faith.
Over the summer of 1821, a cash-strapped John James Audubon worked as a tutor at Oakley Plantation in Louisiana’s rural West Feliciana Parish. This move initiated a profound change in direction for the struggling artist. Oakley’s woods teemed with life, galvanizing Audubon to undertake one of the most extraordinary endeavors in the annals of art: a comprehensive pictorial record of America’s birds. That summer, Audubon began what would eventually become his four-volume opus, Birds of America. In A Summer of Birds, Danny Heitman recounts the season that shaped Audubon’s destiny, sorting facts from romance to give an intimate view of the world’s most famous bird artist. A new preface marks the two-hundredth anniversary of that eventful interlude, reflecting on Audubon’s enduring legacy among artists, aesthetes, and nature lovers in Louisiana and around the world.
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Genius of Birds, a radical investigation into the bird way of being, and the recent scientific research that is dramatically shifting our understanding of birds -- how they live and how they think. “There is the mammal way and there is the bird way.” But the bird way is much more than a unique pattern of brain wiring, and lately, scientists have taken a new look at bird behaviors they have, for years, dismissed as anomalies or mysteries –– What they are finding is upending the traditional view of how birds conduct their lives, how they communicate, forage, court, breed, survive. They are also revealing the remarkable intelligence underlying these activities, abilities we once considered uniquely our own: deception, manipulation, cheating, kidnapping, infanticide, but also ingenious communication between species, cooperation, collaboration, altruism, culture, and play. Some of these extraordinary behaviors are biological conundrums that seem to push the edges of, well, birdness: a mother bird that kills her own infant sons, and another that selflessly tends to the young of other birds as if they were her own; a bird that collaborates in an extraordinary way with one species—ours—but parasitizes another in gruesome fashion; birds that give gifts and birds that steal; birds that dance or drum, that paint their creations or paint themselves; birds that build walls of sound to keep out intruders and birds that summon playmates with a special call—and may hold the secret to our own penchant for playfulness and the evolution of laughter. Drawing on personal observations, the latest science, and her bird-related travel around the world, from the tropical rainforests of eastern Australia and the remote woodlands of northern Japan, to the rolling hills of lower Austria and the islands of Alaska’s Kachemak Bay, Jennifer Ackerman shows there is clearly no single bird way of being. In every respect, in plumage, form, song, flight, lifestyle, niche, and behavior, birds vary. It is what we love about them. As E.O Wilson once said, when you have seen one bird, you have not seen them all.
