The English Love Affair with Nature

The English Love Affair with Nature PDF Author: Ian Alexander
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781909644465
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
We English, supposedly cold and unemotional, are helplessly in love with nature. We fell in love two hundred years ago and, since then, have been on a wild roller-coaster ride through escapism, romanticism, art, animal cruelty, conservation, birdwatching, the back-to-nature movement and much more. Today we live with pets, gardening, wildlife documentaries and smartphone apps. The English Love Affair with Nature tells the story of this extraordinarily long, tangled and passionate romance, how we fell in love, and why we are still mad about nature.

The English Love Affair with Nature

The English Love Affair with Nature PDF Author: Ian Alexander
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781909644465
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 333

Get Book Here

Book Description
We English, supposedly cold and unemotional, are helplessly in love with nature. We fell in love two hundred years ago and, since then, have been on a wild roller-coaster ride through escapism, romanticism, art, animal cruelty, conservation, birdwatching, the back-to-nature movement and much more. Today we live with pets, gardening, wildlife documentaries and smartphone apps. The English Love Affair with Nature tells the story of this extraordinarily long, tangled and passionate romance, how we fell in love, and why we are still mad about nature.

The Home Place

The Home Place PDF Author: J. Drew Lanham
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
ISBN: 1571318755
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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Book Description
“A groundbreaking work about race and the American landscape, and a deep meditation on nature…wise and beautiful.”—Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk A Foreword Reviews Best Book of the Year and Nautilus Silver Award Winner In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored. Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way somewhere else”—has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, readers meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.” By turns angry, funny, elegiac, and heartbreaking, The Home Place is a meditation on nature and belonging by an ornithologist and professor of ecology, at once a deeply moving memoir and riveting exploration of the contradictions of black identity in the rural South—and in America today. “When you’re done with The Home Place, it won’t be done with you. Its wonders will linger like everything luminous.”—Star Tribune “A lyrical story about the power of the wild…synthesizes his own family history, geography, nature, and race into a compelling argument for conservation and resilience.”—National Geographic

A Love Affair with Nature

A Love Affair with Nature PDF Author: Edwin Mullins
Publisher: Phaidon Press
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
In this book Edwin Mullins examines this very British affection in detail: he looks at the great tradition of English landscape painting and demonstrates how the inspiration of nature is reflected in the way the English use the land, in the creation of the small garden, and, on a larger scale, in the landscaped slopes of parkland surrounding the English country house.

A Love Affair with Birds

A Love Affair with Birds PDF Author: Sue Leaf
Publisher: Anchor Books
ISBN: 9780816675654
Category : Birds
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Imagine a Minneapolis so small that, on calm days, the roar of St. Anthony Falls could be heard in town, a time when passenger pigeons roosted in neighborhood oak trees. Now picture a dapper professor conducting his ornithology class (the university's first) by streetcar to Lake Harriet for a morning of bird-watching. The students were mostly young women--in sunhats, sailor tops, and long skirts, with binoculars strung around their necks. The professor was Thomas Sadler Roberts (1858-1946), a doctor for three decades, a bird lover virtually from birth, the father of Minnesota ornithology, and the man who, perhaps more than any other, promoted the study of the state's natural history. "A Love Affair with Birds" is the first full biography of this key figure in Minnesota's past. Roberts came to Minnesota as a boy and began keeping detailed accounts of Minneapolis's birds. These journals, which became the basis for his landmark work "The Birds of Minnesota," also inform this book, affording a view of the state's rich avian life in its early days--and of a young man whose passion for birds and practice of medicine among Minneapolis's elite eventually dovetailed in his launching of the beloved Bell Museum of Natural History. Bird enthusiast, doctor, author, curator, educator, conservationist: every chapter in Roberts's life is also a chapter in the state's history, and in his story acclaimed author Sue Leaf--an avid bird enthusiast and nature lover herself--captures a true Minnesota character and his time.

Love Affair

Love Affair PDF Author: Leslie Kenton
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1429991259
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
A searing literary memoir of a disconnected childhood, a multigenerational upbringing and incest— from the daughter of legendary jazz pianist Stan Kenton Leslie Kenton was the only child of Violet, a stunning Hitchcock blonde, and the legendary jazz giant Stan Kenton. The story takes place on the road in 1950s America and in the mania of Hollywood—a world of jazz clubs, dance halls and onenighters, where lives were lived on a razor's edge. Love Affair takes us beyond the bright lights and glamour into an intense, claustrophobic world of a father and the only child of his troubled marriage. As Stanley grapples with alcohol and his personal demons, gradually his actions threaten to destroy the only real, untainted thing in his life: Leslie. A true story of obsession, tragedy and grace, Love Affair is Leslie Kenton's powerful memoir. At its heart is the complex, ultimately incestuous, relationship with her father–a union so powerful it defines all that came after. As their lives become increasingly entangled, so do the forces of darkness and light that exist within us all, leading to destruction for him and heartbreaking redemption for her. There have been memoirs about incest before, but Love Affair is a surprisingly moving and elegant treatment of a young life, shared passion, and boundaries crossed.

20th Century Britain

20th Century Britain PDF Author: Nicole Robertson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000828301
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
20th Century Britain provides an authoritative and accessible survey of contemporary research on economic activity, society, political development and culture. Written by leading academics, it examines recent advances in scholarship and gives a grounding in established approaches and topics. The first part comprises thematic essays covering the whole of the twentieth century, including chapters on the economy, economic management, big business, parliamentary politics, leisure, work, health, international economic relations and empire. It uncovers key areas of equality and diversity in chapters on women, living standards, social mobility, ethnicity and multiculturalism, and gender and sexuality. The most recent subfields of historical studies are also explored, including disability history and environmental economic history. The second part focuses on seismic events and topics covering shorter timeframes, including the World Wars, interwar Depression, Britain and European integration, sexual behaviours, civil society, the 1960s cultural revolution and resisting racism. This collection provides an essential guide to current academic thinking on the most important elements of twentieth-century British history and is a useful tool for all students and scholars interested in modern Britain.

Changing Times

Changing Times PDF Author: Martin Chick
Publisher: An Economic and Social History of Britain
ISBN: 0199552789
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 455

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Book Description
This is a study of how, and why, the British economy has changed since 1951. It covers the Golden Age of 1945-1973 when unemployment was below one million; when governments built millions of council houses and flats; when electricity, telephones, and gas were supplied by nationalised monopolies; when income and wealth inequality were narrowing; and when the UK was not a member of the European Economic Community. Moving through the inflation, rising unemployment, and rapid contraction of the manufacturing industry from the mid- 1970s, Changing Times examines the transfer of assets which was effected in the privatisation of public housing and nationalised industries from the early 1980s. The role of the State changed as public investment fell. The financing of old-age care, of state pensions, and of the National Health Service became of increasing concern and were less politically amenable to the approach of using private finance (the Private Finance Initiative and tuition fees) to fund former public obligations. Changes were made to the system of taxation, but public expenditure changed little as a share of national income, although the government now built little. Difficulties emerged in ensuring adequate housing for a growing population, and uncertainty grew as to where future investment in necessities like electricity supply would come from. Having narrowed in the Golden Age, inequality of income and wealth widened. Environmental concerns also grew, from the local smogs of the 1950s, through the concern with acid rain from the 1960s, to the current global concern with climate change. The financial crash of 2008 and the decision to 'Brexit' in the referendum of 2016 reduced economic growth and highlighted the extent of economic change since 1951. This is a study of that change.

An Affair with Africa

An Affair with Africa PDF Author: Alzada Carlisle Kistner
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1597268321
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
In June 1960, a young faculty wife named Alzada Kistner and her husband David, a promising entomologist, left their 18-month old daughter in the care of relatives and began what was to be a four month scientific expedition in the Belgian Congo. Three weeks after their arrival, the country was gripped by a violent revolution trapping the Kistners in its midst. Despite having to find their way out of numerous life-threatening situations, the Kistners were not to be dissuaded. An emergency airlift by the United States Air Force brought them to safety in Kenya where they continued their field work. Thus began three decades of adventures in science. In An Affair with Africa, Alzada Kistner describes her family's African experience -- the five expeditions they took beginning with the trip to the Belgian Congo in 1960 and ending in 1972-73 with a nine-month excursion across southern Africa. From hunching over columns of ants for hours on end while seven months pregnant to eating dinner next to Idi Amin, Kistner provides a lively and humor-filled account of the human side of scientific discovery. Her wonderfully detailed stories clearly show why, despite hardship and danger -- and contrary to all of society's expectations -- she could not forsake accompanying her husband on his expeditions, and, to this day, continues to find the world "endlessly beckoning, a lively bubbling cauldron of questions and intrigue." In the spirit of Beryl Markham's West with the Night and Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa, An Affair with Africa shares with readers the thoughts and experiences of a remarkable woman, one whose unquenchable thirst for adventure led her into a series of almost unimaginable situations. Readers -- from armchair travelers fascinated by stories of Africa to scientists familiar with the Kistners's work but unaware of the lengths to which they went to gather their data -- will find An Affair with Africa a rare treasure.

Euphemania

Euphemania PDF Author: Ralph Keyes
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
ISBN: 0316121959
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
How did die become kick the bucket, underwear become unmentionables, and having an affair become hiking the Appalachian trail? Originally used to avoid blasphemy, honor taboos, and make nice, euphemisms have become embedded in the fabric of our language. Euphemania traces the origins of euphemisms from a tool of the church to a form of gentility to today's instrument of commercial, political, and postmodern doublespeak. As much social commentary as a book for word lovers, Euphemania is a lively and thought-provoking look at the power of words and our power over them.

The Golden Shore

The Golden Shore PDF Author: David Helvarg
Publisher: New World Library
ISBN: 1608684415
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
From the first human settlements to the latest marine explorations, The Golden Shore tells the tale of the history, culture, and changing nature of California’s coasts and ocean. David Helvarg takes the reader on both a geographic and literary journey along the state’s 1,100-mile Pacific coastline, from the Oregon border to the San Diego–Tijuana international border fence and out into its whale-, seal-, and shark-rich offshore seamounts, rock isles, and kelp forests. Part history, part travelogue, part love letter, The Golden Shore captures the spirit of the California coast and its mythic place in American culture.