Tenacious Beasts


Book Description

An inspiring look at wildlife species that are defying the odds and teaching important lessons about how to share a planet. The news about wildlife is dire—more than 900 species have been wiped off the planet since industrialization. Against this bleak backdrop, however, there are also glimmers of hope and crucial lessons to be learned from animals that have defied global trends toward extinction: bears in Italy, bison in North America, whales in the Atlantic. These populations are back from the brink, some of them in numbers unimaginable in a century. How has this happened? What shifts in thinking did it demand? In crisp, transporting prose, Christopher Preston reveals the mysteries and challenges at the heart of these resurgences. Drawing on compelling personal stories from the researchers, Indigenous people, and activists who know the creatures best, Preston weaves together a gripping narrative of how some species are taking back vital, ecological roles. Each section of the book—farms, prairies, rivers, forests, oceans—offers a philosophical shift in how humans ought to think about animals, passionately advocating for the changes in attitude necessary for wildlife recovery. Tenacious Beasts is quintessential nature writing for the Anthropocene, touching on different facets of ecological restoration from Indigenous knowledge to rewilding practices. More important, perhaps, the book offers a road map—and a measure of hope—for a future in which humans and animals can once again coexist.




Lair


Book Description

The restless rats return in James Herbert's Lair, the second horror novel in the Rats trilogy. The mutant white rat had grown and mated, creating offspring in its own image. They dominated the others, the dark-furred ones, who foraged for food and brought it back to the lair. Now the dark rats were restless, tormented by a craving they could not satisfy. But the white slug-like thing that ruled them knew. Its two heads weaved to and fro and a stickiness drooled from its mouth as it remembered the taste of human flesh . . . 'Not for the nervous' – Daily Mirror Continue the chilling series from the Master of Horror, with Domain.




John Betjeman


Book Description

John Betjeman was undoubtedly the most popular Poet Laureate since Tennyson. But beneath the thoroughly modern window on Britain that he opened during his lifetime lay the influence of his nineteenth-century forbears. This book explores his identity through such Victorianism via the verse of that period, but also its architecture, religious faith and -- more importantly -- religious doubt. It was, nevertheless, a process which took time. In the 1930s Betjeman's work was tinted with modernism and traditionalism. He found Victorian buildings 'funny' and wrote much in praise of the Bauhaus style, even though his early poetry was peppered with Victorian references. This leaning was incorporated into a greater sense of purpose during World War 2, when he transformed himself from precious humorist into propagandist. The resulting sense of cohesion grew when the dangers of post-war urban redevelopment heightened the need to critique the present via the poetics of the past, a mood which continued up to and beyond his gaining the Laureateship in 1972. This duty proved to be a millstone, so the 'official' poems are thus explored by the author more fully than hitherto. The conclusion of looks back to Betjeman's 1960 verse-autobiography, 'Summoned by Bells', which is seen as the apogee of his achievement and a snapshot of his identity. Included here is the first critical appreciation of the lyrics embodied within the text, which are taken as a map of the young poet's literary growth. Larkin's 1959 question 'What exactly is Betjeman?' then leads to a final appraisal of his originality, as evidenced by his glances towards postmodernism, feminism, and post-colonialism. The fact is that Betjeman never quite fits in anywhere. He is always a square peg in a round hole or a round peg in a square hole -- often for the sheer enjoyment of so being. In a sense, his desire to be as non-conformist as a Quaker meeting house makes him a radical, rather than the reactionary that his interests imply. He was a champion of beauty and the British Isles, and clearly did much to make us see the worth of our Victorian forebears. Greg Morse's book highlights this important facet of his work.




The Synthetic Age


Book Description

Imagining a future in which humans fundamentally reshape the natural world using nanotechnology, synthetic biology, de-extinction, and climate engineering. We have all heard that there are no longer any places left on Earth untouched by humans. The significance of this goes beyond statistics documenting melting glaciers and shrinking species counts. It signals a new geological epoch. In The Synthetic Age, Christopher Preston argues that what is most startling about this coming epoch is not only how much impact humans have had but, more important, how much deliberate shaping they will start to do. Emerging technologies promise to give us the power to take over some of Nature's most basic operations. It is not just that we are exiting the Holocene and entering the Anthropocene; it is that we are leaving behind the time in which planetary change is just the unintended consequence of unbridled industrialism. A world designed by engineers and technicians means the birth of the planet's first Synthetic Age. Preston describes a range of technologies that will reconfigure Earth's very metabolism: nanotechnologies that can restructure natural forms of matter; “molecular manufacturing” that offers unlimited repurposing; synthetic biology's potential to build, not just read, a genome; “biological mini-machines” that can outdesign evolution; the relocation and resurrection of species; and climate engineering attempts to manage solar radiation by synthesizing a volcanic haze, cool surface temperatures by increasing the brightness of clouds, and remove carbon from the atmosphere with artificial trees that capture carbon from the breeze. What does it mean when humans shift from being caretakers of the Earth to being shapers of it? And in whom should we trust to decide the contours of our synthetic future? These questions are too important to be left to the engineers.




Darke Plays: 1


Book Description

"Passionately satirical and sharply observant, he is one of the most interesting of our playwrights" (Sunday Telegraph) The Dead Monkey - "Darke has something both hilarious and horrific to say about the decay of a marriage and he compels the attention while doing so." (Sunday Telegraph) The King of Prussia - "A meaty play...seethes with life, wit and ideas. Darke give shape to a Cornish identity that feels vital and real and has nothing to do with clay pipes and clotted cream. Like Cornwall's coves, it has many unexpected depths...It also raises questions about the points where justice, conscience and the law part company" (Financial Times) The Body - "The best moments in Nick Darke's play are extremely good - and not all good in the same way...the most obvious debt is to Brecht. There are other reminiscences of Auden and Isherwood's The Dog Beneath the Skin, of Tom Stoppard's After Magritte and of T.S Eliot's verse plays." Tin Tang Mine - "A lament for an industry and a way of life; but this should not suggest anything sentimental. The writing is rugged and muscular; lyrical but not ornate; vigorous but not folksy...oddball, quirkily parochial and as authentic as a slice of rough bread." (The Times)




Rewilding


Book Description

Discusses the benefits and risks, as well as the economic and socio-political realities, of rewilding as a novel conservation tool.




The Dreamtime


Book Description

A Kirkus Best Indie Book of the Year & a Library Journal Best World Literature read, from Pulitzer Prize-winning AP Journalist and Director/Producer/Writer of 20 Days in Mariupol, Winner of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival's Audience Award in World Cinema Documentary “[A] book for our times—vivid enough to grab us and not let go.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "A powerful psychological thriller about borderline situations in life, hopes and dreams. Written against the backdrop of the war, before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the story acquires an additional passionate and humanistic significance." — Andrey Kurkov, author of Grey Bees “[T]his timely novel from a Ukrainian author excels at examining the connection between reality and dreams and exploring the effects of war on the human psyche.” — Library Journal The Dreamtime is a fusion of documentary and military fiction inspired by the author’s experience as an award-winning war correspondent that offers a unique and gritty point of view on the horrors of war through four intertwining narratives. Parallel storylines from a guilt-ridden doctor trying to exorcise his demons by exposing himself to war; a young woman tending to her ailing father as the bombs fall around them in Russian-occupied Slovyansk; a mysterious sociopath playing a cat-and-mouse game; and a forensic expert solving a murder case while trying to save her marriage with a discharged soldier bring a raw intensity and a deeply personal connection to the effects of war. As the threads of their stories unfurl, through harrowing scenes of personal and collective trauma, an enigmatic pattern emerges. Shifting from Ukraine's war-torn Donbas to southern Europe and southeast Asia, The Dreamtime ties together themes of existential conflict, the blurred line between reality and dreams, and how easily the boundary dissolves between waking life and nightmare. Originally published in Kyiv in 2020, The Dreamtime has been well received by critics around the world and praised for its realism in depicting war, for its creative literary depiction of how dreams reflect the psyche, and for its masterly prose.




Evolution: The Pattern


Book Description

The origin of life is the fusion of two slightly different halves: fusion-fission, fusion-fission, fusion-fission... the rhythm of Life. In the beginning of all beginnings, an energetic proton and neutral neutron had fused into one whole. On planet Earth, the fusion took monumental proportions until the mating ritual has reached the highest conceivable degree. Love has a power to create life but also has a power to destroy it if its integrity is violated. Psychopath-men attack women, psychopath-women attack own children while breast, prostate and colorectal carcinomas are responsible for more than 20% human deaths whose incidence in great apes is less than 2%. Are humans on the decline? To find out this we have to unravel the mystery of the origin of life. Only if the sequence of the events in the story of life is correct, a pattern will emerge.




A Philosophical Journey Into the Anthropocene


Book Description

"This book presents a philosophical journey into the Anthropocene that views this geological epoch as the potential métarécit of our age and the planetary framework within which technology becomes the environment for human life. The appropriate name for this epochal phenomenon is, as a result, not Anthropocene, but Technocene"--




The Chronicles of Arcanilius


Book Description