Mortal Geography


Book Description

Winner of the 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry. Drawing on sources as varied as ESL classroom discussions, a colonial travelogue, and the Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, Alexandra Teague explores how language alternately empowers and fails us in this smart, searching, and accessible debut.




A Local Habitation


Book Description

New York Times-bestselling October Daye series • Hugo Award-winning author Seanan McGuire • "Top of my urban-paranormal series list!" —Felicia Day October "Toby" Daye is a changeling, the daughter of Amandine of the fae and a mortal man. Like her mother, she is gifted in blood magic, able to read what has happened to a person through a mere taste of blood. Toby is the only changeling who has earned knighthood, and she re-earns that position every day, undertaking assignments for her liege, Sylvester, the Duke of the Shadowed Hills. Now Sylvester has asked her to go to the County of Tamed Lightning—otherwise known as Fremont, CA—to make sure that all is well with his niece, Countess January O'Leary, whom he has not been able to contact. It seems like a simple enough assignment—but when dealing with the realm of Faerie nothing is ever as simple as it seems. Toby soon discovers that someone has begun murdering people close to January, whose domain is a buffer between Sylvester's realm and a scheming rival duchy. If Toby can't find the killer soon, she may well become the next victim.




The Geography of Names


Book Description

This book examines geographical names, place-names, and toponymy from philosophical and cultural evolutionary perspectives. Geographical name-tracking-networks (Geo-NTNs) are posited as tools for tracking names through time and across space, and for making sense of how names evolve both temporally and spatially. Examples from North and South American indigenous groups, the Canadian arctic, Wales, England, and the Middle East are brought into a theoretical framework for making sense of aspects of place-naming practices, beliefs, and systems. New geographical tools such as geographic information systems (GIS) and global positioning systems (GPS) are demonstrated to be important in the production and maintenance of robust networks for keeping names and their associated meanings viable in a rapidly changing world where place-naming is being taken up increasingly in social media and other new mapping platforms. The Geography of Names makes the case that geographical names are transmitted memetically (i.e. as cultural units, or memes) through what Saul Kripke called communication chains. Combining insights from Kripke with views of later Wittgenstein on language and names as being inherently spatial, the present work advances theories of both these thinkers into an explicitly geographical inquiry that advances philosophical and practical aspects of naming, language, and mapping.




The Mortal Sea


Book Description

Since the Viking ascendancy in the Middle Ages, the Atlantic has shaped the lives of people who depend upon it for survival. And just as surely, people have shaped the Atlantic. In his innovative account of this interdependency, W. Jeffrey Bolster, a historian and professional seafarer, takes us through a millennium-long environmental history of our impact on one of the largest ecosystems in the world. While overfishing is often thought of as a contemporary problem, Bolster reveals that humans were transforming the sea long before factory trawlers turned fishing from a handliner's art into an industrial enterprise. The western Atlantic's legendary fishing banks, stretching from Cape Cod to Newfoundland, have attracted fishermen for more than five hundred years. Bolster follows the effects of this siren's song from its medieval European origins to the advent of industrialized fishing in American waters at the beginning of the twentieth century. Blending marine biology, ecological insight, and a remarkable cast of characters, from notable explorers to scientists to an army of unknown fishermen, Bolster tells a story that is both ecological and human: the prelude to an environmental disaster. Over generations, harvesters created a quiet catastrophe as the sea could no longer renew itself. Bolster writes in the hope that the intimate relationship humans have long had with the ocean, and the species that live within it, can be restored for future generations.




The SAGE Handbook of Human Geography, 2v


Book Description

Superb! How refreshing to see a Handbook that eschews convention and explores the richness and diversity of the geographical imagination in such stimulating and challenging ways. - Peter Dicken, University of Manchester "Stands out as an innovative and exciting contribution that exceeds the genre." - Sallie A. Marston, University of Arizona "Captures wonderfully the richness and complexity of the worlds that human beings inhabit... This is a stand-out among handbooks!" - Lily Kong, National University of Singapore "This wonderfully unconventional book demonstrates human geography’s character and significance not by marching through traditional themes, but by presenting a set of geographical essays on basic ideas, practices, and concerns." - Alexander B. Murphy, University of Oregon "This SAGE Handbook stands out for its capacity to provoke the reader to think anew about human geography ... essays that offer some profoundly original insights into what it means to engage geographically with the world." - Eric Sheppard, UCLA Published in association with the journal Progress in Human Geography, edited and written by the principal scholars in the discipline, this Handbook demonstrates the difference that thinking about the world geographically makes. Each section considers how human geography shapes the world, interrogates it, and intervenes in it. It includes a major retrospective and prospective introductory essay, with three substantive sections on: Imagining Human Geographies Practising Human Geographies Living Human Geographies The Handbook also has an innovative multimedia component of conversations about key issues in human geography – as well as an overview of human geography from the Editors. A key reference for any scholar interested in questions about what difference it makes to think spatially or geographically about the world, this Handbook is a rich and textured statement about the geographical imagination.




International Encyclopedia of Human Geography


Book Description

International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Second Edition, Fourteen Volume Set embraces diversity by design and captures the ways in which humans share places and view differences based on gender, race, nationality, location and other factors—in other words, the things that make people and places different. Questions of, for example, politics, economics, race relations and migration are introduced and discussed through a geographical lens. This updated edition will assist readers in their research by providing factual information, historical perspectives, theoretical approaches, reviews of literature, and provocative topical discussions that will stimulate creative thinking. Presents the most up-to-date and comprehensive coverage on the topic of human geography Contains extensive scope and depth of coverage Emphasizes how geographers interact with, understand and contribute to problem-solving in the contemporary world Places an emphasis on how geography is relevant in a social and interdisciplinary context




Myths and Legends of the Celts


Book Description

Myths and Legends of the Celts is a fascinating and wide-ranging introduction to the mythology of the peoples who inhabited the northwestern fringes of Europe - from Britain and the Isle of Man to Gaul and Brittany. Drawing on recent historical and archaeological research, as well as literary and oral sources, the guide looks at the gods and goddesses of Celtic myth; at the nature of Celtic religion, with its rituals of sun and moon worship; and at the druids who served society as judges, diviners and philosophers. It also examines the many Celtic deities who were linked with animals and such natural phenomena as rivers and caves, or who later became associated with local Christian saints. And it explores in detail the rich variety of Celtic myths: from early legends of King Arthur to the stories of the Welsh Mabinogi, and from tales of heroes including Cúchulainn, Fionn mac Cumhaill and the warrior queen Medb to tales of shadowy otherworlds - the homes of spirits and fairies. What emerges is a wonderfully diverse and fertile tradition of myth making that has captured the imagination of countless generations, introduced and explained here with compelling insight.




The Principles Behind Flotation


Book Description

Echoing novels like Karen Russell's Swamplandia! and Carol Rifka Brunt's Tell the Wolves I'm Home, Alexandra Teague's lighthearted coming-of-age debut is perfect for anyone who's navigated the strange seas of adolescence--and lived to tell the tale. A.Z. McKinney is on the shores of greatness. Now all she needs is a boat. When the Sea of Santiago appeared overnight in a cow pasture in Arkansas, it seemed, to some, a religious miracle. But to high school sophomore A.Z. McKinney, it's marked her chance to make history--as its first oceanographer. All she needs is to get out on the water. Her plan is easier said than done, considering the Sea's eccentric owner is only interested in its use as a tourist destination for beachgoers and devout pilgrims. Still, A.Z. is determined to uncover the secrets of the Sea--even if it means smuggling saline samples in her bathing suit. Yet when a cute, conceptual artist named Kristoff moves to town, A.Z. realizes she may have found a first mate. Together, they make a plan to build a boat and study the Sea in secret. But from fighting with her best friend to searching for a tourist-terrorizing alligator (that may or may not be a crocodile), distractions are everywhere. Soon, A.Z.'s dreams are in danger of being dashed upon the shore of Mud Beach. With her self-determined oceanic destiny on the line, A.Z. finds herself at odds with everything she thought she knew about life, love, and the Sea. To get what she wants, she'll have to decide whether to sink or float . . . But which one comes first?




Geography


Book Description

Geography is an encyclopedia of geographical knowledge, consisting of 17 'books', written in Greek by Strabo, an educated citizen of the Roman Empire of Greek descent. In his 17 books, divided into three volumes, Strabo deals with ancient physical geography and chorography, by which he means political geography. The two are combined in this work, which makes a "circuit of the earth" detailing the physical and political features. Strabo's Geography contains a considerable amount of historical data, as he worked on his Geography and now missing History (his other work) at the same time.




One Salt Sea


Book Description

New York Times-bestselling October Daye series • Hugo Award-winning author Seanan McGuire • "Top of my urban-paranormal series list!" —Felicia Day October "Toby" Daye is finally doing all right—and that inevitably means it's time for things to take a turn for the worse. Someone has kidnapped the sons of the Duchess Dianda Lorden, regent of the Undersea Duchy of Saltmist. To prevent a war between land and sea, Toby must not only find the missing boys, but also prove that the Queen of the Mists was not behind their abduction. She'll need all her tricks and the help of her allies if she wants to make it through this in one piece. Toby's search will take her from the streets of San Francisco to the lands beneath the waves. But someone is determined to stop her—and whoever it is isn't playing by Oberon's Laws. As the battle grows more and more personal, one thing is chillingly clear. When Faerie goes to war, not everyone will walk away.




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