Thread: Ebook Collections Update Daily

epub | 22.12 MB | English | Isbn:9780771018206 | Author: Anne Carson | Year: 2013

Description:

A literary event: a follow-up to the internationally acclaimed poetry bestseller Autobiography of Red ("Amazing" - Alice Munro) that takes its mythic boy-hero into the twenty-first century to tell a story all its own of love, loss, and the power of memory.
In a stunningly original mix of poetry, drama, and narrative, Anne Carson brings the red-winged Geryon from Autobiography of Red, now called "G," into manhood, and through the complex labyrinths of the modern age. We join him as he travels with his friend and lover "Sad" (short for Sad But Great), a haunted war veteran; and with Ida, an artist, across a geography that ranges from plains of glacial ice to idyllic green pastures; from a psychiatric clinic to the somber housewhere G's mother must face her death. Haunted by Proust, juxtaposing the hunger for flight with the longing for family and home, this deeply powerful verse picaresque invites readers on an extraordinary journey of intellect, imagination, and soul.

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pdf | 83.15 MB | English | Isbn:9781472992611 | Author: Tim Mackrill | Year: 2024

Description:

A highly readable Poyser monograph on one of the most widespread raptors.
The Osprey is a large, fish-eating bird of prey. Distinctively marked in deep brown and white, with a piercing yellow eye and powerful hooked bill, the Osprey snatches its prey in spectacular swoops above lakes and wetlands around the world - it is one of the most widespread of all birds. Persecuted mercilessly in Britain, it became extinct in the 1890s before returning to the famous Loch Garten in Scotland in the 1950s. The return of the bird has been slow, but reintroduction programmes elsewhere - notably at Rutland Water - have been successful, and this remarkable raptor is an increasingly common sight in our skies.
This Poyser monograph is dedicated to this fine species and includes more than 150 colour photographs. The Osprey looks at the distribution, foraging ecology, migration, breeding behaviour and population dynamics of this spectacular bird, with emphasis placed on conservation efforts both in Britain and in the species' African haunts, which have been discovered only very recently thanks to advances in satellite tagging technology.

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epub | 2.91 MB | English | Isbn:9781250891976 | Author: Aggie Blum Thompson | Year: 2024

Description:

The cherry blossoms are in full bloom in Washington, D.C., and the Calhouns are in the midst of hosting their annual party to celebrate the best of the spring season. With a house full of friends, neighbors, and their beloved three adult children, the Calhouns are expecting another picture-perfect event. But a brutal murder in the middle of the celebration transforms the yearly gathering into a homicide scene, and all the guests into suspects.
Behind their fa?ade of perfection, the Calhoun family has been keeping some very dark secrets. Parents who use money and emotional manipulation to control their children. Two sons, one the black sheep who is desperate to outrun mistakes he's made, and the other a new father, willing to risk everything to protect his child. And a daughter: an Instagram influencer who refuses to face the truth about the man she married.
As the investigation heats up, family tensions build, and alliances shift. Long-buried resentments surface, forcing the Calhouns to face their darkest secrets before it's too late.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

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epub | 22.45 MB | English | Isbn:9781982164058 | Author: Daniel Lewis | Year: 2024

Description:

A compelling global exploration of nature and survival as seen via a dozen species of trees that represent the challenges facing our planet, and the ways that scientists are working urgently to save our forests and our future.
The world today is undergoing the most rapid environmental transformation in human history-from climate change to deforestation. Scientists, ethnobotanists, indigenous peoples, and collectives of all kinds are closely studying trees and their biology to understand how and why trees function individually and collectively in the ways they do. In Twelve Trees, Daniel Lewis, curator and historian at one of the world's most renowned research libraries, travels the world to learn about these trees in their habitats.

Lewis takes us on a sweeping journey to plant breeding labs, botanical gardens, research facilities, deep inside museum collections, to the tops of tall trees, underwater, and around the Earth, journeying into the deserts of the American west and the deep jungles of Peru, to offer a globe-spanning perspective on the crucial impact trees have on our entire planet. When a once-common tree goes extinct in the wild but survives in a botanical garden, what happens next? How can scientists reconstruct lost genomes and habitats? How does a tree store thousands of gallons of water, or offer up perfectly preserved insects from millions of years ago, or root itself in muddy swamps and remain standing? How does a 5,000-year-old tree manage to live, and what can we learn from it? And how can science account for the survival of one species at the expense of others? To study the science of trees is to study not just the present, but the story of the world, its past, and its future.

Note-species include: * The Lost Tree of Easter Island (Sophora toromiro) * The coast redwood ( Sequoia sempervirens) * Hymenaea protera [a fossil tree] * The Longleaf pine ( Pinus palustris) * East Indian sandalwood ( Santanum album) * The Bristlecone pine ( Pinus longaeva) * West African ebony ( Diospyros crassiflora) * The Tasmanian blue gum eucalyptus ( Eucalyptus globulus) * Olive tree ( Olea europaea) * Baobab ( Adansonia digitata) * the kapok tree ( Ceiba pentandra) * The bald cypress ( Taxodium distichum)

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epub | 34.07 MB | English | | Author: Fiona Maddocks | Year: 2024

Description:

The moving story of Rachmaninoff's years in exile and the composition of his last great work, set against a cataclysmic backdrop of two world wars and personal tragedy.
In 1940, Sergei Rachmaninoff, living in exile in America, broke his creative silence and composed a swan song to his Russian homeland-his iconic "Symphonic Dances." What happened in those final haunted years and how did he come to write his farewell masterpiece?

Rachmaninoff left Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in 1917 during the throes of the Russian Revolution. He was forty-four years old, at the peak of his powers as composer-conductor-performer, moving in elite Tsarist circles, as well as running the family estate, his refuge and solace. He had already written the music which, today, has made him one of the most popular composers of all time: the second and third Piano Concertos and two symphonies. The story of his years in exile in America and Switzerland has only been told in passing. Reeling from the trauma of a life in upheaval, he wrote almost no music and quickly had to reinvent himself as a f?ted virtuoso pianist, building up untold wealth and meeting the stars-from Walt Disney and Charlie Chaplin to his Russian contemporaries and polar opposites, Prokofiev and Stravinsky.

Yet the melancholy of leaving his homeland never lifted. Using a wide range of sources, including important newly translated texts, Fiona Maddocks's immensely readable book conjures impressions of this enigmatic figure, his friends and the world he encountered. It explores his life as an emigr? artist and how he clung to an Old Russia which no longer existed. That forging of past and present meets in his Symphonic Dances (1940), his last composition, written on Long Island shortly before his death in Beverly Hills, surrounded by a close-knit circle of exiles. Goodbye Russia is a moving and prismatic look at Rachmaninoff and his iconic final work.

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epub | 638.91 KB | English | Isbn:9781959030317 | Author: Julie Myerson | Year: 2022

Description:

"Raw-nerved and plangent."-The New Yorker
"Entrancing."-ELLE, A Best Book of 2024
"Glitteringly painful."-Rachel Cusk
This is definitely not a ghost story. But for a while after you're gone, I see you everywhere. Every ragged young person sitting huddled on a pavement, every stretched-out body under cardboard in a shop doorway.
Two parents stand by powerlessly as their only child seems intent on destroying herself. As the mother-a novelist-attempts to understand her daughter, she finds herself revisiting her own uneasy, unresolved relationship with her mother. Weaving between childhoods past and present, laced with temptation and betrayal, Nonfiction: A Novel is an unflinching account of a mother, daughter, wife, and author reckoning with the world around her. But can a writer ever be trusted with the truth of her own story?
Clear-eyed, lacerating, and fearless, Julie Myerson's Nonfiction: A Novel explores maternal love as an emotional foundation to both crave and fear. A hauntingly beautiful and deeply moving love letter from a mother to a daughter, this is a tale of damage and addiction, recovery and creativity, compassion and love.

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epub | 3.43 MB | English | Isbn:9780300248920 | Author: Ian Buruma | Year: 2024

Description:

Ian Buruma explores the life and death of Baruch Spinoza, the Enlightenment thinker whose belief in freedom of thought and speech resonates in our own time

Baruch (Benedictus) Spinoza (1632-1677) was a radical free thinker who led a life guided by strong moral principles despite his disbelief in an all-seeing God. Seen by many-Christians as well as Jews-as Satan's disciple during his lifetime, Spinoza has been regarded as a secular saint since his death. Many contradictory beliefs have been attached to his name: rationalism or metaphysics, atheism or pantheism, liberalism or despotism, Jewishness or anti-Semitism. However, there is no question that he viewed freedom of thought and speech as essential to an open and free society.

In this insightful account, the award-winning author Ian Buruma stresses the importance of the time and place that shaped Spinoza, beginning with the Sephardim of Amsterdam and followed by the politics of the Dutch Republic. Though Spinoza rejected the basic assumptions of his family's faith, and was consequently expelled from his Sephardic community, Buruma argues that Spinoza did indeed lead a Jewish life: a modern Jewish life. To Heine, Hess, Marx, Freud, and no doubt many others today, Spinoza exemplified how to be Jewish without believing in Judaism. His defense of universal freedom is as important for our own time as it was in his.

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epub | 1.84 MB | English | Isbn:9781662602368 | Author: Kohei Saito | Year: 2024

Description:

"[A] well-reasoned and eye-opening treatise . . . [Kohei Saito makes] a provocative and visionary proposal."
-Publishers Weekly, (starred review)
"Saito's clarity of thought, plethora of evidence, and conversational, gentle, yet urgent tone . . . are sure to win over open-minded readers who understand the dire nature of our global. . . . A cogently structured anti-capitalist approach to the climate crisis."
-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Why, in our affluent society, do so many people live in poverty, without access to health care, working multiple jobs and are nevertheless unable to make ends meet, with no future prospects, while the planet is burning?
In his international bestseller, Kohei Saito argues that while unfettered capitalism is often blamed for inequality and climate change, subsequent calls for "sustainable growth" and a "Green New Deal" are a dangerous compromise. Capitalism creates artificial scarcity by pursuing profit based on the value of products rather than their usefulness and by putting perpetual growth above all else. It is therefore impossible to reverse climate change in a capitalist society-more: the system that caused the problem in the first place cannot be an integral part of the solution.
Instead, Saito advocates for degrowth and deceleration, which he conceives as the slowing of economic activity through the dematic reform of labor and production. In practical terms, he argues for:[*]the end of mass production and mass consumption[*]decarbonization through shorter working hours[*]the prioritization of essential labor over corporate profits

By returning to a system of social ownership, he argues, we can restore abundance and focus on those activities that are essential for human life, effectively reversing climate change and saving the planet.

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epub | 19.41 MB | English | Isbn:9780374608095 | Author: Joan Acocella | Year: 2024

Description:

A collection of the New Yorker critic's finest essays, which examine the books that reveal and record our world.
Joan Acocella was "one of our finest cultural critics" (Edward Hirsch), and she had the rare ability to examine literature and unearth the lives contained within it-its authors, its subjects, and the communities from which it springs. In her hands, arts criticism was a celebration and an investigation, and her essays pulse with unadulterated enthusiasm. As Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "Hers is a vision that allows art its mystery but not its pretensions, to which she is acutely sensitive. What better instincts could a critic have?"
The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays gathers twenty-four essays from the final decade and a half of Acocella's career, as well as an introduction that frames her simple preoccupations: "life and art." In agile, inspired prose, she moves from J. R. R. Tolkien's translation of Beowulf to the life of Richard Pryor, from surveying profanity to untangling the book of Job. Her appetite (and reading list) knew no bounds. This collection is a joy and a revelation, a library in itself, and Acocella is our dream companion among its shelves.
Includes 25 black-and-white images

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epub | 973.02 KB | English | Isbn:9780374298340 | Author: Noah Feldman | Year: 2024

Description:

A leading public intellectual's timely reckoning with how Jews can and should make sense of their tradition and each other.

What does it mean to be a Jew? At a time of worldwide crisis, venerable answers to this question have become unsettled. In To Be a Jew Today, the legal scholar and columnist Noah Feldman draws on a lifelong engagement with his religion to offer a wide-ranging interpretation of Judaism in its current varieties. How do Jews today understand their relationship to God, to Israel, and to each other-and live their lives accordingly?
Writing sympathetically but incisively about diverse outlooks, Feldman clarifies what's at stake in the choice of how to be a Jew, and discusses the shared "theology of struggle" that Jews engage in as they wrestle with who God is, what God wants, or whether God exists. He shows how the founding of Israel has transformed Judaism itself over the last century-and explores the ongoing consequences of that transformation for all Jews, who find the meaning of their Jewishness and their views about Israel intertwined, no matter what those views are. And he examines the analogies between being Jewish and belonging to a large, messy family-a family that often makes its members crazy, but a family all the same. Written with learning, empathy and clarity, To Be a Jew Today is a critical resource for readers of all faiths.

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