Author: Kavitha Iyer
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 9390327474
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
WINNER OF THE TATA LITERATURE LIVE FIRST BOOK AWARD (NON-FICTION) 2021 Maharashtra, India's richest state by GDP, has its eyes set on becoming the country's first trillion-dollar economy by 2025. At the same time, Marathwada - a historically backward part of the state adjoining the distressed Vidarbha region - has seen a surge in farmer suicides. At the heart of the crisis is a cyclical drought that has persisted for almost a decade. Relief packages and loan waivers have not reversed the trend. On the contrary, the stories of dystopia grow more tragic every year as thousands of farmer families flee to the big cities, while those who stay back are plagued by bad credit and crop loss. Landscapes of Loss tells the story of Marathwada through the accounts of its people: marginal farmers, Dalits, landless labourers, farm widows and children. It lays bare the complex factors that have brought the region to this pass - a story representative, in many ways, of the agrarian unrest in large parts of rural India.
Author: Naomi Greene
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400823048
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 243
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Book Description
In Landscapes of Loss, Naomi Greene makes new sense of the rich variety of postwar French films by exploring the obsession with the national past that has characterized French cinema since the late 1960s. Observing that the sense of grandeur and destiny that once shaped French identity has eroded under the weight of recent history, Greene examines the ways in which French cinema has represented traumatic and defining moments of the nation's past: the political battles of the 1930s, the Vichy era, decolonization, the collapse of ideologies. Drawing upon a broad spectrum of films and directors, she shows how postwar films have reflected contemporary concerns even as they have created images and myths that have helped determine the contours of French memory. This study of the intricate links between French history, memory, and cinema begins by examining the long shadow cast by the Vichy past: the repressed memories and smothered unease that characterize the cinema of Alain Resnais are seen as a kind of prelude to a fierce battle for national memory that marked so-called rétro films of the 1970s and 1980s. The shifting political and historical perspectives toward the nation's more distant past, which also emerged in these years, are explored in the light of the films of one of France's leading directors, Bertrand Tavernier. Finally, the mood of nostalgia and melancholy that appears to haunt contemporary France is analyzed in the context of films about the nation's imperial past as well as those that hark back to a "golden age," a remembered paradis perdu, of French cinema itself.
Author: Douglas V. Porpora
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190290803
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 366
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Book Description
Do you believe in God? Nine out of ten Americans unhesitatingly answer yes. But for Douglas Porpora, the real questions begin where pollsters leave off. What, he asks, does religious belief actually mean in our lives? Does it shape our identities and our actions? Or, despite our professions of faith, are we morally adrift? Landscapes of the Soul paints a disturbing picture of American spiritual life. In his search for answers to his questions, Porpora interviewed clerks and executives, Jews, evangelical Christians, Buddhists, Taoists, and even followers of Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh. He asked them about God, and about what they saw as their own place in the universe. What he found was a widespread inability to articulate any grand meaning of life. We lack heroes to inspire us. We lack a sense of calling, of transcendent purpose in our existence. Many of us seem incapable of caring deeply about the suffering of others. Our society is permeated with moral indifference. Yes, we are a believing people, but God is often a distant abstraction and rarely an emotional presence in our lives. Only such an emotional connection, Porpora argues, can be the basis of a genuine moral vision. Our emotional estrangement from God and the sacred keeps us from caring about social justice, keeps us from wanting to change the world, keeps us enclosed in our own private worlds. Landscapes of the Soul is a passionate call to broaden our spiritual and moral horizons, to raise our eyes to the greater reality that unites us all.
Author: David J Tongway
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1610910079
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 406
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Book Description
Restoring Disturbed Landscapes is a hands-on guide for individuals and groups seeking to improve the functional capacity of landscapes. The book presents a five-step, adaptive procedure for restoring landscapes that is supported by proven principles and concepts of ecological science. Written by restoration experts with a wealth of experience teaching restoration principles and techniques to practitioners and would-be practitioners from a variety of backgrounds, the book offers: an outline of a science-based, ecologically sound approach to restoration discussion of the conceptual framework and rigorous principles that underlie the approach case studies of two types of restoration projects (restoring mined landscapes and restoring damaged rangelands) that illustrate how the approach, framework, and four key principles for restoring landscapes have been implemented a variety of scenarios that represent typical restoration problems and how those problems can be handled indicators for monitoring and how landscape function can be tracked and analyzed as part of a comprehensive monitoring program. Abundantly illustrated with photos and figures that clearly explain concepts outlined in the book, Restoring Disturbed Landscapes is an engaging and accessible work designed specifically for restoration practitioners with limited training or experience in the field. It tells restorationists where to start, what information they need to acquire, and how to apply this information to their specific situations.
Author: H. Scott Butterfield
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1642831263
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
As the world population grows, so does the demand for food, putting unprecedented pressure on agricultural lands. In many desert dryland regions, however, intensive cultivation is causing their productivity to decline precipitously. "Rewilding" the least productive of these landscapes offers a sensible way to reverse the damage, recover natural diversity, and ensure long-term sustainability of remaining farms and the communities they support. This accessibly written, groundbreaking contributed volume is the first to examine in detail what it would take to retire eligible farmland and restore functioning natural ecosystems. The lessons in Rewilding Agricultural Landscapes will be useful to conservation leaders, policymakers, groundwater agencies, and water managers looking for inspiration and practical advice for solving the complicated issues of agricultural sustainability and water management.
Author: Gretel Ehrlich
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0307911799
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
From the author of the enduring classic The Solace of Open Spaces, here is a wondrous meditation on how water, light, wind, mountain, bird, and horse have shaped her life and her understanding of a world besieged by a climate crisis. Amid species extinctions and disintegrating ice sheets, this stunning collection of memories, observations, and narratives is acute and lyrical, Whitmanesque in breadth, and as elegant as a Japanese teahouse. “Sentience and sunderance,” Ehrlich writes. “How we know what we know, who teaches us, how easy it is to lose it all.” As if to stave off impending loss, she embarks on strenuous adventures to Greenland, Africa, Kosovo, Japan, and an uninhabited Alaskan island, always returning to her simple Wyoming cabin at the foot of the mountains and the trail that leads into the heart of them.
Author: David B. Lindenmayer
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 159726606X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 349
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Book Description
Habitat loss and degradation that comes as a result of human activity is the single biggest threat to biodiversity in the world today. Habitat Fragmentation and Landscape Change is a groundbreaking work that brings together a wealth of information from a wide range of sources to define the ecological problems caused by landscape change and to highlight the relationships among landscape change, habitat fragmentation, and biodiversity conservation. The book: synthesizes a large body of information from the scientific literature considers key theoretical principles for examining and predicting effects examines the range of effects that can arise explores ways of mitigating impacts reviews approaches to studying the problem discusses knowledge gaps and future areas for research and management Habitat Fragmentation and Landscape Change offers a unique mix of theoretical and practical information, outlining general principles and approaches and illustrating those principles with case studies from around the world. It represents a definitive overview and synthesis on the full range of topics that fall under the widely used but often vaguely defined term "habitat fragmentation."
Author: Jeffrey Gusky
Publisher: Overlook Books
ISBN: 9781585675166
Category : Concentration camps
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Accompanied each time by a top Polish guide, Gusky made four trips through the Polish countryside, beyond the city ghettos and the sites of concentration camps, into remote villages where Jews had lived and worked for almost 1,000 years before the Holocaust. His book captures on film the austere landscapes and the remains of this once thriving Jewish culture in Eastern Europe.
Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101118717
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
“An intriguing amalgam of personal memoir, philosophical speculation, natural lore, cultural history, and art criticism.” —Los Angeles Times From the award-winning author of Orwell's Roses, a stimulating exploration of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown Written as a series of autobiographical essays, A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Rebecca Solnit's life to explore issues of uncertainty, trust, loss, memory, desire, and place. Solnit is interested in the stories we use to navigate our way through the world, and the places we traverse, from wilderness to cities, in finding ourselves, or losing ourselves. While deeply personal, her own stories link up to larger stories, from captivity narratives of early Americans to the use of the color blue in Renaissance painting, not to mention encounters with tortoises, monks, punk rockers, mountains, deserts, and the movie Vertigo. The result is a distinctive, stimulating voyage of discovery.
Author: Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062408690
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
Written with the raw honesty and poignant insight that were the hallmarks of her acclaimed bestseller A Widow’s Story, an affecting and observant memoir of growing up from one of our finest and most beloved literary masters. The Lost Landscape is Joyce Carol Oates’ vivid chronicle of her hardscrabble childhood in rural western New York State. From memories of her relatives, to those of a charming bond with a special red hen on her family farm; from her first friendships to her earliest experiences with death, The Lost Landscape is a powerful evocation of the romance of childhood, and its indelible influence on the woman and the writer she would become. In this exceptionally candid, moving, and richly reflective account, Oates explores the world through the eyes of her younger self, an imaginative girl eager to tell stories about the world and the people she meets. While reading Alice in Wonderland changed a young Joyce forever and inspired her to view life as a series of endless adventures, growing up on a farm taught her harsh lessons about sacrifice, hard work, and loss. With searing detail and an acutely perceptive eye, Oates renders her memories and emotions with exquisite precision, transporting us to a forgotten place and time—the lost landscape of her youth, reminding us of the forgotten landscapes of our own earliest lives.
