The Vulture is a Patient Bird

The Vulture is a Patient Bird PDF Author: James Hadley Chase
Publisher: Murder Room
ISBN: 1471903699
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Get Book Here

Book Description
A brilliant but sadistic safe-breaker; a beautiful seductress; an expert young hunter and an ace pilot with a shady past - this is the team that undercover operator Armo Shalik assembles to steal the priceless Borgia ring from millionaire Max Kahlenberg's closely guarded fortress in the remote and deadly African bush. But when Kahlenberg finds out they are coming, the gang's expedition turns into a strictly one-way safari - to slaughter ... 'Insanely readable' Observer

The Vulture is a Patient Bird

The Vulture is a Patient Bird PDF Author: James Hadley Chase
Publisher: Murder Room
ISBN: 1471903699
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Get Book Here

Book Description
A brilliant but sadistic safe-breaker; a beautiful seductress; an expert young hunter and an ace pilot with a shady past - this is the team that undercover operator Armo Shalik assembles to steal the priceless Borgia ring from millionaire Max Kahlenberg's closely guarded fortress in the remote and deadly African bush. But when Kahlenberg finds out they are coming, the gang's expedition turns into a strictly one-way safari - to slaughter ... 'Insanely readable' Observer

Vulture is a Patient Bird

Vulture is a Patient Bird PDF Author: James Hadley Chase
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Great Indoors

The Great Indoors PDF Author: Emily Anthes
Publisher: Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374716684
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book Here

Book Description
An Architectural Record Notable Book A fascinating, thought-provoking journey into our built environment Modern humans are an indoor species. We spend 90 percent of our time inside, shuttling between homes and offices, schools and stores, restaurants and gyms. And yet, in many ways, the indoor world remains unexplored territory. For all the time we spend inside buildings, we rarely stop to consider: How do these spaces affect our mental and physical well-being? Our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors? Our productivity, performance, and relationships? In this wide-ranging, character-driven book, science journalist Emily Anthes takes us on an adventure into the buildings in which we spend our days, exploring the profound, and sometimes unexpected, ways that they shape our lives. Drawing on cutting-edge research, she probes the pain-killing power of a well-placed window and examines how the right office layout can expand our social networks. She investigates how room temperature regulates our cognitive performance, how the microbes hiding in our homes influence our immune systems, and how cafeteria design affects what—and how much—we eat. Along the way, Anthes takes readers into an operating room designed to minimize medical errors, a school designed to boost students’ physical fitness, and a prison designed to support inmates’ psychological needs. And she previews the homes of the future, from the high-tech houses that could monitor our health to the 3D-printed structures that might allow us to live on the Moon. The Great Indoors provides a fresh perspective on our most familiar surroundings and a new understanding of the power of architecture and design. It's an argument for thoughtful interventions into the built environment and a story about how to build a better world—one room at a time.

The Bird Way

The Bird Way PDF Author: Jennifer Ackerman
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735223033
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Genius of Birds, a radical investigation into the bird way of being, and the recent scientific research that is dramatically shifting our understanding of birds -- how they live and how they think. “There is the mammal way and there is the bird way.” But the bird way is much more than a unique pattern of brain wiring, and lately, scientists have taken a new look at bird behaviors they have, for years, dismissed as anomalies or mysteries –– What they are finding is upending the traditional view of how birds conduct their lives, how they communicate, forage, court, breed, survive. They are also revealing the remarkable intelligence underlying these activities, abilities we once considered uniquely our own: deception, manipulation, cheating, kidnapping, infanticide, but also ingenious communication between species, cooperation, collaboration, altruism, culture, and play. Some of these extraordinary behaviors are biological conundrums that seem to push the edges of, well, birdness: a mother bird that kills her own infant sons, and another that selflessly tends to the young of other birds as if they were her own; a bird that collaborates in an extraordinary way with one species—ours—but parasitizes another in gruesome fashion; birds that give gifts and birds that steal; birds that dance or drum, that paint their creations or paint themselves; birds that build walls of sound to keep out intruders and birds that summon playmates with a special call—and may hold the secret to our own penchant for playfulness and the evolution of laughter. Drawing on personal observations, the latest science, and her bird-related travel around the world, from the tropical rainforests of eastern Australia and the remote woodlands of northern Japan, to the rolling hills of lower Austria and the islands of Alaska’s Kachemak Bay, Jennifer Ackerman shows there is clearly no single bird way of being. In every respect, in plumage, form, song, flight, lifestyle, niche, and behavior, birds vary. It is what we love about them. As E.O Wilson once said, when you have seen one bird, you have not seen them all.

Vanessa's Rotten Day

Vanessa's Rotten Day PDF Author: Roberta Carr
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781533629357
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 82

Get Book Here

Book Description
Vanessa's Rotten Day is a whimsical tale that is based on a true animal rescue story. One hot August morning, Vanessa, a young turkey vulture, is hunting for food when she sports a half-buried dog in a field. She swoops down and enjoys a savory meal. As she flies home, she begins to feel sick. Before long, she falls from the sky and crashes into a stranger's backyard. She's scared, unable to move, and desperately wants her mother. She trembles with fear as a human shadow closes in on her. What made her sick? Will the human harm her? Will she ever see her family again?

I Have Something to Tell You

I Have Something to Tell You PDF Author: Regan Hofmann
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439109648
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book Here

Book Description
For ten years, Regan Hofmann lived a double life. To the world, she was a woman from Princeton who went to prep school, summered in the Hamptons and rode Thoroughbred horses. She had a great job, a loving family and friends and looks that made men turn their heads. From the outside, she seemed to have it all. On the inside, though, coursing through her veins and weighing heavily on her mind, was the truth: that she was HIV-positive. At first, Hofmann faced her mortality alone, shamed by a disease society considered the exclusive property of gay men, injection drug users and sex workers. Burdened by her secret, she withdrew from the world she once knew. Over time, though, Hofmann began to accept her mortality -- and HIV -- and reconsidered the way she wanted to live her life. After nearly a decade of silence, Hofmann did what she never imagined having the courage to do: she came out to the world about what she was going through. Regan Hofmann not only has the courage to fight HIV and the debilitating stigma that surrounds it, but she writes about her experience with unflinching honesty and a deep affection for the family and friends who support her. I Have Something to Tell You is a memoir of disease and survival, and an inspiring account of a life driven by a sense of purpose and a search for love in the face of the unthinkable. More than anything, it is a story that reminds us that while life can change in an instant, we each hold the power to decide how we use the time we have. With humor, vitality and an unquenchable passion, Regan shows us a life fully lived.

Consider the Birds

Consider the Birds PDF Author: Debbie Blue
Publisher: Abingdon Press
ISBN: 1426775903
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Get Book Here

Book Description
From biblical times to today, humans have found meaning and significance in the actions and symbolism of birds. We admire their mystery and manners, their strength and fragility, their beauty and their ugliness—and perhaps compare these very characteristics to their own lives in the process. Though admired today, the birds of Scripture are largely unseen and underappreciated. From the well-known image of the dove to the birds that gorge on the flesh of the defeated “beast” in Revelation, birds play a dynamic part in Scripture. They bring bread to the prophets. They are food for the wanderers. As sacrifices, they are the currency of mercy. Highlighting 10 birds throughout Scripture, author Debbie Blue explores their significance in both familiar and unfamiliar biblical stories and illustrates how and why they have represented humanity across culture, Christian tradition, art, and contemporary psyche. With these (usually) minor characters at the forefront of human imaginations, poignant life lessons illuminate such qualities as desire and gratitude, power and vulnerability, insignificance and importance—even as readers gain a better understanding that God’s mysterious grace is sometimes most evident in His simplest of creatures.

Birds Without Wings

Birds Without Wings PDF Author: Louis de Bernieres
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307424995
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 578

Get Book Here

Book Description
In his first novel since Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernières creates a world, populates it with characters as real as our best friends, and launches it into the maelstrom of twentieth-century history. The setting is a small village in southwestern Anatolia in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire. Everyone there speaks Turkish, though they write it in Greek letters. It’s a place that has room for a professional blasphemer; where a brokenhearted aga finds solace in the arms of a Circassian courtesan who isn’t Circassian at all; where a beautiful Christian girl named Philothei is engaged to a Muslim boy named Ibrahim. But all of this will change when Turkey enters the modern world. Epic in sweep, intoxicating in its sensual detail, Birds Without Wings is an enchantment.

On Freedom

On Freedom PDF Author: Maggie Nelson
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 077105128X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK A GUARDIAN AND TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'BOOK OF THE YEAR' PICK A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE WORK OF NONFICTION So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom's long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept's complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate. Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing "practices of freedom" by which we negotiate our interrelation with—indeed, our inseparability from—others, with all the care and constraint that relation entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion. For Nelson, thinking publicly through the knots in our culture—from recent art world debates to the turbulent legacies of sexual liberation, from the painful paradoxes of addiction to the lure of despair in the face of the climate crisis—is itself a practice of freedom, a means of forging fortitude, courage, and company. On Freedom is an invigorating, essential book for challenging times.

The Genius of Birds

The Genius of Birds PDF Author: Jennifer Ackerman
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0399563121
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Get Book Here

Book Description
“Lovely, celebratory. For all the belittling of ‘bird brains,’ [Ackerman] shows them to be uniquely impressive machines . . .” —New York Times Book Review “A lyrical testimony to the wonders of avian intelligence.” —Scientific American An award-winning science writer tours the globe to reveal what makes birds capable of such extraordinary feats of mental prowess Birds are astonishingly intelligent creatures. According to revolutionary new research, some birds rival primates and even humans in their remarkable forms of intelligence. In The Genius of Birds, acclaimed author Jennifer Ackerman explores their newly discovered brilliance and how it came about. As she travels around the world to the most cutting-edge frontiers of research, Ackerman not only tells the story of the recently uncovered genius of birds but also delves deeply into the latest findings about the bird brain itself that are shifting our view of what it means to be intelligent. At once personal yet scientific, richly informative and beautifully written, The Genius of Birds celebrates the triumphs of these surprising and fiercely intelligent creatures. Ackerman is also the author of Birds by the Shore: Observing the Natural Life of the Atlantic Coast.