Book picks similar to
Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice by Annie Merrill Ingram
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Recycling Fun
Neville Astley - 2003
Miss Rabbit is having fun recycling, too, until she tries to recycle something she shouldn't!Read it yourself with Ladybird is one of Ladybird's best-selling series. For over thirty-five years it has helped young children who are learning to read develop and improve their reading skills.Each Read it yourself book is very carefully written to include many key, high-frequency words that are vital for learning to read, as well as a limited number of story words that are introduced and practised throughout. Simple sentences and frequently repeated words help to build the confidence of beginner readers and the four different levels of books support children all the way from very first reading practice through to independent, fluent reading.Each book has been carefully checked by educational consultants and can be read independently at home or used in a guided reading session at school. Further content includes comprehension puzzles, helpful notes for parents, carers and teachers, and book band information for use in schools.Peppa Pig: Recycling Fun is a Level 1 Read it yourself title, suitable for very early readers who have had some initial reading instruction and are ready to take their first steps in reading real stories. Each story is told very simply, using a small number of frequently repeated words.
Open City
Teju Cole - 2011
The walks meet a need for Julius: they are a release from the tightly regulated mental environment of work, and they give him the opportunity to process his relationships, his recent breakup with his girlfriend, his present, his past.But it is not only a physical landscape he covers; Julius crisscrosses social territory as well, encountering people from different cultures and classes who will provide insight on his journey—which takes him to Brussels, to the Nigeria of his youth, and into the most unrecognizable facets of his own soul.
Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign
Jonathan Allen - 2017
And of course she was supposed to win. How Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump is the tragic story of a sure thing gone off the rails. For every Comey revelation or hindsight acknowledgment about the electorate, no explanation of defeat can begin with anything other than the core problem of Hillary's campaign--the candidate herself. Through deep access to insiders from the top to the bottom of the campaign, political writers Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes have reconstructed the key decisions and unseized opportunities, the well-intentioned misfires and the hidden thorns that turned a winnable contest into a devastating loss. Drawing on the authors' deep knowledge of Hillary from their previous book, the acclaimed biography HRC, Shattered will offer an object lesson in how Hillary herself made victory an uphill battle, how her difficulty articulating a vision irreparably hobbled her impact with voters, and how the campaign failed to internalize the lessons of populist fury from the hard-fought primary against Bernie Sanders. Moving blow-by-blow from the campaign's difficult birth through the bewildering terror of election night, Shattered tells an unforgettable story with urgent lessons both political and personal, filled with revelations that will change the way readers understand just what happened to America on November 8, 2016.
Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads
Paul Theroux - 2015
Now, for the first time, in his tenth travel book, Theroux explores a piece of America — the Deep South. He finds there a paradoxical place, full of incomparable music, unparalleled cuisine, and yet also some of the nation’s worst schools, housing, and unemployment rates. It’s these parts of the South, so often ignored, that have caught Theroux’s keen traveler’s eye. On road trips spanning four seasons, wending along rural highways, Theroux visits gun shows and small-town churches, laborers in Arkansas, and parts of Mississippi where they still call the farm up the road “the plantation.” He talks to mayors and social workers, writers and reverends, the working poor and farming families — the unsung heroes of the south, the people who, despite it all, never left, and also those who returned home to rebuild a place they could never live without. From the writer whose “great mission has always been to transport us beyond that reading chair, to challenge himself — and thus, to challenge us” (Boston Globe), Deep South is an ode to a region, vivid and haunting, full of life and loss alike.
More Than One Truth
Matt Benson - 2018
MTOT is the story of an idealistic young attorney who must defend a childhood acquaintance from murder while receiving guidance from his mentor's ghost. After his client and lover exposes their illicit affair, the unnamed narrator is forced to resign his position as an attorney in the Navy JAG Corps. He takes a job with a charismatic criminal defense attorney known for reckless behavior, which reunites him with his hometown of Chico, California. After tragedy strikes and John dies, he must take on his first felony murder case alone. His client is Scotty Watts, a former high classmate and sports superstar turned jail bird. Scotty professes his innocence and remembers nothing about the night in question other than waking up in a pool of blood to sheriff's deputies pounding on his door. Despite a mountain of evidence pointing to Scotty's guilt, Narrator works earnestly to exonerate him. But while he investigates the case, it becomes harder and harder to separate fact from fiction, and his mind starts to unravel. Filled with conspiracy theories, twists, turns, and eleventh-hour evidentiary discoveries, More Than One Truth leads to a climax that shocks to the core. A unique take on the legal thriller, a story about the conflicted emotions of returning home, shattered idealism, and the pernicious effect of loneliness. "...will keep many readers guessing until the end." -Kirkus Reviews "...spooky..." -Kirkus Reviews "The groundwork (is) laid early on, but with such a light touch that clues are easy to overlook..." -Kirkus Reviews
The Confessions of Max Tivoli
Andrew Sean Greer - 2004
And yet, his physical curse proves to be a blessing, allowing him to try to win the heart of the same woman three times as at each successive encounter she fails to recognize him, taking him for a stranger, so giving Max another chance at love.Set against the historical backdrop of San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century, Andrew Sean Greer's The Confessions of Max Tivoli is a beautiful and daring feat of the imagination, questioning the very nature of love, time, and what it means to be human.
Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time
Ben Ehrenreich - 2020
Desert Notebooks examines how the unprecedented pace of destruction to our environment and an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape have led us to the brink of a calamity greater than any humankind has confronted before. As inhabitants of the Anthropocene, what might some of our own histories tell us about how to confront apocalypse? And how might the geologies and ecologies of desert spaces inform how we see and act toward time--the pasts we have erased and paved over, this anxious present, the future we have no choice but to build? Ehrenreich draws on the stark grandeur of the desert to ask how we might reckon with the uncertainty that surrounds us and fight off the crises that have already begun.In the canyons and oases of the Mojave and in Las Vegas's neon apocalypse, Ehrenreich finds beauty, and even hope, surging up in the most unlikely places, from the most barren rocks, and the apparent emptiness of the sky. Desert Notebooks is a vital and necessary chronicle of our past and our present--unflinching, urgent--yet timeless and profound.
Lucky Fish
Aimee Nezhukumatathil - 2011
With an exuberant appetite for “my morning song, my scurry-step, my dew,” anchored in complicated human situations, this astounding young poet’s third collection of poems is her strongest yet.
No Turning Back: The Life and Death of Animal Species
Richard Ellis - 2004
The trilobites, which dominated the ocean floors for 300 million years, are gone. The last of the dinosaurs was wiped out by a Mount Everest-sized meteorite that slammed into the earth 65 million years ago. The great flying reptiles are gone, and so are the marine reptiles, some of them larger than a humpback whale. Before humans crossed the Bering land bridge some 15,000 years ago, North America was populated by mastodons, mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, and cave bears. They too are MIA. Passenger pigeons once flew over North America in flocks that numbered in the billions; the last one died in 1914.In this book you will meet creatures that were driven to extinction even more recently, as well as some that were brought back from the brink. You will even encounter animals not known to exist until recently -- an antidote to extinction.
A Little Book of Language
David Crystal - 2010
In this charming volume, a narrative history written explicitly for a young audience, expert linguist David Crystal proves why the story of language deserves retelling.From the first words of an infant to the peculiar modern dialect of text messaging, A Little Book of Language ranges widely, revealing language’s myriad intricacies and quirks. In animated fashion, Crystal sheds light on the development of unique linguistic styles, the origins of obscure accents, and the search for the first written word. He discusses the plight of endangered languages, as well as successful cases of linguistic revitalization. Much more than a history, Crystal’s work looks forward to the future of language, exploring the effect of technology on our day-to-day reading, writing, and speech. Through enlightening tables, diagrams, and quizzes, as well as Crystal’s avuncular and entertaining style, A Little Book of Language will reveal the story of language to be a captivating tale for all ages.
The Johnstown Flood
David McCullough - 1968
In the mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been hastily rebuilt to create a lake for an exclusive summer resort patronized by the tycoons of that same industrial prosperity, among them Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon. Despite repeated warnings of possible danger, nothing was done about the dam. Then came May 31, 1889, when the dam burst, sending a wall of water thundering down the mountain, smashing through Johnstown, and killing more than 2,000 people. It was a tragedy that became a national scandal. Graced by David McCullough's remarkable gift for writing richly textured, sympathetic social history, The Johnstown Flood is an absorbing, classic portrait of life in nineteenth-century America, of overweening confidence, of energy, and of tragedy. It also offers a powerful historical lesson for our century and all times: the danger of assuming that because people are in positions of responsibility they are necessarily behaving responsibly.
Wisdom of the Last Farmer: Harvesting Legacies from the Land
David Mas Masumoto - 2009
Hailed by The New York Times as a poet of farming, Slow Food activist Masumoto weaves together stories of family and farming, life and death, to reveal age-old wisdom that is fast disappearing--and urgently needed.
Blood of the Liberals
George Packer - 2000
Packer's father was a Kennedy-era liberal, a law professor and dean at Stanford whose convictions were sorely--and ultimately fatally--tested in the campus upheavals of the 1960s. The inheritor of two sometimes conflicting strains of the great American liberal tradition, Packer discusses the testing of ideals in the lives of his father and grandfather and his own struggle to understand the place of the progressive tradition in our currently polarized political climate. Searching, engrossing, and persuasive, this is an original, intimate examination of the meaning of politics in American lives.
Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image
David Greenberg - 2003
everyman; to intellectuals of the 1950s, he was Tricky Dick; to 1960s radicals, a shadowy conspirator; to the Washington press corps, a pioneering spin doctor; to loyal Middle Americans, a victim of liberal hatred; to recent historians, an unlikely liberal. how each was created and disseminated in American culture and how Nixon's tinkering with his own image often backfired. More than what Nixon did, this it reveals what Nixon meant.
American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God & Public Lands in the West
Betsy Gaines Quammen - 2020
With an antagonism that goes back to the very first Mormons who fled the Midwest for the Great Basin, they hold a sense of entitlement that confronts both law and democracy. Today their cowboy confrontations threaten public lands, wild species, and American heritage.