Dirt Work

Dirt Work PDF Author: Christine Byl
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807001015
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
A lively and lyrical account of one woman’s unlikely apprenticeship on a national park trail crew—and what she discovers about nature, gender, and the value of hard work Christine Byl first encountered the national parks the way most of us do: on vacation. But after she graduated from college, broke and ready for a new challenge, she joined a Glacier National Park trail crew as a seasonal “traildog” maintaining mountain trails for the millions of visitors Glacier draws every year. Byl first thought of the job as a paycheck, a summer diversion, a welcome break from “the real world” before going on to graduate school. She came to find out that work in the woods on a trail crew was more demanding, more rewarding—more real—than she ever imagined. During her first season, Byl embraces the backbreaking difficulty of the work, learning how to clear trees, move boulders, and build stairs in the backcountry. Her first mentors are the colorful characters with whom she works—the packers, sawyers, and traildogs from all walks of life—along with the tools in her hands: axe, shovel, chainsaw, rock bar. As she invests herself deeply in new work, the mountains, rivers, animals, and weather become teachers as well. While Byl expected that her tenure at the parks would be temporary, she ends up turning this summer gig into a decades-long job, moving from Montana to Alaska, breaking expectations—including her own—that she would follow a “professional” career path. Returning season after season, she eventually leads her own crews, mentoring other trail dogs along the way. In Dirt Work, Byl probes common assumptions about the division between mental and physical labor, “women’s work” and “men’s work,” white collars and blue collars. The supposedly simple work of digging holes, dropping trees, and blasting snowdrifts in fact offers her an education of the hands and the head, as well as membership in an utterly unique subculture. Dirt Work is a contemplative but unsentimental look at the pleasures of labor, the challenges of apprenticeship, and the way a place becomes a home.

Dirt Work

Dirt Work PDF Author: Christine Byl
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807001015
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Get Book Here

Book Description
A lively and lyrical account of one woman’s unlikely apprenticeship on a national park trail crew—and what she discovers about nature, gender, and the value of hard work Christine Byl first encountered the national parks the way most of us do: on vacation. But after she graduated from college, broke and ready for a new challenge, she joined a Glacier National Park trail crew as a seasonal “traildog” maintaining mountain trails for the millions of visitors Glacier draws every year. Byl first thought of the job as a paycheck, a summer diversion, a welcome break from “the real world” before going on to graduate school. She came to find out that work in the woods on a trail crew was more demanding, more rewarding—more real—than she ever imagined. During her first season, Byl embraces the backbreaking difficulty of the work, learning how to clear trees, move boulders, and build stairs in the backcountry. Her first mentors are the colorful characters with whom she works—the packers, sawyers, and traildogs from all walks of life—along with the tools in her hands: axe, shovel, chainsaw, rock bar. As she invests herself deeply in new work, the mountains, rivers, animals, and weather become teachers as well. While Byl expected that her tenure at the parks would be temporary, she ends up turning this summer gig into a decades-long job, moving from Montana to Alaska, breaking expectations—including her own—that she would follow a “professional” career path. Returning season after season, she eventually leads her own crews, mentoring other trail dogs along the way. In Dirt Work, Byl probes common assumptions about the division between mental and physical labor, “women’s work” and “men’s work,” white collars and blue collars. The supposedly simple work of digging holes, dropping trees, and blasting snowdrifts in fact offers her an education of the hands and the head, as well as membership in an utterly unique subculture. Dirt Work is a contemplative but unsentimental look at the pleasures of labor, the challenges of apprenticeship, and the way a place becomes a home.

Dirt

Dirt PDF Author: David R. Montgomery
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520933168
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Dirt, soil, call it what you want—it's everywhere we go. It is the root of our existence, supporting our feet, our farms, our cities. This fascinating yet disquieting book finds, however, that we are running out of dirt, and it's no laughing matter. An engaging natural and cultural history of soil that sweeps from ancient civilizations to modern times, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations explores the compelling idea that we are—and have long been—using up Earth's soil. Once bare of protective vegetation and exposed to wind and rain, cultivated soils erode bit by bit, slowly enough to be ignored in a single lifetime but fast enough over centuries to limit the lifespan of civilizations. A rich mix of history, archaeology and geology, Dirt traces the role of soil use and abuse in the history of Mesopotamia, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, China, European colonialism, Central America, and the American push westward. We see how soil has shaped us and we have shaped soil—as society after society has risen, prospered, and plowed through a natural endowment of fertile dirt. David R. Montgomery sees in the recent rise of organic and no-till farming the hope for a new agricultural revolution that might help us avoid the fate of previous civilizations.

Wiggling Worms at Work

Wiggling Worms at Work PDF Author: Wendy Pfeffer
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0064451992
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 44

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Book Description
Crawling through the dirt, worms are hard at work, helping plants to grow. Worms help the fruit and vegetables we eat by loosening the soil and feeding the plants. Read and find out about these wiggling wonders!

American Dirt (Oprah's Book Club)

American Dirt (Oprah's Book Club) PDF Author: Jeanine Cummins
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
ISBN: 1250209781
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"También de este lado hay sueños. On this side, too, there are dreams. Lydia Quixano Perez lives in the Mexican city of Acapulco. She runs a bookstore. She has a son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist. And while there are cracks beginning to show in Acapulco because of the drug cartels, her life is, by and large, fairly comfortable. Even though she knows they'll never sell, Lydia stocks some of her all-time favorite books in her store. And then one day a man enters the shop to browse and comes up to the register with four books he would like to buy--two of them her favorites. Javier is erudite. He is charming. And, unbeknownst to Lydia, he is the jefe of the newest drug cartel that has gruesomely taken over the city. When Lydia's husband's tell-all profile of Javier is published, none of their lives will ever be the same. Forced to flee, Lydia and eight-year-old Luca soon find themselves miles and worlds away from their comfortable middle-class existence. Instantly transformed into migrants, Lydia and Luca ride la bestia--trains that make their way north toward the United States, which is the only place Javier's reach doesn't extend. As they join the countless people trying to reach el norte, Lydia soon sees that everyone is running from something. But what exactly are they running to? American Dirt will leave readers utterly changed when they finish reading it. A page-turner filled with poignancy, drama, and humanity on every page, it is a literary achievement."--

The Book of Dirt

The Book of Dirt PDF Author: Bram Presser
Publisher: Text Publishing
ISBN: 1925240266
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
• An extraordinary and absorbing novelisation of one family’s tale of Holocaust survival and a grandson’s unrelenting dedication to ensuring his ancestor’s stories will never be forgotten • The Book of Dirt reimagines the lives of Jakub Rand, a rabbi’s son who is tasked with curating Eichmann’s infamous Museum of the Extinct Race, and Františka Roubíčkova, a converted Jew who would go on to establish a smuggling network that would stretch as far as Auschwitz • Presser began writing the novel after seeing an article in the local community paper that purported to tell a very different version of his grandfather’s fabled Holocaust story. Presser subsequently embarked on a seven-year search across four continents to uncover the truth • With elements of magical realism and innovative storytelling, The Book of Dirt is an imaginative and bold novel about family myths – how they come to be formed, the way in which they are perpetuated and what happens when we subject them to scrutiny • Bram Presser is a much-loved Melbourne personality, known for his involvement in the local music scene and Jewish community. He is a criminal lawyer and community activist

Dirt

Dirt PDF Author: Ben Campkin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857738828
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Dirt - and our rituals to eradicate it - is as much a part of our everyday lives as eating, breathing and sleeping. Yet this very fact means that we seldom stop to question what we mean by dirt. What do our attitudes to dirt and cleanliness tell us about ourselves and the societies we live in? Exploring a wide variety of settings - domestic, urban, suburban and rural - the contributors expose how our ideas about dirt are intimately bound up with issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and the body. The result is a a rich and challenging work that extends our understanding of historical and contemporary cultural manifestations of dirt and cleanliness.

Public Works

Public Works PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Municipal engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 1132

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Book Description


Dirt for Art's Sake

Dirt for Art's Sake PDF Author: Elisabeth Ladenson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801460379
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
In Dirt for Art's Sake, Elisabeth Ladenson recounts the most visible of modern obscenity trials involving scandalous books and their authors. What, she asks, do these often-colorful legal histories have to tell us about the works themselves and about a changing cultural climate that first treated them as filth and later celebrated them as masterpieces? Ladenson's narrative starts with Madame Bovary (Flaubert was tried in France in 1857) and finishes with Fanny Hill (written in the eighteenth century, put on trial in the United States in 1966); she considers, along the way, Les Fleurs du Mal, Ulysses, The Well of Loneliness, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Lolita, and the works of the Marquis de Sade. Over the course of roughly a century, Ladenson finds, two ideas that had been circulating in the form of avant-garde heresy gradually became accepted as truisms, and eventually as grounds for legal defense. The first is captured in the formula "art for art's sake"-the notion that a work of art exists in a realm independent of conventional morality. The second is realism, vilified by its critics as "dirt for dirt's sake." In Ladenson's view, the truth of the matter is closer to -dirt for art's sake-"the idea that the work of art may legitimately include the representation of all aspects of life, including the unpleasant and the sordid. Ladenson also considers cinematic adaptations of these novels, among them Vincente Minnelli's Madame Bovary, Stanley Kubrick's Lolita and the 1997 remake directed by Adrian Lyne, and various attempts to translate de Sade's works and life into film, which faced similar censorship travails. Written with a keen awareness of ongoing debates about free speech, Dirt for Art's Sake traces the legal and social acceptance of controversial works with critical acumen and delightful wit.

Dirt

Dirt PDF Author: Bill Buford
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385353197
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
“You can almost taste the food in Bill Buford’s Dirt, an engrossing, beautifully written memoir about his life as a cook in France.” —The Wall Street Journal What does it take to master French cooking? This is the question that drives Bill Buford to abandon his perfectly happy life in New York City and pack up and (with a wife and three-year-old twin sons in tow) move to Lyon, the so-called gastronomic capital of France. But what was meant to be six months in a new and very foreign city turns into a wild five-year digression from normal life, as Buford apprentices at Lyon’s best boulangerie, studies at a legendary culinary school, and cooks at a storied Michelin-starred restaurant, where he discovers the exacting (and incomprehensibly punishing) rigueur of the professional kitchen. With his signature humor, sense of adventure, and masterful ability to bring an exotic and unknown world to life, Buford has written the definitive insider story of a city and its great culinary culture.

Divine Dirt

Divine Dirt PDF Author: Charity L. Bedell
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide
ISBN: 073877751X
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Turn Ordinary Soil into Magic with 120+ Spells and Exercises Combining witchcraft, Conjure, and other folk practices, Charity L. Bedell shows you how to work with the energy of various environments—from riverbanks to forests to graveyards. Build relationships with urban and nature spirits, use dirt from footprints and animal tracks in your spells, make protection charms to use at crossroads, and much more. Divine Dirt helps you understand and connect with the magical places all around you. In addition to numerous spells and exercises, this book teaches you how to create and charge potent magical powders that can be used in the moment or stored for later use. Featuring extensive correspondences and resources, Divine Dirt is an indispensable guide. A great companion to Container Magic, this book includes spells and rituals for a wide variety of purposes, including: • Wellness • Justice • Protection • Money • Healing • Career • Fertility • Mental Health • Love • Luck • Spirit Communication • Cleansing • Ancestors and Guardians • New Opportunities • Karma • Beauty • Divination • Friendship • House and Home • Prosperity • Strength