Heading towards a half-remembered cave on the Pacific coast where her younger, more adventurous self once stayed, she recalls adventures in Sumatra, the Yukon and many places in between—and wonders what compels her to keep moving through life while everyone else has found a place to belong.

    From the heat of anti-rape protest on the streets of New Delhi to the cool hills of Shimla, playground of the Raj; from a Gujurati retirement home for gay men and eunuchs to a busy sex clinic in Chennai; from patriarchs to matriarchs; GIGs (Good Indian Girls), BIGs (Bad Indian Girls) and the fleshpots of Bombay, she accompanied by feisty Delhi girl Dimple lifts the bed sheets on India's sexual revolution. And it's a revolution that's full of fascinating surprises and contrasts; for India - the land that gave us that exuberant guide to sexual pleasure, the Kama Sutra - is also the land where women remain cloistered in purdah while teenage girls check out porn online; where families bow down to a conjoined phallus and vagina, the Shivaling, while couples fear to hold hands in public; and where the loveless arranged marriage is still the norm. Colourful, compelling, confounding, The Kama Sutra Diaries reveal what India has to tell us about modern-day love, sex and sexuality.

    I’m an average guy who learned how to “ask more” to “get more” out of life. The strategies and techniques I outline in this book can help you get just about anything—a better job, a new house, or a great vacation—faster and more consistently if you’re willing to follow my advice.

      In the constellation of Eridanus, there lurks a cosmic mystery: It’s as if something has taken a huge bite out of the universe. But what is the culprit? The hole in the universe is just one of many puzzles keeping cosmologists busy. Supermassive black holes, bubbles of nothingness gobbling up space, monster universes swallowing others—these and many other bizarre ideas are being pursued by scientists. Due to breathtaking progress in astronomy, the history of our universe is now better understood than the history of our own planet. But these advances have uncovered some startling riddles. In this electrifying new book, renowned cosmologist and author Paul Davies lucidly explains what we know about the cosmos and its enigmas, exploring the tantalizing—and sometimes terrifying—possibilities that lie before us. As Davies guides us through the audacious research offering mind-bending solutions to these and other mysteries, he leads us up to the greatest outstanding conundrum of all: Why does the universe even exist in the first place? And how did a system of mindless, purposeless particles manage to bring forth conscious, thinking beings? Filled with wit and wonder, What’s Eating the Universe? is a dazzling tour of cosmic questions, sure to entertain, enchant, and inspire us all.

    --Charles D'Ambrosio, author of LoiteringIn search of answers and action, the award-winning poet and essayist Lisa Wells brings us Believers, introducing trailblazers and outliers from across the globe who have found radically new ways to live and reconnect to the Earth in the face of climate change We find ourselves at the end of the world. How, then, shall we live?Like most of us, Lisa Wells has spent years overwhelmed by increasingly urgent news of climate change on an apocalyptic scale. She did not need to be convinced of the stakes, but she could not find practical answers. She embarked on a pilgrimage, seeking wisdom and paths to action from outliers and visionaries, pragmatists and iconoclasts. Believers tracks through the lives of these people who are dedicated to repairing the earth and seemingly undaunted by the task ahead.Wells meets an itinerant gardener and misanthrope leading a group of nomadic activists in rewilding the American desert. She finds a group of environmentalist Christians practicing "watershed discipleship" in New Mexico and another group in Philadelphia turning the tools of violence into tools of farming--guns into ploughshares. She watches the world's greatest tracker teach others how to read a trail, and visits botanists who are restoring land overrun by invasive species and destructive humans. She talks with survivors of catastrophic wildfires in California as they try to rebuild in ways that acknowledge the fires will come again.Through empathic, critical portraits, Wells shows that these trailblazers are not so far beyond the rest of us. They have had the same realization, have accepted that we are living through a global catastrophe, but are trying to answer the next question: How do you make a life at the end of the world? Through this miraculous commingling of acceptance and activism, this focus on seeing clearly and moving forward, Wells is able to take the devastating news facing us all, every day, and inject a possibility of real hope. Believers demands transformation. It will change how you think about your own actions, about how you can still make an impact, and about how we might yet reckon with our inheritance.

    Yet, in his many travels, he'd never visited the Northwest Territories, "the white ribbon across the top of North American maps found beneath a paper crease still crisp at the fold." After an all-too-brief visit to a literary festival in Yellowknife, Bidini was hooked on the place and its people. From the time he returned home, all he could do was think about going back to the North.At the same time, Bidini found himself at a career crossroads. His position as a columnist with a national newspaper had come to an end, leaving him reflecting on his lifelong love of newspapers and questioning the future of journalism in Canada. Writing had always been Bidini's way to make sense of the world around him and he was determined to find an outlet for his unique perspective. Still fresh with the memories of his recent visit to the Northwest Territories, Bidini contacts the Yellowknifer, one of the last truly local and independent newspapers, and signs on as a guest columnist for an unforgettable summer. Midnight Light: A Personal Journey to the North, is Dave Bidini's fast, funny and, at times, powerfully poignant chronicle of the incredible time he spent "up there" in the NWT. The Yellowknifer, like the city it serves, bucks all of the trends and invokes all of the charms and frustrations of stubborn nationalism. The newspaper is completely locally-focused and treats the global news sharescape as if it never existed. The paper gives Bidini a ground-level view of a city and its environs, including Great Bear Lake, Tuktoyaktuk, and Nahanni National Park, that are on one hand lost in time, and on another faced with the very stark realities of poverty, racism, addiction, and hopelessness. Along the way, Midnight Light introduces readers to an extraordinary cast of characters, including Dene elders and entrepreneurs adapting to a changing way of life, various artists who are giving the region a powerful voice to the rest of the world, politicians and law enforcement officers who are dealing with the community's difficult history and economic realities, and an assortment of complicated souls from the South who have travelled North as a "last chance" to build lives for themselves. Woven throughout Midnight Light's tremendous narrative is the story of the irascible John McFadden, a veteran Toronto newspaper crime reporter who "escaped" to Yellowknife. McFadden is the key character in the Yellowknifer's ongoing fight with the authorities (RCMP forces) who do not take kindly to journalistic doggedness. McFadden and the paper became the centre of attention across the country when he was charged with obstruction and threatened with jail time. He was found not guilty and the police were forced to change their tactics. Yet the tension between the RCMP and the Yellowknifer remains unresolved. In Midnight Light, Dave Bidini brings Yellowknife, the Northwest Territories and its remarkable and proud people to brilliant life.

    It tells the story of two mates, a kayak, and the conquest of the Tasman.

    Hazen writes of how the co-evolution of the geosphere and biosphere—of rocks and living matter—has shaped our planet into the only one of its kind in the Solar System, if not the entire cosmos.With an astrobiologist’s imagination, a historian’s perspective, and a naturalist’s passion for the ground beneath our feet, Hazen explains how changes on an atomic level translate into dramatic shifts in Earth’s makeup over its 4.567 billion year existence. He calls upon a flurry of recent discoveries to portray our planet’s many iterations in vivid detail. Through his theory of “co-evolution,” we learn how reactions between organic molecules and rock crystals may have generated Earth’s first organisms, which in turn are responsible for more than two-thirds of the mineral varieties on the planet.The Story of Earth is also the story of the pioneering men and women behind the sciences. Readers will meet black-market meteorite hawkers of the Sahara Desert, the gun-toting Feds who guarded the Apollo missions’ lunar dust, and the World War II Navy officer whose super-pressurized “bomb”—recycled from military hardware—first simulated the molten rock of Earth’s mantle. As a mentor to a new generation of scientists, Hazen introduces the intrepid young explorers whose dispatches from Earth’s harshest landscapes will revolutionize geology.

    His methods are so at odds with conventional scientific wisdom that for 30 years he has been dismissed and ridiculed as a madman. He has faced bankruptcy and family break-up. But now, on the brink of ecological disaster, leading politicians, international scientists and businessmen are beating a path to his door as they grapple with how best to alleviate the affects of drought on the Australian landscape. Described as a man who reads and understands the Australian landscape better than most scientists, supporters of Peter Andrews claim he has done what no scientist ever thought to do — he has restored streams and wetlands to the way they were before European settlement interfered with them. The startling results of his natural sequence farming are said to have been achieved very cheaply, simply and quickly.

    She's done things I dream of doing."—James CameronEdith Widder's childhood dream of becoming a marine biologist was almost derailed in college, when complications from a surgery gone wrong caused temporary blindness. A new reality of shifting shadows drew her fascination to the power of light—as well as the importance of optimism.As her vision cleared, Widder found the intersection of her two passions in oceanic bioluminescence, a little-explored scientific field within Earth's last great unknown frontier: the deep ocean. With little promise of funding or employment, she leaped at the first opportunity to train as a submersible pilot and dove into the darkness.Widder's first journey into the deep ocean, in a diving suit that resembled a suit of armor, took her to a depth of eight hundred feet. She turned off the lights and witnessed breathtaking underwater fireworks: explosions of bioluminescent activity. Concerns about her future career vanished. She only wanted to know one thing: Why was there so much light down there?Below the Edge of Darkness takes readers deep into our planet's oceans as Widder pursues her questions about one of the most important and widely used forms of communication in nature. In the process, she reveals hidden worlds and a dazzling menagerie of behaviors and animals, from microbes to leviathans, many never before seen or, like the legendary giant squid, never before filmed in their deep-sea lairs. Alongside Widder, we experience life-and-death equipment malfunctions and witness breakthroughs in technology and understanding, all set against a growing awareness of the deteriorating health of our largest and least understood ecosystem.A thrilling adventure story as well as a scientific revelation, Below the Edge of Darkness reckons with the complicated and sometimes dangerous realities of exploration. Widder shows us how when we push our boundaries and expand our worlds, discovery and wonder follow. These are the ultimate keys to the ocean's salvation—and thus to our future on this planet.

    In the face of environmental degradation and global climate change, scientific knowledge alone does not tell us what we ought to do. The missing premise of the argument and much-needed center piece in the debate to date has been the need for ethical values, moral guidance, and principled reasons for doing the right thing for our planet, its animals, its plants, and its people.Contributors from throughout the world (including North America, Africa, Australia, Asia, and Europe) bring forth a rich variety of heritages and perspectives. Their contributions take many forms, illustrating the rich variety of ways we express our moral beliefs in letters, poems, economic analyses, proclamations, essays, and stories. In the end, their voices affirm why we must move beyond a scientific study and response to embrace an ongoing model of repair and sustainability. These writings demonstrate that scientific analysis and moral conviction can work successfully side-by-side.This is a book that can speak to anyone, regardless of his or her worldview, and that also includes a section devoted to “what next” thinking that helps the reader put the words and ideas into action in their personal lives. Thanks to generous support from numerous landmark organizations, such as the Kendeda Fund and Germeshausen Foundation, the book is just the starting point for a national, and international, discussion that will be carried out in a variety of ways, from online debate to “town hall” meetings, from essay competitions for youth to sermons from pulpits in all denominations. The “Moral Ground movement” will result in a newly discovered, or rediscovered, commitment on a personal and community level to consensus about our ethical obligation to the future.

    Pearce deftly shows us the hidden worlds that sustain a Western lifestyle, and he does it by examining the sources of everything in his own life; as an ordinary citizen of the Western world, he, like all of us, is an "eco-sinner." In Confessions of an Eco-Sinner, Pearce surveys his home and then launches on a global tour to track down, among other things, the Tanzanians who grow and harvest his fair-trade coffee (which isn't as fair as one might hope), the Central American plantations that grow his daily banana (a treat that may disappear forever), the women in the Bangladeshi sweatshops who sew his jeans, the Chinese factory cities where the world's computers are made, and the African afterlife for old cell phones. It's a fascinating portrait, by turns sobering and hopeful, of the effects the world's more than 6 billion inhabitants-all eating, consuming, making-have on our planet, and of the working and living conditions of the people who produce most of these goods.

    When death is sudden or unexplained, it falls to Shepherd to establish the cause. Each post-mortem is a detective story in its own right - and Shepherd has performed over 23,000 of them. Through his skill, dedication and insight, Dr Shepherd solves the puzzle to answer our most pressing question: how did this person die?From serial killer to natural disaster, 'perfect murder' to freak accident, Shepherd takes nothing for granted in pursuit of truth. And while he's been involved in some of the most high-profile cases of recent times, it's often the less well known encounters that prove the most perplexing, intriguing and even bizarre. In or out of the public eye, his evidence has put killers behind bars, freed the innocent and turned open-and-shut cases on their heads.But a life in death, bearing witness to some of humanity's darkest corners, exacts a price and Shepherd doesn't flinch from counting the cost to him and his family.

    Goliath tale with a twist.” —The New York Times Book Review The story that inspired the major motion picture Dark Waters, starring Mark Ruffalo as Robert Bilott.In 1998, Rob Bilott began a legal battle against DuPont that would consume the next twenty years of his life, uncovering the worst case of environmental contamination in modern history and a corporate cover-up that put the health of hundreds of thousands of people at risk. Representing a single farmer who was convinced the creek on his property had been poisoned by runoff from a nearby DuPont landfill, Rob ultimately discovers the truth about PFAS—unregulated, toxic chemicals used in the manufacturing of Teflon and a host of other household goods. DuPont’s own scientists had issued internal warnings for years about the harmful effects of PFAS on human health, but the company continued to allow these chemicals to leach into public drinking water. Until Rob forced them to face the consequences. Exposure is an unforgettable legal drama about malice and manipulation, the failings of environmental regulation, and one lawyer’s quest to expose the truth about this previously unknown—and still unregulated—chemical that presents one of the greatest human health crises of the 21st century.

     Drivers and racing crews from across the country converged on "The Brickyard," site of the Indianapolis 500, to help search for her. As the head mechanic for the Dick Simon racing team, known as “Crabby” across the race circuit, Michael had a reputation for bullying and abuse. He'd immediately become a suspect in Cynthia's disappearance. But with a strong alibi, there was nothing authorities could do when he decided to take a vacation to Florida and skip a scheduled polygraph test and the search for his estranged wife. ??? Nor could law enforcement charge him when Cynthia’s body was found a few weeks later in northern Indiana - minus her head. The case went cold for six years until a newly elected prosecutor allowed his deputies to charge Michael Albrecht with murder. ??? But would they be able to prove his guilt? This true crime legal thriller written by one of the prosecutors, Larry Sells, and journalist Margie Porter, runs at full throttle and will leave you on the edge of your seat right up to the checkered flag at the final verdict. Scroll up and grab a copy today.