Bird Lady Meets Mort and Ort in “It’s a Great Day for Grocery Shopping!”


Book Description

This book is the third in the series written by Gramma Golden to educate children and adults about their responsibility to help improve the health and well-being of upcoming generations. It is a coloring book conversation that raises awareness of childhood bullying and the need to encourage and practice kindness and healthy eating lifestyles. The story picks up from book two as Bird Lady arrives home from taking a vacation at the beach. While flying home, she finds her airplane seat and seatbelt to be a bit tight and uncomfortable as are her shoes. She attributes it to possibly eating too much food while on vacation and vows to do a much better job of choosing what to eat when she gets back home. The following day, she embarks on her grocery shopping trip with the intent to fill her cupboards, refrigerator and freezer with her favorite foods. Suddenly, through the mist of the water sprayer over the fresh vegetables in the supermarket, she sees the main characters of the book, her friends Mort and Ort Aahkamort. They are the colorful pair of birds who have taught her lessons before about gardening and caring for the environment. She is hopeful they might teach her this time about making better food choices. They all decide to go visit awhile in the coffee shop where Bird Lady confesses to them her seat, seatbelt and shoes all felt tight on the trip home. She also shared she had been bullied as a child and how she had been left out of many activities growing up. The remainder of the story revolves around their plan to help Bird Lady consider exercising more, practice wise shopping habits, eating healthy foods, and sharing her story about how bullying affected her. She realizes her desire is to teach children to treat others with kindness.




Bird Lady Meets Mort and Ort in "It's a Great Day for Pulling Weeds"


Book Description

Popular Maine columnist, author, and outdoor enthusiast George Smith confirms in his review that "Gramma Golden's very entertaining books were created to educate children and adults about things we can do to improve and protect our environment. I had a wonderful time last year reading the book to my 3 year old granddaughter" writes Smith. In this tender and fact-filled story, Bird Lady is the one being taught to recognize her careless gardening practices by none other than a pair of unusually attractive and vividly colorful birds, Mort and Ort Aahkamort. Sitting atop the weather-worn shed directly behind her, they were talking to one another in words Bird Lady could completely understand. At first, she is both startled and a bit fearful when the larger one in his gravelly voice begins to talk directly to her by saying "It's a great day for pulling weeds!" The lessons that follow throughout the rest of the story result in Bird Lady changing her gardening practices to help wildlife visitors in her gardens. Like the author, Bird Lady has a passion for birds, butterflies, flowers, plants and nature in general. As a result of the lessons Mort and Ort teach Bird Lady, children and adults alike reading this book will learn how to help birds, flowers, butterflies and insects thrive as they visit their own gardens.




Lieutenant-colonel de Maumort


Book Description

The unfinished memoir of a French soldier-philosopher. While describing bourgeois life in France before and after World War I, he ruminates on the futility of individual conscience in the face of evil.




Luxury Arts of the Renaissance


Book Description

Today we associate the Renaissance with painting, sculpture, and architecture—the “major” arts. Yet contemporaries often held the “minor” arts—gem-studded goldwork, richly embellished armor, splendid tapestries and embroideries, music, and ephemeral multi-media spectacles—in much higher esteem. Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, was typical of the Italian nobility: she bequeathed to her children precious stone vases mounted in gold, engraved gems, ivories, and antique bronzes and marbles; her favorite ladies-in-waiting, by contrast, received mere paintings. Renaissance patrons and observers extolled finely wrought luxury artifacts for their exquisite craftsmanship and the symbolic capital of their components; paintings and sculptures in modest materials, although discussed by some literati, were of lesser consequence. This book endeavors to return to the mainstream material long marginalized as a result of historical and ideological biases of the intervening centuries. The author analyzes how luxury arts went from being lofty markers of ascendancy and discernment in the Renaissance to being dismissed as “decorative” or “minor” arts—extravagant trinkets of the rich unworthy of the status of Art. Then, by re-examining the objects themselves and their uses in their day, she shows how sumptuous creations constructed the world and taste of Renaissance women and men.




Slayers


Book Description

Dragons exist. They're ferocious. And they're smart: Before they were killed off by slayer-knights, they rendered a select group of eggs dormant, so their offspring would survive. Only a handful of people know about this, let alone believe it – these "Slayers" are descended from the original knights, and are now a diverse group of teens that includes Tori, a smart but spoiled senator's daughter who didn't sign up to save the world. The dragon eggs have fallen into the wrong hands. The Slayers must work together to stop the eggs from hatching. They will fight; they will fall in love. But will they survive?




An Anglo-Norman Reader


Book Description

This book is an anthology with a difference. It presents a distinctive variety of Anglo-Norman works, beginning in the twelfth century and ending in the nineteenth, covering a broad range of genres and writers, introduced in a lively and thought-provoking way. Facing-page translations, into accessible and engaging modern English, are provided throughout, bringing these texts to life for a contemporary audience. The collection offers a selection of fascinating passages, and whole texts, many of which are not anthologised or translated anywhere else. It explores little-known byways of Arthurian legend and stories of real-life crime and punishment; women’s voices tell history, write letters, berate pagans; advice is offered on how to win friends and influence people, how to cure people’s ailments and how to keep clear of the law; and stories from the Bible are retold with commentary, together with guidance on prayer and confession. Each text is introduced and elucidated with notes and full references, and the material is divided into three main sections: Story (a variety of narrative forms), Miscellany (including letters, law and medicine, and other non-fiction), and Religious (saints' lives, sermons, Bible commentary, and prayers). Passages in one genre have been chosen so as to reflect themes or stories that appear in another, so that the book can be enjoyed as a collection or used as a resource to dip into for selected texts. This anthology is essential reading for students and scholars of Anglo-Norman and medieval literature and culture. Wide-ranging and fully referenced, it can be used as a springboard for further study or relished in its own right by readers interested to discover Anglo-Norman literature that was written to amuse, instruct, entertain, or admonish medieval audiences.




Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States


Book Description

Summarizes the science of climate change and impacts on the United States, for the public and policymakers.




Exile and Pride


Book Description

First published in 1999, the groundbreaking Exile and Pride is essential to the history and future of disability politics. Eli Clare's revelatory writing about his experiences as a white disabled genderqueer activist/writer established him as one of the leading writers on the intersections of queerness and disability and permanently changed the landscape of disability politics and queer liberation. With a poet's devotion to truth and an activist's demand for justice, Clare deftly unspools the multiple histories from which our ever-evolving sense of self unfolds. His essays weave together memoir, history, and political thinking to explore meanings and experiences of home: home as place, community, bodies, identity, and activism. Here readers will find an intersectional framework for understanding how we actually live with the daily hydraulics of oppression, power, and resistance. At the root of Clare's exploration of environmental destruction and capitalism, sexuality and institutional violence, gender and the body politic, is a call for social justice movements that are truly accessible to everyone. With heart and hammer, Exile and Pride pries open a window onto a world where our whole selves, in all their complexity, can be realized, loved, and embraced.




Speak, Bird, Speak Again


Book Description

A collection of Palestinian Arab folktales which reflect the culture and highlights the role of women in the society.




Blue of Noon


Book Description

Set against the backdrop of Europe's slide into Fascism, Blue of Noon is a blackly compelling account of depravity and violence. As its narrator lurches despairingly from city to city in a surreal sexual and mental nightmare of squalor, sadism and drunken encounters, his internal collapse mirrors the fighting and marching on the streets outside. Exploring the dark forces beneath the surface of civilization, this is a novel torn between identifying with history's victims and being seduced by the monstrous glamour of its terrible victors, and is one of the twentieth century's great nihilist works.