Ancient Skies, Ancient Trees

Ancient Skies, Ancient Trees PDF Author:
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0789212676
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Photographer Beth Moon revisits the world’s oldest trees in the darkest places on earth, using color photography to capture vibrant nighttime skies. Throughout much of the world, night skies are growing increasingly brighter, but the force that protects the remaining naturally dark sky, unpolluted by artificial light, is the same that saves its ancient trees—isolation. Staking out some of the world’s last dark places, photographer Beth Moon uses a digital camera to reveal constellations, nebulae, and the Milky Way, in rich hues that are often too faint to be seen by the naked eye. As in her acclaimed first volume, Ancient Trees: Portraits of Time, these magnificent images encounter great arboreal specimens, including baobabs, olive trees, and redwoods, in such places as South Africa, England, and California. In her artist’s statement, Beth Moon describes the experience of shooting at night in these remote places. An essay by Jana Grcevich, postdoctoral fellow of astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History, provides the perspective of a scientist racing to study the stars in a world growing increasingly brighter. Clark Strand, the author of Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age, takes a different tack, illuminating the inherent spirituality of trees.

Ancient Skies, Ancient Trees

Ancient Skies, Ancient Trees PDF Author:
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0789212676
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Photographer Beth Moon revisits the world’s oldest trees in the darkest places on earth, using color photography to capture vibrant nighttime skies. Throughout much of the world, night skies are growing increasingly brighter, but the force that protects the remaining naturally dark sky, unpolluted by artificial light, is the same that saves its ancient trees—isolation. Staking out some of the world’s last dark places, photographer Beth Moon uses a digital camera to reveal constellations, nebulae, and the Milky Way, in rich hues that are often too faint to be seen by the naked eye. As in her acclaimed first volume, Ancient Trees: Portraits of Time, these magnificent images encounter great arboreal specimens, including baobabs, olive trees, and redwoods, in such places as South Africa, England, and California. In her artist’s statement, Beth Moon describes the experience of shooting at night in these remote places. An essay by Jana Grcevich, postdoctoral fellow of astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History, provides the perspective of a scientist racing to study the stars in a world growing increasingly brighter. Clark Strand, the author of Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age, takes a different tack, illuminating the inherent spirituality of trees.

Ancient Trees

Ancient Trees PDF Author: Beth Moon
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0789211955
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Captivating black-and-white photographs of the world’s most majestic ancient trees. Beth Moon’s fourteen-year quest to photograph ancient trees has taken her across the United States, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Some of her subjects grow in isolation, on remote mountainsides, private estates, or nature preserves; others maintain a proud, though often precarious, existence in the midst of civilization. All, however, share a mysterious beauty perfected by age and the power to connect us to a sense of time and nature much greater than ourselves. It is this beauty, and this power, that Moon captures in her remarkable photographs. This handsome volume presents nearly seventy of Moon’s finest tree portraits as full-page duotone plates. The pictured trees include the tangled, hollow-trunked yews—some more than a thousand years old—that grow in English churchyards; the baobabs of Madagascar, called “upside-down trees” because of the curious disproportion of their giant trunks and modest branches; and the fantastical dragon’s-blood trees, red-sapped and umbrella-shaped, that grow only on the island of Socotra, off the Horn of Africa. Moon’s narrative captions describe the natural and cultural history of each individual tree, while Todd Forrest, vice president for horticulture and living collections at The New York Botanical Garden, provides a concise introduction to the biology and preservation of ancient trees. An essay by the critic Steven Brown defines Moon’s unique place in a tradition of tree photography extending from William Henry Fox Talbot to Sally Mann, and explores the challenges and potential of the tree as a subject for art.

There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden

There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden PDF Author: Leon Forrest
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226257211
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Leon Forrest, acclaimed author of Divine Days, uses a remarkable verbal intensity to evoke human tragedy, injustice, and spirituality in his writing. As Toni Morrison has said, "All of Forrest's novels explore the complex legacy of Afro-Americans. Like an insistent tide this history . . . swells and recalls America's past. . . . Brooding, hilarious, acerbic and profoundly valued life has no more astute observer than Leon Forrest." All of that is on display here in two novels that give readers a breathtaking view of the human experience, filled with humor and pathos.

Baobab

Baobab PDF Author: Beth Moon
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0789214091
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A spectacular oversize photo book celebrating Africa’s most majestic trees—which are now facing an unprecedented ecological threat. Baobabs are one of Africa’s natural wonders: they can live more than 2,000 years, and their massive, water-storing trunks can grow to more than one hundred feet in circumference. They serve as a renewable source of food, fiber, and fuel, as well as a focus of spiritual life. But now, suddenly, the largest baobabs are dying off , literally collapsing under their own weight. Scientists believe these ancient giants are being dehydrated by drought and higher temperatures, likely the result of climate change. Photographer Beth Moon, already responsible for some of the most indelible images of Africa’s oldest and largest baobabs, has undertaken a new photographic pilgrimage to bear witness to this environmental catastrophe and document the baobabs that still survive. In this oversize volume, Moon presents breathtaking new duotone tree portraits of the baobabs of Madagascar, Botswana, South Africa, and Senegal. She recounts her eventful journey to visit these monumental trees in a moving diaristic text studded with color travel photos. This book also includes an essay by Adrian Patrut, leader of a research team that has studied Africa's largest baobabs and alerted the world tot he threat these majestic trees are facing. Baobab is not only a compelling photo book and travel narrative, but also a timely ecological warning.

The Old Garden

The Old Garden PDF Author: Hwang Sok-yong
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609800389
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 553

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Book Description
Political prisoner Hyun Woo is freed after eighteen years to find no trace of the world he knew. The friends with whom he shared utopianist dreams are gone. His Seoul is unrecognizably transformed and aggressively modernized. Yoon Hee, the woman he loved, died three years ago. A broken man, he drifts toward a small house in Kalmoe, where he and Yoon Hee once stole a few fleeting months of happiness while fleeing the authorities. In the company of her diaries, he relives and reviews his life, trying to find meaning in the revolutionary struggle that consumed their youth—a youth of great energy and optimism, victim to implacable history. Hyun Woo weighs the worth of his own life, spent in prison, and that of the strong-willed artist Yoon Hee, whose involvement in rebel groups took her to Berlin and the fall of the wall. With great poignancy, Hwang Sok-yong grapples with the immortal questions—the endurance of love, the price of a commitment to causes—while depicting a generation that sacrificed youth, liberty, and often life, for the dream of a better tomorrow.

Ancient Shores

Ancient Shores PDF Author: Jack McDevitt
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061802107
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
It turned up in a North Dakota wheat field: a triangle, like a shark's fin, sticking up from the black loam. Tom Lasker did what any farmer would have done. He dug it up. And discovered a boat, made of a fiberglass-like material with an utterly impossible atomic number. What it was doing buried under a dozen feet of prairie soil two thousand miles from any ocean, no one knew. True, Tom Lasker's wheat field had once been on the shoreline of a great inland sea, but that was a long time ago -- ten thousand years ago. A return to science fiction on a grand scale, reminiscent of the best of Heinlein, Simak, and Clarke, Ancient Shores is the most ambitious and exciting SF triumph of the decade, a bold speculative adventure that does not shrink from the big questions -- and the big answers.

The Ancient Yew

The Ancient Yew PDF Author: Robert Bevan-Jones
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1911188127
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
The gnarled, immutable yew tree is one of the most evocative sights in the British and Irish language, an evergreen impression of immortality, the tree that provides a living botanical link between our own landscapes and those of the distant past. This book tells the extraordinary story of the yew’s role in the landscape through the millennia, and makes a convincing case for the origins of many of the oldest trees, as markers of the holy places founded by Celtic saints in the early medieval ‘Dark Ages’. With wonderful photographic portraits of ancient yews and a gazetteer (with locations) of the oldest yew trees in Britain, the book brings together for the first time all the evidence about the dating, history, archaeology and cultural connections of the yew. Robert Bevan-Jones discusses its history, biology, the origins of its name, the yew berry and its toxicity, its distribution across Britain, means of dating examples, and their association with folklore, with churchyards, abbeys, springs, pre-Reformation wells and as landscape markers. This third edition has an updated introduction with new photographs and corrections to the main text.

The Ancient Explorers

The Ancient Explorers PDF Author: M. Cary
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781032763552
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Ancient Explorers (1929) examines the motives of ancient exploration, and looks at the means of travel at their disposal. The book uses both historical records and modern archaeological discoveries to piece together the important journeys that expanded the known worlds of the ancient peoples.

Christmas Trees Lit the Sky

Christmas Trees Lit the Sky PDF Author: Anneliese Heider Tisdale
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1477278192
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
The Heider family huddles together in the basement, wondering if this is the last day they will be together, if this is the last day of their lives. Its Munich, Germany, in 1945, the day American tanks are rolling in. Annelieses father finds a white sheet, ready to hang it from the attic window, hoping he times it right. Too early, and German SS forces could open fire. Too late, and the Allied forces could shoot. Thank god, its not the Russians. And so begins the memoir of Anneliese Heider Tisdale, who grew up in Germany during World War II. Hers is a universal and timeless tale of war and death, of fear and deprivation, of the inventiveness of children who want to dance and wear new clothes but instead have childhoods filled with bandages and bombs, who return to school one fall to find the crucifix in their classroom replaced with a picture of the Fhrer.

Ancient Tillage

Ancient Tillage PDF Author: Raduan Nassar
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811226573
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
A Brazilian master novelist in English at last For André, a young man growing up on a farm in Brazil, life consists of “the earth, the wheat, the bread, our table, and our family.” He loves the land, fears his austere, pious father, who preaches from the head of the table as if from a pulpit, and loathes himself as he begins to harbor shameful feelings for his sister Ana. Lyrical and sensual, written with biblical intensity, this classic Brazilian coming-of-age novel follows André’s tormented path. He falls into the comforting embrace of liquor as—in his psychological and sexual awakening—he must choose between body and soul, obligation and freedom.