Once he started a family, the moral dimensions of food became increasingly important.Faced with the prospect of being unable to explain why we eat some animals and not others, Foer set out to explore the origins of many eating traditions and the fictions involved with creating them. Traveling to the darkest corners of our dining habits, Foer raises the unspoken question behind every fish we eat, every chicken we fry, and every burger we grill.Part memoir and part investigative report, Eating Animals is a book that, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, places Jonathan Safran Foer "at the table with our greatest philosophers."

    Eliot Porter's photographs of the natural world, spanning thirty-five years and five continents -- from an Antarctic ice floe to an American desert to an Icelandic lava field -- reveal in mesmerizing ways what scientists are beginning to see for themselves: the patterns, relations, and interactions present in nature's disorder and wildness. This is the perfect marriage of image and text -- brilliant full-color photographs by the preeminent nature photographer of his generation together with an illuminating essay by the widely praised author of Chaos.

    This is the perfect gift for all bird lovers.

    Your Action World parodies the "inspirational" promotional materialsincluding books, tapes, and corporate advertising - with which we are inundated daily. Byrne's impulse is to fight back, "to stem the tide of images and bullying texts that assault all of us, by building dikes and dams of my own images and texts. To understand the enemy I must become one with the enemy, I must be of one mind with the enemy. I must infect myself in order to be immunized." An intelligent, quirky document from one of our most innovative artistswith a cool debossed PVC cover and 4-color stickerYour Action World will be the cult hit of the season.

    Seasons is a lavish volume that ambles through the year with beauty and simplicity.

    bataar bones he was impressed. The enormous skull and teeth betrayed the apex predators close relation to the storied Tyrannosaurus rex, the most famous animal that ever lived. Prokopi's obsession with fossils had begun decades earlier, when he was a Florida boy scouring for shark teeth and Ice Age remnants, and it had continued as he built a thriving business hunting, preparing, and selling specimens to avid collectors and private museums around the world. To scientists' fury and dismay, there was big money to be made in certain corners of the fossil trade. Prokopi didn't consider himself merely a businessman, though. He also thought of himself as a vital part of paleontology--as one of the lesser-known artistic links in bringing prehistoric creatures back to life--and saw nothing wrong with turning a profit in the process. Bone hunting was expensive, risky, controversial work, and he increasingly needed bigger "scores." By the time he acquired a largely complete skeleton of T. bataar and restored it in his workshop, he was highly leveraged and drawing quiet scorn from peers who worried that by bringing such a big, beautiful Mongolian dinosaur to market he would tarnish the entire trade. Presenting the skeleton for sale at a major auction house in New York City, he was relieved to see the bidding start at nearly $1 million---only to fall apart when the president of Mongolia unexpectedly stepped in to question the specimen's origins and demand its return. An international custody battle ensued, shining new light on the black market for dinosaur fossils, the angst of scientists who fear for their field, and the precarious political tensions in post-Communist Mongolia. The Prokopi case, unprecedented in American jurisprudence, continues to reverberate throughout the intersecting worlds of paleontology, museums, art, and geopolitics.

    Nine different spaceships, pods, race cars, giant trains, warships and balloons from various planets of the Galaxion system are shown from concept to completion. Daniel Simon is an established senior car designer who has spent the last several years focusing his talents on futuristic concepts for such automakers as Bugatti and Lamborghini. In his first book, Cosmic Motors, each chapter shows the design process of a unique vehicle, from the first ideation sketches to the stunningly detailed 3-D models to the final photorealistic full spread renderings. Join Daniel in this virtual world of visionary vehicles!

    Here is the Naked Ape at his most primal in love, at work, at war. Meet man as he really is: relative to the apes, stripped of his veneer as we see him courting, making love, sleeping, socializing, grooming, playing. The Naked Ape takes its place alongside Darwin’s Origin of the Species, presenting man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape, remarkable in his resilience, energy and imagination, yet an animal nonetheless, in danger of forgetting his origins. With its penetrating insights on man's beginnings, sex life, habits and our astonishing bonds to the animal kingdom, The Naked Ape is a landmark, at once provocative, compelling and timeless.

    Even Isaac Cline, resident meteorologist for the U.S. Weather Bureau failed to grasp the true meaning of the strange deep-sea swells and peculiar winds that greeted the city that morning. Mere hours later, Galveston found itself submerged in a monster hurricane that completely destroyed the town and killed over six thousand people in what remains the greatest natural disaster in American history--and Isaac Cline found himself the victim of a devastating personal tragedy.Using Cline's own telegrams, letters, and reports, the testimony of scores of survivors, and our latest understanding of the science of hurricanes, Erik Larson builds a chronicle of one man's heroic struggle and fatal miscalculation in the face of a storm of unimaginable magnitude. Riveting, powerful, and unbearably suspenseful, Isaac's Storm is the story of what can happen when human arrogance meets the great uncontrollable force of nature.

    A quotation for every picture is also included taken from Virgil, Shakespeare, Herman Melville, D.H. Lawrence, Eugene Delacroix and others.

    But when his mother's escalating Alzheimer's disease creates a crisis that calls him home, he's pressured into hosting a reunion he's avoided for decades in the one place he thought his family would never return to: the rural state park in Maine where his little sister drowned years before on a family vacation. Over the course of ten days of guiding his family over difficult terrain, Paul finds himself torn between his desire for isolation and the need to reconnect with the only people who can make him whole. But after a lifetime of separation, is the painful chasm between them—and within Paul's own soul—too deep to overcome?Bryan Wiggins's beautifully rendered novel illuminates the mysterious power of the wilderness and the resiliency of the human spirit to heal in the wake of devastating trauma.

    She was smart, attractive and well educated. After losing the love of her life she decided she had to get away from it all. Ravenna did what everyone would love to do…, she left and never looked back. She made a comfortable life on a small Greek island paradise nestled in the southern blue Aegean sea. It was filled with friendly people, beautiful beaches and warm sunny days. The strong willed woman thought she had left her life behind her… but she was wrong. Now, torn between memories and guilt, she must decide- but will she get…a second chance?

    Set between London, Cap d'Antibes, Big Sur, and a rewilded corner of Sussex, this thrilling, ambitious novel is about the headlong pursuit of knowledge—for the purposes of pleasure, revelation, money, sanity, or survival—and the consequences of fleeing from what we know about others and ourselves. When Olivia meets a new lover just as she is welcoming her best friend, Lucy, back from New York, her dedicated academic life expands precipitously. Her connection to Francis, a committed naturalist living off the grid, is immediate and startling. Eager to involve Lucy in her joy, Olivia introduces the two—but Lucy has received shocking news of her own that binds the trio unusually close. Over the months that follow, Lucy’s boss, Hunter, Olivia’s psychoanalyst parents, and a young man named Sebastian are pulled into the friends’ orbit, and not one of them will emerge unchanged. Expansive, playful, and compassionate, Edward St. Aubyn's Double Blind investigates themes of inheritance, determinism, freedom, consciousness, and the stories we tell about ourselves. St. Aubyn's major new novel is as compelling about ecology, psychoanalysis, genetics, and neuroscience as it is about love, fear, and courage. Most of all, it is a perfect expression of the interconnections it sets out to examine, and a moving evocation of an imagined world that is deeply intelligent, often tender, curious, and very much alive.

    Today there are three cats for every dog on the planet, and yet cats remain more mysterious, even to their most adoring owners. Unlike dogs, cats evolved as solitary hunters, and, while many have learned to live alongside humans and even feel affection for us, they still don’t quite get us” the way dogs do, and perhaps they never will. But cats have rich emotional lives that we need to respect and understand if they are to thrive in our company.In Cat Sense, renowned anthrozoologist John Bradshaw takes us further into the mind of the domestic cat than ever before, using cutting-edge scientific research to dispel the myths and explain the true nature of our feline friends. Tracing the cat’s evolution from lone predator to domesticated companion, Bradshaw shows that although cats and humans have been living together for at least eight thousand years, cats remain independent, predatory, and wary of contact with their own kind, qualities that often clash with our modern lifestyles. Cats still have three out of four paws firmly planted in the wild, and within only a few generations can easily revert back to the independent way of life that was the exclusive preserve of their predecessors some 10,000 years ago. Cats are astonishingly flexible, and given the right environment they can adapt to a life of domesticity with their owners—but to continue do so, they will increasingly need our help. If we’re to live in harmony with our cats, Bradshaw explains, we first need to understand their inherited quirks: understanding their body language, keeping their environments—however small—sufficiently interesting, and becoming more proactive in managing both their natural hunting instincts and their relationships with other cats.A must-read for any cat lover, Cat Sense offers humane, penetrating insights about the domestic cat that challenge our most basic assumptions and promise to dramatically improve our pets’ lives—and ours.

    We see cowboys and clowns, dancers and dog groomers, miners and models. On one page, drill sergeants bark orders to U.S. Navy recruits; on another, young Tibetan monks study Buddhist scriptures; and on another, Kenyan women spread coffee beans to dry. Work is a subject that is both worldwide and personal. It is a shared endeavor at the very core of our identity. From the glamour of a Parisian fashion show to the grit of an African diamond mine, there are countless ways to make a living. The book illuminates scores of them many in never-before-published photographs offering revealing glimpses into various eras and cultures and engaging the reader with entertaining text and informative captions. With a wonderful mix of the utterly unexpected and the instantly familiar, this vivid panorama takes an essential human activity and shows us myriad ways in which work is at once universal and delightfully, unforgettably unique."