Author: Jerry Langton
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1466872020
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 183
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Book Description
From its origins in the swamps of Southeast Asia to its role in the medieval Black Death to its unshakeable niche in modern urban centers, the rat has incredible evolutionary advantages. Combining biology with history, and social commentary with firsthand experience, Rat dispels the myths and exposes the little-known facts about the ubiquitous rodent. Plague carrier, city vermin, and an out-and-out menace to modern man, the rat, like death and taxes, is a certain fixture in humankind's history. Rats are found in virtually every nook and cranny of the globe and their numbers are ever increasing. Rats are always adapting and they seem to outwit any attempts by humans to wipe them out. What makes the rat such a worthy adversary and how has it risen to the top of the animal kingdom? • Rats have been discovered living in meat lockers. The rats in there simply grew longer hair, fatter bodies, and nested in the carcasses they fed upon. • A female rat can, under good conditions, have well over 100,000 babies in her lifetime. • A rat can fall fifty feet onto pavement and skitter away unharmed. • A rat's jaws can exert a force more than twenty times as powerful as a human's. • The front side of a rat's incisors are as hard as some grades of steel. In Rat: How the World's Most Notorious Rodent Clawed Its Way to the Top, Jerry Langton explores the history, myth, physiology, habits, and psyche of the rat and even speculates on the future of the rat and how they might evolve over the next few hundred years.
Author: Jerry Langton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
If given the time, food, and freedom from predators, a rat can produce 128,000 offspring in one year.Plague carrier, city vermin and an out-and-out menace to modern man, the rat, like death and taxes, is a certain fixture on humankinds history. Rats are found in virtually every nook and cranny of the globe and their numbers are ever increasing. Popular movies such as Wilbur have only reinforced our terror of the rat and have given it a permanent place on our list of enemies. Rats are always adapting and they seem to outwit any attempts by humans to wipe them out. What makes the rat such a worthy adversary and how has it risen to the top of the animal kingdom? In Rat: How the Worlds Most Notorious Rodent Clawed its Way to the Top, Jerry Langton explores the history, myth, physiology, habits, and psyche of the rat and even speculates on the future of the rat and how they might evolve over the next few hundred years. From its origins in the swamps of Southeast Asia, to its role in the medieval Black Death to its unshakable niche in modern urban centres, the rat has incredible biological advantages that make it virtually indestructible. Rat: How the Worlds Most Notorious Rodent Clawed its Way to the Top transcends nature literature by combining biology with history, and social commentary with first-hand experience, to dispel the myths and expose the little-known facts about the ubiquitous rodent.
Author: Rachel Toor
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374303096
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
As much a moving memoir as it is an amusing pet manual, Misunderstood is a unique nonfiction book for teens and tweens about domesticated rats in general and a wonderful rat named Iris in particular. Brimming with smarts and energy just like its furry subjects, Rachel Toor's text blends history and science with profiles of interesting people and autobiographical anecdotes as it joyfully sets the record straight about why this reviled creature is actually a most amazing species. Readers will come away with a deeper understanding and appreciation of domestic rats—and may be convinced to adopt one themselves.
Author: Anthony Winson
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479862797
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
- "Provides all the evidence anyone needs to understand the problems with our current food system." - Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University - "A hugely informative book, stocked full of careful analysis." - Amy Best, Associate Professor of Sociology, George Mason University
Author: Melvil Dewey
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic journals
Languages : en
Pages : 894
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Book Description
Includes, beginning Sept. 15, 1954 (and on the 15th of each month, Sept.-May) a special section: School library journal, ISSN 0000-0035, (called Junior libraries, 1954-May 1961). Also issued separately.
Author: Harlan Coben
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 045122650X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 498
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Book Description
NOW A NETFLIX SERIES! The bestselling author and creator of the hit Netflix dramas Stay Close and The Stranger delivers a #1 New York Times bestseller that asks how well parents really know their children—and puts them on a technological roller coaster of their worst fears. “We’re losing him.” With those words, Mike and Tia Baye decide to spy on their sixteen-year-old son Adam, who has become increasingly moody and withdrawn since the suicide of his best friend. The software they install on his computer shows them every Web site visited, every e-mail sent or received, every instant message. And each keystroke draws them deeper and deeper into a maze of mayhem and violence that could destroy them all....
Author: Kate DiCamillo
Publisher: Candlewick Press
ISBN: 076366040X
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
Rescuing a squirrel after an accident involving a vacuum cleaner, comic-reading cynic Flora Belle Buckman is astonished when the squirrel, Ulysses, demonstrates astonishing powers of strength and flight after being revived. By the Newbery Medal-winning author of The Tale of Despereaux.
Author: Robert Sullivan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1596919175
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
New York Public Library Book for the Teenager New York Public Library Book to Remember PSLA Young Adult Top 40 Nonfiction Titles of the Year "Engaging...a lively, informative compendium of facts, theories, and musings."-Michiko Kakutani, New York Times Behold the rat, dirty and disgusting! Robert Sullivan turns the lowly rat into the star of this most perversely intriguing, remarkable, and unexpectedly elegant New York Times bestseller. Love them or loathe them, rats are here to stay-they are city dwellers as much as (or more than) we are, surviving on the effluvia of our society. In Rats, the critically acclaimed bestseller, Robert Sullivan spends a year investigating a rat-infested alley just a few blocks away from Wall Street. Sullivan gets to know not just the beast but its friends and foes: the exterminators, the sanitation workers, the agitators and activists who have played their part in the centuries-old war between human city dweller and wild city rat. Sullivan looks deep into the largely unrecorded history of the city and its masses-its herds-of-rats-like mob. Funny, wise, sometimes disgusting but always compulsively readable, Rats earns its unlikely place alongside the great classics of nature writing. With an all-new Afterword by the author
Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061804819
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 578
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Book Description
New York Times Bestseller • Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • An Oprah's Book Club Selection “Powerful . . . [Kingsolver] has with infinitely steady hands worked the prickly threads of religion, politics, race, sin and redemption into a thing of terrible beauty.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review The Poisonwood Bible, now celebrating its 25th anniversary, established Barbara Kingsolver as one of the most thoughtful and daring of modern writers. Taking its place alongside the classic works of postcolonial literature, it is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in Africa. The story is told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Against this backdrop, Orleanna Price reconstructs the story of her evangelist husband's part in the Western assault on Africa, a tale indelibly darkened by her own losses and unanswerable questions about her own culpability. Also narrating the story, by turns, are her four daughters—the teenaged Rachel; adolescent twins Leah and Adah; and Ruth May, a prescient five-year-old. These sharply observant girls, who arrive in the Congo with racial preconceptions forged in 1950s Georgia, will be marked in surprisingly different ways by their father's intractable mission, and by Africa itself. Ultimately each must strike her own separate path to salvation. Their passionately intertwined stories become a compelling exploration of moral risk and personal responsibility.
Author: George Orwell
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198829191
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
'If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever.' Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), George Orwell's final novel, was completed in difficult conditions shortly before his early death. It is one of the most influential and widely-read novels of the post-war period, and has been a huge international bestseller over many decades. Continually in print, it has long been controversial, both in its immediate Cold War context and in later history. It is in some ways a realist novel, but in others is more akin to a work of science fiction, a dystopia or a satire. It also has strong affiliations to Gothic in its plotting, motifs and affective states. Full of horror and terror, it contains prophetic dreams and a central character who thinks of himself as a 'monster', a 'ghost' and 'already dead'. Like Frankenstein and Dracula, it is fascinated by the power of a documentary remnant addressed to an unknown reader.
