Meditations at 10,000 Feet

Meditations at 10,000 Feet PDF Author: James Trefil
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers
ISBN: 9780020258902
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Trefil's preeminent reputation for explaining complex, scientific principles in an engaging and lucid manner results in a most fascinating and elegantly guided tour through mountains and the natural and scientific world. 23 black-and-white photographs. 71 line drawings.

Meditations at 10,000 Feet

Meditations at 10,000 Feet PDF Author: James Trefil
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers
ISBN: 9780020258902
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Trefil's preeminent reputation for explaining complex, scientific principles in an engaging and lucid manner results in a most fascinating and elegantly guided tour through mountains and the natural and scientific world. 23 black-and-white photographs. 71 line drawings.

Meditations at Sunset

Meditations at Sunset PDF Author: James S. Trefil
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers
ISBN: 9780020257608
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
The third and final book in the Natural Philospher trilogy addresses the puzzles overhead: the mystery of the disappearing sunspots, why sunsets and geraniums are red, how bad clouds crashed Delta Flight 191, why we'll never see a Hurricane Zelda, the riddle of ball lightning and UFOs, and more.

Ice

Ice PDF Author: Mariana Gosnell
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307791467
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 793

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Book Description
Like the adventurer who circled an iceberg to see it on all sides, Mariana Gosnell, former Newsweek reporter and author of Zero Three Bravo, a book about flying a small plane around the United States, explores ice in all its complexity, grandeur, and significance.More brittle than glass, at times stronger than steel, at other times flowing like molasses, ice covers 10 percent of the earth’s land and 7 percent of its oceans. In nature it is found in myriad forms, from the delicate needle ice that crunches underfoot in a winter meadow to the massive, centuries-old ice that forms the world’s glaciers. Scientists theorize that icy comets delivered to Earth the molecules needed to get life started, and ice ages have shaped much of the land as we know it.Here is the whole world of ice, from the freezing of Pleasant Lake in New Hampshire to the breakup of a Vermont river at the onset of spring, from the frozen Antarctic landscape that emperor penguins inhabit to the cold, watery route bowhead whales take between Arctic ice floes. Mariana Gosnell writes about frostbite and about the recently discovered 5,000-year-old body of a man preserved in an Alpine glacier. She discusses the work of scientists who extract cylinders of Greenland ice to study the history of the earth’s climate and try to predict its future. She examines ice in plants, icebergs, icicles, and hail; sea ice and permafrost; ice on Mars and in the rings of Saturn; and several new forms of ice developed in labs. She writes of the many uses humans make of ice, including ice-skating, ice fishing, iceboating, and ice climbing; building ice roads and seeding clouds; making ice castles, ice cubes, and iced desserts. Ice is a sparkling illumination of the natural phenomenon whose ebbs and flows over time have helped form the world we live in. It is a pleasure to read, and important to read—for its natural science and revelations about ice’s influence on our everyday lives, and for what it has to tell us about our environment today and in the future.

Human Nature

Human Nature PDF Author: James Trefil
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 9780805078480
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
"Uncommon and refreshing. Moreover, Trefil is right." -Michael Ruse, The New York Times Book Review As a prizewinning theoretical physicist and bestselling author, James Trefil has long been the public's guide to a better understanding of the world. Now, in this provocative and engaging book, Trefil looks squarely at our environmental future and finds-contrary to popular wisdom-reason to celebrate. For too long, Trefil argues, humans have treated nature as something separate from themselves-pristine wilderness to be saved or material resources to be exploited. What we need instead is a scientific approach to the environment. In Human Nature, Trefil exposes the benefits of genetically modified species, uncovers vital facts about droughts and global warming, and shows why putting humans first is the best path ahead. By taking advantage of explosive advances in the sciences, we can fruitfully manage the planet, if we rise to the challenge. Human Nature promises to awaken a new state of environmentalism and our relationship to the planet-and is filled with optimism, rather than alarm.

Evening Tide

Evening Tide PDF Author: Elizabeth Tarbox
Publisher: Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations
ISBN: 9781558963641
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 74

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Book Description
Whether in the bleakest moment of bidding goodbye to her dying father or in the pain she hears as she counsels gay youth, Tarbox's ears and eyes are attuned to the hopes and the solace that she finds in nature -- in the gentle sounds in a stand of pines, in the intensive chore of splitting wood. These meditations will comfort and inspire. Part of the UUA Meditation Manual series.

The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy

The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy PDF Author: Eric Donald Hirsch
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780618226474
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 944

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Book Description
Provides information on ideas concerning people, places, ideas, and events currently under discussion, including gene therapy, NAFTA, pheromones, and Kwanzaa.

A Walk in the Woods

A Walk in the Woods PDF Author: Bill Bryson
Publisher: Anchor Canada
ISBN: 0385674546
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
God only knows what possessed Bill Bryson, a reluctant adventurer if ever there was one, to undertake a gruelling hike along the world's longest continuous footpath—The Appalachian Trail. The 2,000-plus-mile trail winds through 14 states, stretching along the east coast of the United States, from Georgia to Maine. It snakes through some of the wildest and most spectacular landscapes in North America, as well as through some of its most poverty-stricken and primitive backwoods areas. With his offbeat sensibility, his eye for the absurd, and his laugh-out-loud sense of humour, Bryson recounts his confrontations with nature at its most uncompromising over his five-month journey. An instant classic, riotously funny, A Walk in the Woods will add a whole new audience to the legions of Bill Bryson fans.

The Best American Essays of the Century

The Best American Essays of the Century PDF Author: Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 632

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Book Description
Fifty five unforgettable essays by the finest American writers of the twentieth century.

Are We Unique

Are We Unique PDF Author: James Trefil
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
ISBN: 1620459167
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
In this fascinating book on an exciting and timely topic, James Trefil explores just exactly what it is that is so special about the human mind that sets us so far from all the other animals and that also makes it impossible to design a computer that coul

Mountains Figured and Disfigured in the English-Speaking World

Mountains Figured and Disfigured in the English-Speaking World PDF Author: Françoise Besson
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527554031
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 730

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Book Description
The essays in this book, written by poets, novelists, mountain-climbers and academics from all over the world, evoke the representation of mountains in the English-speaking world as artists, writers, philosophers or mountain-climbers have represented them from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. From the Alps to the Pyrenees, from Mount Fuji to Mount Shasta, from the Himalayas to the Scottish Highlands, from Ikere in Nigeria to Devil's Tower in the United States, from Uluru in Australia to the most northern mountain of the Arctic, the shapes of the world speak the same language and tell the world its own story. This interdisciplinary book, weaving together mountaineering, literature, philosophy, painting, cinema, ecology, history, palaeontology, geography, geopolitics, toponymy, law, religion and myth, invites people to an innovative reading of mountains: it reveals the close relationship existing between the shapes of the world and all forms of writing and, at the same time, it shows how the representations of the imagination may be instrumental in protecting the natural world. The story told by the landscape inscribes a broken line in the shapes of the world, tearing the landscape like a fragile page whenever historical and political events (wars, mining or deforestation) leave scars in the landscape; but writers' and artists' representations of mountains constitute a path to awareness as they are not only a painting of beauty, but an image of our link to nature and a warning as well. For centuries the image of the mountain has conveyed a symbolism telling the story of human thought, and this book shows to what extent literature and art play an essential part in our awareness of nature.