What Species of Creatures

What Species of Creatures PDF Author: Sharon Kirsch
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Literary Nonfiction. North American History. Science. Three centuries ago, white Europeans began to colonize the North American continent. In doing so, they encountered flying squirrels, ruby-throated hummingbirds, and the easily tamed beaver: creatures their kind had never met before. The accounts of early explorers and settlers in describing these animals and others provide fascinating insight into the taxonomies they carried to the so-called New World. Their literature of discovery was by turns comic, cruel and adulatory. This book brings together period quotes and 21st-century science in an idiosyncratic narrative. Extended anecdote conveys the adventures of historical personalities, and the book borrows, too, from fables, children's stories and natural histories. Yet WHAT SPECIES OF CREATURES addresses present concerns our habitual understanding of wild animals and our own place in the natural order. In the process of quoting from and commenting upon European ancestors' speciesist arrogance, Kirsch interrogates our seemingly insatiable appetite to trap, catch, skin, domesticate, eat, eradicate or otherwise bend to our use the animals in our midst."

What Species of Creatures

What Species of Creatures PDF Author: Sharon Kirsch
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
Literary Nonfiction. North American History. Science. Three centuries ago, white Europeans began to colonize the North American continent. In doing so, they encountered flying squirrels, ruby-throated hummingbirds, and the easily tamed beaver: creatures their kind had never met before. The accounts of early explorers and settlers in describing these animals and others provide fascinating insight into the taxonomies they carried to the so-called New World. Their literature of discovery was by turns comic, cruel and adulatory. This book brings together period quotes and 21st-century science in an idiosyncratic narrative. Extended anecdote conveys the adventures of historical personalities, and the book borrows, too, from fables, children's stories and natural histories. Yet WHAT SPECIES OF CREATURES addresses present concerns our habitual understanding of wild animals and our own place in the natural order. In the process of quoting from and commenting upon European ancestors' speciesist arrogance, Kirsch interrogates our seemingly insatiable appetite to trap, catch, skin, domesticate, eat, eradicate or otherwise bend to our use the animals in our midst."

The Soul of All Living Creatures

The Soul of All Living Creatures PDF Author: Vint Virga, D.V.M.
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307718875
Category : Pets
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
As profiled in the New York Times Magazine… Based on the author’s twenty-five years of experience as a veterinarian and veterinary behaviorist, The Soul of All Living Creatures delves into the inner lives of animals – from whales, wolves, and leopards to mice, dogs, and cats – and explores the relationships we forge with them. As an emergency room clinician four years out of veterinary school, Dr. Vint Virga had a life-changing experience: he witnessed the power of simple human contact and compassion to affect the recovery of a dog struggling to survive after being hit by a car. Observing firsthand the remarkably strong connection between humans and animals inspired him to explore the world from the viewpoint of animals and taught him to respect the kinship that connects us. With The Soul of All Living Creatures, Virga draws from his decades in veterinary practice to reveal how, by striving to perceive the world as animals do, we can enrich our own appreciation of life, enhance our character, nurture our relationships, improve our communication with others, reorder our values, and deepen our grasp of spirituality. Virga discerningly illuminates basic traits shared by both humans and animals and makes animal behavior meaningful, relevant, and easy to understand. Insightful and eloquent, The Soul of All Living Creatures offers an intimate journey into the lives of our fellow creatures and a thought-provoking promise of what we can learn from spending time with them.

Unusual Creatures

Unusual Creatures PDF Author: Michael Hearst
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 1452104670
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 111

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Book Description
"Introduces the reader to a wealth of extraordinary life forms"-- P. [4] of cover.

Lost Animals

Lost Animals PDF Author: John Whitfield
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution
ISBN: 1588346986
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Meet the incredible animals that have disappeared due to competition, mass extinctions, hunting, and human activity. Lost Animals brings back to life some of the most charismatic creatures to inhabit the planet. It captures the imagination with more than 200 incredible photographs, artworks of fossils, and scientific drawings of charming creatures like dodos, paraceratherium (the largest land mammal), spinosaurus (the biggest carnivorous dinosaur), placeoderm fishes (the sharks of their day), and more! Lost Animals is a captivating documentation of evolution and extinction. Each chapter focuses on a specific time in Earth's history, from the Cambrian explosion (the most intense surge of evolution the world has ever experienced) to present times, with profiles of the key species that lived then. From long extinct animals to Lazarus species--animals that were thought to be extinct before being rediscovered--this book takes readers on a journey through Earth's natural history, highlighting the world's biggest animal losses and its moments of conservational hope.

The Most Important Animal of All

The Most Important Animal of All PDF Author: Penny Worms
Publisher: North Star Editions, Inc.
ISBN: 1631637029
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 44

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Book Description
When seven children are asked about which is the most important animal of all, they learn about the key roles different animals play on Earth.

Stuff They Don't Want You to Know

Stuff They Don't Want You to Know PDF Author: Ben Bowlin
Publisher: Flatiron Books
ISBN: 1250268575
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
“Interesting...Bowlin's calmly rational approach to the subject of conspiracy theories shows the importance of logic and evidence.”—Booklist "A page-turning book to give to someone who believes in pizza pedophilia or that the Illuminati rule the world."—Kirkus Reviews The co-hosts of the hit podcast Stuff They Don’t Want You to Know, Ben Bowlin, Matthew Frederick, & Noel Brown, discern conspiracy fact from fiction in this sharp, humorous, compulsively readable, and gorgeously illustrated book. In times of chaos and uncertainty, when trust is low and economic disparity is high, when political institutions are crumbling and cultural animosities are building, conspiracy theories find fertile ground. Many are wild, most are untrue, a few are hard to ignore, but all of them share one vital trait: there’s a seed of truth at their center. That seed carries the sordid, conspiracy-riddled history of our institutions and corporations woven into its DNA. Ben Bowlin, Matt Frederick, and Noel Brown host the popular iHeart Media podcast, Stuff They Don’t Want You To Know. They are experts at exploring, explaining, and interrogating today’s emergent conspiracies—from chem trails and biological testing to the secrets of lobbying and the indisputable evidence of UFOs. Written in a smart, witty, and conversational style, elevated with amazing illustrations, Stuff They Don’t Want You to Know is a vital book in understanding the nature of conspiracy and using truth as a powerful weapon against ignorance, misinformation, and lies.

Imperfect Creatures

Imperfect Creatures PDF Author: Lucinda Cole
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472052950
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Lucinda Cole’s Imperfect Creatures offers the first full-length study of the shifting, unstable, but foundational status of “vermin” as creatures and category in the early modern literary, scientific, and political imagination. In the space between theology and an emergent empiricism, Cole’s argument engages a wide historical swath of canonical early modern literary texts—William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Abraham Cowley’s The Plagues of Egypt, Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, the Earl of Rochester’s “A Ramble in St. James’s Park,” and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Journal of the Plague Year—alongside other nonliterary primary sources and under-examined archival materials from the period, including treatises on animal trials, grain shortages, rabies, and comparative neuroanatomy. As Cole illustrates, human health and demographic problems—notably those of feeding populations periodically stricken by hunger, disease, and famine—were tied to larger questions about food supplies, property laws, national identity, and the theological imperatives that underwrote humankind’s claim to dominion over the animal kingdom. In this context, Cole’s study indicates, so-called “vermin” occupied liminal spaces between subject and object, nature and animal, animal and the devil, the devil and disease—even reason and madness. This verminous discourse formed a foundational category used to carve out humankind’s relationship to an unpredictable, irrational natural world, but it evolved into a form for thinking about not merely animals but anything that threatened the health of the body politic—humans, animals, and even thoughts.

The Complete Book of Animals

The Complete Book of Animals PDF Author: Tom Jackson
Publisher: Armadillo Music
ISBN: 9781843227342
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"This is a world encyclopedia of amphibians, reptiles and mammals with over 500 detailed illustrations. This is a fully illustrated encyclopedia of over 350 amphibians, reptiles and mammals from the world. It includes the venomous western diamondback rattlesnake of the southern United States; the tree-dwelling flying lizard of South-east Asia, the extraordinary egg-laying platypus of Australia. This is a natural history guide that focuses on how animals have adapted in terms of anatomy, senses and survival skills, and describes the varied habitats in which animals live. This is a fabulous, accessible natural history reference for both families and schools. The first section of this incredible illustrated reference book focuses on the diversity of life in the animal kingdom, looking at the habitats in which animals live and how they survive. It also includes a guide to a mphibian, reptilian and mammalian anatomy and senses. The rest of the book is divided into three chapters, each focusing on a different area of the world: the Americas; Europe and Africa; and Asia, Australia and New Zealand. Each animal is accompanied by a colour illustration and a specification panel giving information about distribution, habitat, food, size, maturity, breeding, life span and more. With over 900 magnificent colour illustrations and photographs, and packed with fascinating facts, this book is a must-have family reference for anyone interested in wild animals, where they live and how they survive."--Publisher's description.

Atlas of the World's Strangest Animals

Atlas of the World's Strangest Animals PDF Author: Paula Hammond
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish
ISBN: 9780761479406
Category : Animals
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This single-volume reference title takes a look at some of our world's most strange and interesting animals.

A Different Kind of Animal

A Different Kind of Animal PDF Author: Robert Boyd
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691195900
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
"Human beings are a very different kind of animal. We have evolved to become the most dominant species on Earth. We have a larger geographical range and process more energy than any other creature alive. This astonishing transformation is usually explained in terms of cognitive ability--people are just smarter than all the rest. But in this compelling book, Robert Boyd argues that culture--our ability to learn from each other--has been the essential ingredient of our remarkable success. A Different Kind of Animal demonstrates that while people are smart, we are not nearly smart enough to have solved the vast array of problems that confronted our species as it spread across the globe. Over the past two million years, culture has evolved to enable human populations to accumulate superb local adaptations that no individual could ever have invented on their own. It has also made possible the evolution of social norms that allow humans to make common cause with large groups of unrelated individuals, a kind of society not seen anywhere else in nature. This unique combination of cultural adaptation and large-scale cooperation has transformed our species and assured our survival--making us the different kind of animal we are today. Based on the Tanner Lectures delivered at Princeton University, A Different Kind of Animal features challenging responses by biologist H. Allen Orr, philosopher Kim Sterelny, economist Paul Seabright, and evolutionary anthropologist Ruth Mace, as well as an introduction by Stephen Macedo."--