The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us

The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us PDF Author: Diane Ackerman
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393245845
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award and the PEN New England Henry David Thoreau Prize. A dazzling, inspiring tour through the ways that humans are working with nature to try to save the planet. With her celebrated blend of scientific insight, clarity, and curiosity, Diane Ackerman explores our human capacity both for destruction and for invention as we shape the future of the planet Earth. Ackerman takes us to the mind-expanding frontiers of science, exploring the fact that the "natural" and the "human" now inescapably depend on one another, drawing from "fields as diverse as evolutionary robotics…nanotechnology, 3-D printing and biomimicry" (New York Times Book Review), with probing intelligence, a clear eye, and an ever-hopeful heart.

The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us

The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us PDF Author: Diane Ackerman
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393245845
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book

Book Description
Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award and the PEN New England Henry David Thoreau Prize. A dazzling, inspiring tour through the ways that humans are working with nature to try to save the planet. With her celebrated blend of scientific insight, clarity, and curiosity, Diane Ackerman explores our human capacity both for destruction and for invention as we shape the future of the planet Earth. Ackerman takes us to the mind-expanding frontiers of science, exploring the fact that the "natural" and the "human" now inescapably depend on one another, drawing from "fields as diverse as evolutionary robotics…nanotechnology, 3-D printing and biomimicry" (New York Times Book Review), with probing intelligence, a clear eye, and an ever-hopeful heart.

Origins

Origins PDF Author: Lewis Dartnell
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541617894
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
A New York Times-bestselling author explains how the physical world shaped the history of our species When we talk about human history, we often focus on great leaders, population forces, and decisive wars. But how has the earth itself determined our destiny? Our planet wobbles, driving changes in climate that forced the transition from nomadism to farming. Mountainous terrain led to the development of democracy in Greece. Atmospheric circulation patterns later on shaped the progression of global exploration, colonization, and trade. Even today, voting behavior in the south-east United States ultimately follows the underlying pattern of 75 million-year-old sediments from an ancient sea. Everywhere is the deep imprint of the planetary on the human. From the cultivation of the first crops to the founding of modern states, Origins reveals the breathtaking impact of the earth beneath our feet on the shape of our human civilizations.

An Alchemy of Mind

An Alchemy of Mind PDF Author: Diane Ackerman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439125082
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Zookeeper's Wife, an ambitious and enlightening work that combines an artist's eye with a scientist's erudition to illuminate, as never before, the magic and mysteries of the human mind. Long treasured by literary readers for her uncommon ability to bridge the gap between art and science, celebrated scholar-artist Diane Ackerman returns with the book she was born to write. Her dazzling new work, An Alchemy of Mind, offers an unprecedented exploration and celebration of the mental fantasia in which we spend our days—and does for the human mind what the bestselling A Natural History of the Senses did for the physical senses. Bringing a valuable female perspective to the topic, Diane Ackerman discusses the science of the brain as only she can: with gorgeous, immediate language and imagery that paint an unusually lucid and vibrant picture for the reader. And in addition to explaining memory, thought, emotion, dreams, and language acquisition, she reports on the latest discoveries in neuroscience and addresses controversial subjects like the effects of trauma and male versus female brains. In prose that is not simply accessible but also beautiful and electric, Ackerman distills the hard, objective truths of science in order to yield vivid, heavily anecdotal explanations about a range of existential questions regarding consciousness, human thought, memory, and the nature of identity.

A Natural History of the Senses

A Natural History of the Senses PDF Author: Diane Ackerman
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307763315
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Diane Ackerman's lusciously written grand tour of the realm of the senses includes conversations with an iceberg in Antarctica and a professional nose in New York, along with dissertations on kisses and tattoos, sadistic cuisine and the music played by the planet Earth. “Delightful . . . gives the reader the richest possible feeling of the worlds the senses take in.” —The New York Times

The Zookeeper's Wife

The Zookeeper's Wife PDF Author: Diane Ackerman
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039333306X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
A true story--as powerful as "Schindler's List"--in which the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands.

The Anthropocene

The Anthropocene PDF Author: Christian Schwägerl
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780907791546
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
More than a decade ago, Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen first suggested that we were now living in the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch in which human dominance of biological, chemical and geological processes on Earth was already an undeniable reality. Crutzen's ideas inspired Christian Schwagerl to do further documentation and to write this stimulating book. Well-equipped to take on such a task, Schwagerl has been a political, science and environmental journalist for more than 20 years. He first studied biology at the University of Berlin, completing his Master of Science degree at the University of Reading (UK). He is a past winner of the Georg von Holtzbrinck Prize for Science Journalism, the IUCN-Reuters Media Awards for excellence in Environmental Reporting (Category Europe, together with Philip Bethge and Rafaela von Bredow) and the Econsense Journalism Award for sustainability.

A Slender Thread

A Slender Thread PDF Author: Diane Ackerman
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307763366
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
An astonishing book by the prize-winning, bestselling author of A Natural History of the Senses that reveals her parallel lives as an observer of the wildlife in her garden and as a telephone crisis counselor. "(Ackerman) brings a luminous and illuminating combination of sensuality, science, and speculation to whatever she considers." —San Francisco Examiner

Living in the Anthropocene

Living in the Anthropocene PDF Author: Gísli Palsson
Publisher: Welbeck Publishing
ISBN: 9781787394353
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Creating a visual and written timeline of the age of human domination, The Human Age reveals how this era was born, the ways in which it is impacting us and our planet now, and the outlook for the future.

Cultivating Delight

Cultivating Delight PDF Author: Diane Ackerman
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060505362
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
In the mode of her bestseller A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman celebrates the sensory pleasures of her garden through the seasons. Whether she is deadheading flowers or glorying in the profusion of roses, offering sugar water to a hummingbird or studying the slug, she welcomes the unexpected drama and extravagance as well as the sanctuary her garden offers. Written in sensuous, lyrical prose, Cultivating Delight is a hymn to nature and to the pleasure we take in it.

The Age of Wood

The Age of Wood PDF Author: Roland Ennos
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982114746
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
A scholarly and scientific examination of the unrecognized role of trees in the planet's ecosystem reveals wood's unexpected influence on human evolution, civilization, and the global economy.