She’d never hear him again if she didn’t survive the tragedy…Marie Lindstrom was ready to take on the world. After months of research poured into planning a birthday trip to remember, the mother of two beamed with happiness as they touched down in Thailand. And she was positive they were bound for a trek full of lasting memories… until the tsunami wave hit.Terrified by the prospect of losing all she held dear, Marie struggled to keep her head above water after being swept underground and enshrouded in darkness. But even after the catastrophe passed and she embraced what remained, the guilt accompanying her survival proved staggering.Would the soul-wrenching pain tear her apart or be miraculously transformative?No. 204 is Going Home is a heart-shaking memoir about the unbreakable strength of motherhood. If you like honest depictions of disaster, raw emotional transformations, and moving accounts of healing, then you’ll love Marie Lindstrom’s sail through calamity.Buy No. 204 is Going Home to stare into the maw of real-life terror today!

    In their place evolved an enormous variety of land creatures, especially the mammals, which in their way were every bit as remarkable as their Mesozoic cousins.The Age of Mammals, the Cenozoic Era, has never had its Jurassic Park, but it was an amazing time in earth's history, populated by a wonderful assortment of bizarre animals. The rapid evolution of thousands of species of mammals brought forth gigantic hornless rhinos, sabertooth cats, mastodonts and mammoths, and many other creatures--including our own ancestors.Their story is part of a larger story of a world emerging from the greenhouse conditions of the Mesozoic, warming up dramatically about 55 million years ago, and then cooling rapidly so that 33 million years ago the glacial ice returned. The earth's vegetation went through equally dramatic changes, from tropical jungles in Montana and forests at the poles, to grasslands and savannas across the entire world. Life in the sea also underwent striking evolution reflecting global climate change, including the emergence of such creatures as giant sharks, seals, sea lions, dolphins, and whales.After the Dinosaurs is a book for everyone who has an abiding fascination with the remarkable life of the past.

    Yet we take supplies of clean water and secure food for granted, rarely considering the free work nature does for Britain. In fact for years we have damaged the systems that sustain us under the illusion that we are keeping prices down, through intensive farming, drainage of bogs, clearing forests and turning rivers into canals. As Tony Juniper's new analysis shows, however, the ways in which we meet our needs often doesn't make economic sense. Through vivid first hand accounts and inspirational examples of how the damage is being repaired, Juniper takes readers on a journey to a different Britain from the one many assume we inhabit, not a country where nature is worthless or an impediment to progress, but the real Britain, the one where we are supported by nature, wildlife and natural systems at almost every turn.

    Once seen as a thousand years of warfare, religious infighting, and cultural stagnation, they are now understood to be the vital connection between the past and the present. Along with the battles that helped shape the modern world are a rich heritage of architecture, arts, and literature, of empire and its dissolution. It was the era of the Crusades and the Norman Conquest, the Black Death and the fall of Constantinople. It is a landscape both familiar and foreign, dark and foreboding at times, but also filled with the promise and potential of the future.

    It is also the direction taken throughout history by the adventurous, the curious, the solitary, and the foolhardy. Based in the North himself, Peter Davidson, in The Idea of North, explores the very concept of "north" through its many manifestations in painting, legend, and literature. Tracing a northbound route from rural England—whose mild climate keeps it from being truly northern—to the wind-shorn highlands of Scotland, then through Scandinavia and into the desolate, icebound Arctic Circle, Davidson takes the reader on a journey from the heart of society to its most far-flung outposts. But we never fully leave civilization behind; rather, it is our companion on his alluring ramble through the north in art and story. Davidson presents a north that is haunted by Moomintrolls and the ghosts of long-lost Arctic explorers but at the same time, somehow, home to the fragile beauty of a Baltic midsummer evening. He sets the Icelandic Sagas, Nabokov's snowy fictional kingdom of Zembla, and Hans Christian Andersen's cryptic, forbidding Snow Queen alongside the works of such artists as Eric Ravilious, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Andy Goldsworthy, demonstrating how each illuminates a different facet of humanity's relationship to the earth's most dangerous and austere terrain. Through the lens of Davidson's easy erudition and astonishing range of reference, we come to see that the north is more a goal than a place, receding always before us, just over the horizon, past the last town, off the edge of the map. True north may be unreachable, but The Idea of North brings intrepid readers closer than ever before.

    A unique guide to sheep, for would-be farmers and people who simply love animals and the outdoors.

    Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins--some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace, who'd risked everything to gather them--and escaped into the darkness. Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man's relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man's destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature.

    Every day of the year, winter or summer, in every corner of the British Isles, there's plenty to see if you know where - and how - to look. From encounters with the curious black redstart, which winters on our rocky coasts, to the tiny green snowdrop shoots that are the first sign that spring might be round the corner. And from the blossom-time and dawn choruses of April and May into the abundant noisiness of summer, where days start with hawker dragonflies and drowsy bumblebees and end with glow-worms and ghost moths; to autumn when in the early morning mist of London's Richmond Park male red deer lock horns in competition for a mate.Nature is always full of surprises - whether it's the strange behaviour of clothes moths or the gruesome larder of the strike. Distilling two lifetimes' knowledge, expert insight and enthusiasm, award-winning authors and passionate naturalists Brett Westwood and Stephen Moss take us through the year, day by day, sharing the unexpected delights that we can experience in our skies, beaches, rivers, fields, forests and back gardens. There are all kinds of adventures waiting on your doorstep, any day of the year, all you need is Wonderland.

    Unlocking the secrets of our genomes opens the door to understanding why we are the way we are and potentially fixing what ails us, from cancer and diabetes to obesity and male pattern baldness. But what exactly will happen to this information? Will it be a boon or just another marketing tool?Here Is a Human Being is the first in-depth look at personal genomics—its larger-than-life research subjects; its entrepreneurs and do-it-yourselfers; its technology developers; and the bewildered physicians and regulators who must negotiate with it—and what it means to be a “public genome” in a world where privacy is already under siege.

    Recent, massive blooms of billions of jellyfish have clogged power plants, decimated fisheries, and caused millions of dollars of damage. Driven by questions about how overfishing, coastal development, and climate change were contributing to a jellyfish population explosion, Juli embarked on a scientific odyssey. She traveled the globe to meet the biologists who devote their careers to jellies, hitched rides on Japanese fishing boats to see giant jellyfish in the wild, raised jellyfish in her dining room, and throughout it all marveled at the complexity of these alluring and ominous biological wonders.

    You are missing what is happening in the distance and right in front of you. In reading these words, you are ignoring an unthinkably large amount of information that continues to bombard all of your senses. The hum of the fluorescent lights; the ambient noise in the room; the feeling of the chair against your legs or back; your tongue touching the roof of your mouth; the tension you are holding in your shoulders or jaw; the constant hum of traffic or a distant lawnmower; the blurred view of your own shoulders and torso in your peripheral vision; a chirp of a bug or whine of a kitchen appliance.On Looking begins with inattention. It is not meant to help you focus on your reading of Tolstoy; it is not about how to multitask. Rather, it is about attending to the joys of the unattended, the perceived "ordinary." Horowitz encourages us to rediscover the extraordinary things that we are missing in our ordinary activities. Even when engaged in the simplest of activities - taking a walk around the block - we pay so little attention to most of what is right before us that we are sleepwalkers in our own lives. So turn off the phone and portable electronics and get into the real world, where you'll find there are worlds within worlds within worlds.

    Ruth Kassinger’s wonderful story of the unique way she chose to cope with the profound changes in her life—a book that will delight readers of Eat, Pray, Love and I Feel Bad About My Neck—is interwoven with the fascinating history of conservatories from the Renaissance orangeries to the glass palaces of Kew.

    Mt. Lockley, who observed rabbits in Wales over a 5 year period, shows that they have a complex community life little understood by the world in general. These vegetarian creatures posses both dignity and 'animality'; psychological factors play as large a part in shaping their lives as they do in ours. One finds, too, that their reputation for promiscuity and wanton reproduction is really undeserved. Lockley built an artificial warren with glass sides and several tracts of natural habitat-an open plain, a woodlot, a lushly vegetated savannah were enclosed and arranged for maximum ease of observation with minimum interference. This controlled rabbit colony was observed every day and night in every season and in all kinds of weather. In Lockley's account, rabbits emerge with characteristics and personalities of their own. The nicknames he gives them (Weary Willie, Timid Timothy, Bold Benjamin, for example) in no way lessen the objective and scientific accuracy of his findings. In fact, this touch of individuality reinforces the observation that rabbits are creatures with interests, wills, and preferences of their own. Female conservatism, scent setting or 'chinning' by dominant males, the ability of the female to absorb her fertilized embryo, the stress of subordinate status...and more, are revealed here.

    

    They say ‘British’ when they mean ‘English’, and ‘English’ when they should say ‘British.’ But when England, more than the rest of the UK, voted to leave the EU, polls showed national identity was a big concern. So it’s time the English sorted out in their minds what it means to be English. A nation’s character is moulded by its history. And in ‘Who Do the English Think They Are?’ historian and journalist, Derek J. Taylor travels the length and breadth of the country to find answers. He discovers that the first English came from Germany, and then in the later Middle Ages almost became French. He tracks down the origins of English respect for the rule of law, tolerance and a love of political stability. And, when he reaches Victorian times, he investigates the arrogance and snobbishness that have sometimes blighted English behaviour. Finally, Taylor looks ahead. He asks – faced with uncharted waters post-Brexit, what is it is in their national character that will help guide the English people now?