Author: Miguel de Asúa
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351962140
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
Many Early Modern Europeans who during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries travelled to the New World left written or pictorial records of their encounters with a surprising fauna. The story told in this book is woven out of the threads of those texts and pictures. A New World of Animals shows how the initial wonder at the new beasts gave way to a more utilitarian approach, assessing their economic and medical potential. It elucidates how shifts in European perceptions brought the animals from the realm of the fantastic into the mainstream of early modern natural history, while at the same time changing the way in which Europeans saw their own world. Indeed, the chronicles and treatises of those who in the wake of the discovery arrived in the new lands tell as much about the particular interests and mental worlds of the writers as about the 'new animals'. This book traces the amazement of the first explorers and colonizers, the chronicles of soldiers and Indians, the 'natural histories of the New World', the place of animals in the network of economic interests driving the early expansion of Europe, the views of the missionaries and those of natural philosophers and physicians. Taking the reader from the Brazilian forests to the erudite cabinets of the Old World, from Patagonia to the centres of empire, the story of the discovery of the unexpected menagerie of the New World is also an exploration of Early Modern European imagination and learning.
Author: Sharon Kirsch
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
Literary Nonfiction. North American History. Science. Three centuries ago, white Europeans began to colonize the North American continent. In doing so, they encountered flying squirrels, ruby-throated hummingbirds, and the easily tamed beaver: creatures their kind had never met before. The accounts of early explorers and settlers in describing these animals and others provide fascinating insight into the taxonomies they carried to the so-called New World. Their literature of discovery was by turns comic, cruel and adulatory. This book brings together period quotes and 21st-century science in an idiosyncratic narrative. Extended anecdote conveys the adventures of historical personalities, and the book borrows, too, from fables, children's stories and natural histories. Yet WHAT SPECIES OF CREATURES addresses present concerns our habitual understanding of wild animals and our own place in the natural order. In the process of quoting from and commenting upon European ancestors' speciesist arrogance, Kirsch interrogates our seemingly insatiable appetite to trap, catch, skin, domesticate, eat, eradicate or otherwise bend to our use the animals in our midst."
Author: Ole Könnecke
Publisher:
ISBN: 177657012X
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 11
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Book Description
A large format board book of animals from all over the world, illustrated with charm and humor. Each spread in this big book focuses on a continent or ocean and features animals unique to that part of the world. Simple but charming, this is a great mix of world tour and day at the zoo, with plenty of room for spontaneous storytelling.
Author: R. J. Hoage
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801853739
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
Illustrated with nearly 100 photographs, New Worlds, New Animals gives readers a new respect for and understanding of the role of zoos in social and cultural history.
Author: Martin Walters
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781841640570
Category : Animals
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
Author: Sandra Markle
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 1452108757
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 48
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Book Description
In this series by award-winning author Sandra Markle, famous explorers take a back seat to the animals they encountered along the way. While nothing about Christopher Columbus' journey was expected, he couldn't have imagined feasting on roasted lizard! Through nimble writing and beautiful paintings, this series casts the past in a whole new light!
Author: Simon Barnes
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1643139169
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 505
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Book Description
Fully illustrated in color, a fascinating exploration of the one hundred animals that have had the most profound influence on humanity throughout the ages. We are not alone. We are not alone on the planet. We are not alone in the countryside. We are not alone in cities. We are not alone in our homes. We are humans and we love the idea of our uniqueness. But the fact is that we humans are as much members of the animal kingdom as the cats and dogs we surround ourselves with, the cows and the fish we eat, and the bees who pollinate so many of our food-plants. In The History of the World in 100 Animals, award-winning author Simon Barnes selects the one hundred animals who have had the greatest impact on humanity and on whom humanity has had the greatest effect. He shows how we have domesticated animals for food and for transport, and how animals powered agriculture, making civilisation possible. A species of flea came close to destroying human civilisation in Europe, while the slaughter of a species of bovines was used to create one civilisation and destroy another. He explains how pigeons made possible the biggest single breakthrough in the history of human thought. In short, he charts the close relationship between humans and animals, finding examples from around the planet that bring the story of life on earth vividly to life, with great insight and understanding. The heresy of human uniqueness has led us across the millennia along the path of destruction. This book, beautifully illustrated throughout, helps us to understand our place in the world better, so that we might do a better job of looking after it. That might save the polar bears, the modern emblem of impending loss and destruction. It might even save ourselves.
Author: Dan Flores
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 132400617X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 478
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Book Description
One of Kirkus Review's Best Nonfiction Books of 2022 A deep-time history of animals and humans in North America, by the best-selling and award-winning author of Coyote America. In 1908, near Folsom, New Mexico, a cowboy discovered the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison. By examining flint points embedded in the bones, archeologists later determined that a band of humans had killed and butchered the animals 12,450 years ago. This discovery vastly expanded America’s known human history but also revealed the long-standing danger Homo sapiens presented to the continent’s evolutionary richness. Distinguished author Dan Flores’s ambitious history chronicles the epoch in which humans and animals have coexisted in the “wild new world” of North America—a place shaped both by its own grand evolutionary forces and by momentous arrivals from Asia, Africa, and Europe. With portraits of iconic creatures such as mammoths, horses, wolves, and bison, Flores describes the evolution and historical ecology of North America like never before. The arrival of humans precipitated an extraordinary disruption of this teeming environment. Flores treats humans not as a species apart but as a new animal entering two continents that had never seen our likes before. He shows how our long past as carnivorous hunters helped us settle America, initially establishing a coast-to-coast culture that lasted longer than the present United States. But humanity’s success had devastating consequences for other creatures. In telling this epic story, Flores traces the origins of today’s “Sixth Extinction” to the spread of humans around the world; tracks the story of a hundred centuries of Native America; explains how Old World ideologies precipitated 400 years of market-driven slaughter that devastated so many ancient American species; and explores the decline and miraculous recovery of species in recent decades. In thrilling narrative style, informed by genomic science, evolutionary biology, and environmental history, Flores celebrates the astonishing bestiary that arose on our continent and introduces the complex human cultures and individuals who hastened its eradication, studied America’s animals, and moved heaven and earth to rescue them. Eons in scope and continental in scale, Wild New World is a sweeping yet intimate Big History of the animal-human story in America.
Author: Ed Yong
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0593133242
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 485
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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “thrilling” (The New York Times), “dazzling” (The Wall Street Journal) tour of the radically different ways that animals perceive the world that will fill you with wonder and forever alter your perspective, by Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist Ed Yong “One of this year’s finest works of narrative nonfiction.”—Oprah Daily ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Time, People, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Slate, Reader’s Digest, Chicago Public Library, Outside, Publishers Weekly, BookPage ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Oprah Daily, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Economist, Smithsonian Magazine, Prospect (UK), Globe & Mail, Esquire, Mental Floss, Marginalian, She Reads, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world. In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries that remain unsolved. Funny, rigorous, and suffused with the joy of discovery, An Immense World takes us on what Marcel Proust called “the only true voyage . . . not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes.” WINNER OF THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL • FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON AWARD
Author: Mark Sampson
Publisher: Buckrider Books
ISBN: 9781989496107
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
In a mix of imagination and social commentary, Sampson creates an unbelievable future and takes his readers on a remarkable road trip as his Everyman finds his place in a strange reality where detail-oriented pigeons are project managers and dependable dogs work round the clock in orange safety vests building housing for earth's newest inhabitants.
