'She closes her eyes, trying to remember more perfectly, trying to get the smell and the feel of that one afternoon clear in her head.' Sam's life is haunted by the day that her mother inexplicably abandoned her at the beach, leaving her homeless at thirteen. One minute she was surfing the pure, clean waves, and the next she was completely on her own. Years later, Sam has created a life for herself by the sea with her partner Em. When a coma patient is brought to the hospital where Sam works, she believes the woman to be her mother. Before she can discover the truth, she must unravel her own memories of that traumatic day. The True Green of Hope is a provocative novel about the natures of love, memory and belonging.
Caribbean-island innkeeper Holly Walker is hunkering down against a monster hurricane. Unfortunately, so is player Lord Anthony Bascombe, a man who excuses his bad behavior by saying he is descended from pirates. Then her grown son, Byron, and his father, Montez—the man she’s never stopped wanting—go missing. Will she ever see them again? What about the many others hurt and dying? And will help ever arrive? With each passing day, Holly’s tumultuous past and the epic storm send her hurtling toward a shattering climax that will change the island—and Holly’s life—forever.
Describes how to renovate, purchase, and live in homes with environmental consciousness in mind, providing tips on increasing the energy efficiency of one's home without relinquishing aestheticism.
All of science springs from the observation of nature. In this classic book, the late Professor Minnaert accompanies the reader on a tour of nature's light and color and reveals the myriad phenomena that may be observed outdoors with no more than a pair of eyes and an enquiring mind. From the intriguing shape of the dapples beneath a tree on a sunny day, via rainbows, mirages, and haloes, the colors of liquid, ice, and the sky, to the appearance of the sun, moon, planets, and stars - Minnaert describes and explains them all in a clear language accessible to laymen. This new English edition is supplemented by 80 plates, over half of them in color, taken by the acclaimed photographer Pekka Parviainen, illustrating many of the phenomena - ordinary and exotic - discussed in the book.
In this, her third crime novel set in Hawaii, Selma delves into the mystique, history, lure, and romance of coffee while taking the reader on a tour of Oahu. In Coffee Kapu, modern day criminals pattern their behavior after the notorious criminals of the past. These 21st century bad guys taunt Madam Pele, the legendary goddess of the volcano, and she takes care of them in her inimitable style. The Days continue to enjoy their vacations in Hawaii and share their observations and experiences even while the criminals wreak havoc.
Why do we need two eyes? Why are all cats grey at night and appear to move faster the day? Why is the sky blue and the setting sun red? This book explains the multifaceted nature of perception, and discusses the mysteries of vision. It provides readers with experiments to help them discover optical illusions and the features of their own perception. Illusions of Seeing begins with a discussion on the essence of light and its perception to the human eye. It presents a comprehensive overview of the basic laws of human perception as well as the fundamentals of good gestalt. Subsequent chapters discuss geometric-optical illusions; the perception of form, brightness, and translucency and their interaction with each other; ambiguous perception, color vision, spatial vision. The book ends with a discussion of the perception of motion and its interaction with color, form, and spatial depth with a full chapter devoted to illusions in our everyday life. Consider this your travel guide in the marvelous world of sight, to experience a completely individual way to understand and improve your own perception. Illusions of Seeing will be of interest to psychologists, physicists, biologists, and undergraduate and graduate students within the field of cognitive psychology.
“An exciting tale of another path to super intelligence.” —Vernor Vinge, three-time Hugo Award–winning author of A Fire Upon the Deep Jonathan Knox is one of the country’s most sought-after management consultants, not least for his uncanny skill at intuiting the solution hidden in the noise. Blessing though it may be to his clients, Knox’s so-called pattern-matching ability began as a curse. The only saving grace is that it blundered him into a relationship with Marianna Bonaventure, an Energy Department agent charged with keeping track of nuclear proliferation risks . . . from behind a desk. Her only foray into fieldwork so far was the mission where she first teamed with Jon Knox, the one where they’d sort of saved the world. Now she’s on another case with Jon, investigating the disappearance of billionaire tech genius Davoud Ansari’s daughter Fatimah. Nietzsche is the artificial intelligence built by Ansari’s company, Psyche Industries, helping Marianna and John with the investigation. But Nietzsche is also a machine with a secret agenda. Hamza Nassiri is a deep-cover agent for Iran’s feared Quds Force. Posing as Psyche Industries’ security chief, Hamza is laboring in secret to undermine the MERGE, an intelligence analysis capability of unthinkable power. Before it comes on line, he must use Fatimah Ansari to bring down MERGE and the country along with it.
“A thrilling, fast-paced excursion through the history of physical discovery . . . from silly putty to string theory” (Dr. Paul Halpern, author of Collider). Following his previous volumes, The Science Book and The Math Book, acclaimed science writer Clifford Pickover returns with a richly illustrated chronology of physics, containing 250 short, entertaining, and thought-provoking entries. In addition to exploring such engaging topics as dark energy, parallel universes, the Doppler effect, the God particle, and Maxwells demon, The Physics Book extends back billions of years to the hypothetical Big Bang and forward trillions of years to a time of “quantum resurrection.” Like the previous titles in this series, The Physics Book offers a lively and accessible account of major concepts without getting bogged down in complex details.
In a sequence of publications in the 1760s, James Macpherson, a Scottish schoolteacher in the central Highlands, created fantastic epics of ancient heroes and presented them as genuine translations of the poetry of Ossian, a fictionalized Caledonian bard of the third century. In Ossianic Unconformities Eric Gidal introduces the idiosyncratic publications of a group of nineteenth-century Scottish eccentrics who used statistics, cartography, and geomorphology to map and thereby vindicate Macpherson's controversial eighteenth-century renderings of Gaelic oral traditions. Although these writers primarily sought to establish the authenticity of Macpherson's "translations," they came to record, through promotion, evasion, and confrontation, the massive changes being wrought upon Scottish and Irish lands by British industrialization. Their obsessive and elaborate attempts to fix both the poetry and the land into a stable set of coordinates developed what we can now perceive as a nascent ecological perspective on literature in a changing world. Gidal examines the details of these imaginary geographies in conjunction with the social and spatial histories of Belfast and the River Lagan valley, Glasgow and the Firth of Clyde, and the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland, regions that form both the sixth-century kingdom of Dál Riata and the fabled terrain of the Ossianic poems. Combining environmental and industrial histories with the reception of the poems of Ossian, Ossianic Unconformities unites literary history and book studies with geography, cartography, and geology to present and consider imaginative responses to environmental catastrophe.
