Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom


Book Description

Marcia Douglas, who was born in England and grew up in Jamaica, presents poems beginning with the image of the voicelessness of the country people who witness the coming of lights to Cocoa Bottom but have no one amongst them to record the event. Each poem has its own poignant individually, but there is also a powerful sense of architecture which runs through the collection.




Far District


Book Description

"A marvelous book of generous, giving poems." —Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth Far District, the transporting debut by the author of House of Lords and Commons, charts the spiritual path of a poet-speaker caught between two spheres: the culture of bush people and a luminous, dangerous sea of myth. Crafting an impressionistic portrait of his youth in Jamaica, Ishion Hutchinson explores the West Indian distrust of European literature and mythology. The speaker fears the land of myth because he is loyal to the bush people, but he also desires to transcend his physical and intellectual poverty. Little by little, the two cultures come together as the speaker begins grafting childhood memories onto the realm of imagination, shaped by art, music, literature, and new glimpses of the world. Written in both traditional and formless verse, as well as in English and Jamaican patois, Far District is an indelible, urgent collection. As the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award committee said of its 2011 winner, “Far District is a classic, which is to say a rare and exemplary first book.”




Madam Fate


Book Description

A novel whose protagonists are a group of Jamaican women. One is a shapeshifter, another a cleaner in New York, a third is in a lunatic asylum and a fourth is waiting to die. A first novel.




Notes from a Writer's Book of Cures and Spells


Book Description

""Writing is a cover for necromancy", Carmen Innocencia accuses her creator, Flamingo Tongue, a young Jamaican writer. Carmen is not the only one of Flamingo's creations to confront her author, for her characters and their tragic, heartening story come vividly alive, perhaps too alive, and just to make sure she can control them, Flamingo makes doll figures of them, but even then... There is Alva Donovan, blinded in childhood, with one seeing eye, one dreaming eye, with whom Flamingo exchanges shoes and in whom she begins to fear she will lose herself. There are the other members of the Donovan family: Dahlia, Paul aka Made in China, and their parents Mama Milly and Daddy Clive the bee-keeper whose sudden, violent deaths set up the patterns of separation and eventual reconnection and healing that run through the novel. As Carmen's accusation suggests, this is a novel set at the cross-roads between the living and the dead - and the cemetery literally becomes the refuge of the orphaned children - between the harsh realities of the violence which spills over from an election campaign and a world where dreams, spirit possession and women who become snails are just as real."--BOOK JACKET.




The Marvellous Equations of the Dread


Book Description

Longlisted: 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature Bob Marley is dead. The Emperor Haile Selassie has been brutally murdered. The armed gangs of Kingston are at war and the murder rate soars. The people have lost all trust in self-serving politicians. It is hard to imagine worse times. The Marvellous Equations of the Dread tells the twin stories of Jamaica's nihilistic violence and its wondrously creative humanity and does truthful justice to both. It takes place in the worlds of the living and in the vivid afterlife of the dead, spanning the Kingston ghettoes, the Emperor's palace in Addis Ababa and Zion. There is even a fallen angel. At its heart are the human stories of the deaf Leenah who with her mother and daughter writes a powerful woman version of events; the relationship between Fall-down (the street madman and fallen angel) and Delroy the orphaned street-boy, and the meetings in the clock tower at Half Way Tree between Bob Marley, Marcus Garvey and the island's dead. There is also the enslaved boy who was hung from the silk cotton tree in 1766. The novel sets out to retrieve the word at the tip of his tongue. Not least of the novel's marvellous equations are the dread revenants who encourage the living to take responsibility for the future of the nation.




From Poverty to Power


Book Description

Offers a look at the causes and effects of poverty and inequality, as well as the possible solutions. This title features research, human stories, statistics, and compelling arguments. It discusses about the world we live in and how we can make it a better place.




The Bottom Billion


Book Description

The Bottom Billion is an elegant and impassioned synthesis from one of the world's leading experts on Africa and poverty. It was hailed as "the best non-fiction book so far this year" by Nicholas Kristoff of The New York Times.




Renewable Energy


Book Description

The use of renewables is spreading rapidly. Over a quarter of global electricity is already generated from solar, wind, hydro and biomass energy. With costs falling significantly, renewables are booming, helping to avoid the major climate change risks associated with fossil fuel use in power stations, homes and vehicles. But can we get rid of all of these dirty energy sources – and nuclear power, as well – and deliver 100% of our energy from renewables? Or are renewable energy systems inherently unreliable and expensive, given the need to deal with their variability? In this timely analysis, leading energy expert David Elliott tackles these issues head on and asks to what extent renewables can deliver a technologically and economically viable energy future. Exploring both the progress and problems of renewables against a backdrop of rising energy demand, he argues that, on balance, they do seem to be living up to their promises. With renewables rapidly expanding across the globe, and China now leading the pack, a renewable future could really be on the horizon.




Coal


Book Description

By making available the almost unlimited energy stored in prehistoric plant matter, coal enabled the industrial age – and it still does. Coal today generates more electricity worldwide than any other energy source, helping to drive economic growth in major emerging markets. And yet, continued reliance on this ancient rock carries a high price in smog and greenhouse gases. We use coal because it is cheap: cheap to scrape from the ground, cheap to move, cheap to burn in power plants with inadequate environmental controls. In this book, Mark Thurber explains how coal producers, users, financiers, and technology exporters drive this supply chain, while fragmented environmental movements battle for full incorporation of environmental costs into the global calculus of coal. Delving into the politics of energy versus the environment at local, national, and international levels, Thurber paints a vivid picture of the multi-faceted challenges associated with continued coal production and use in the twenty-first century.




Florida Bound


Book Description

Geoffrey Philp's poems of exasperation and longing explore a reluctance to leave Jamaica and the 'marl-white roads at Struie' and anger that 'blackman still can't live in him own/black land' where 'gunman crawl like bedbug'. But whilst poems explore the keeness and sorrows of an exile's memory, the new landscape of South Florida landscape fully engages the poet's imagination. The experience of journeying is seen as part of a larger pattern of restless but creative movement in the Americas. Philp joins other Caribbean poets in making use of nation language, but few have pushed the collision between roots language and classical forms to greater effect. "Philp weaves dialect and landscape into his lines with subtle authority. It is easy to get caught up in the content and miss the grace of his technique." Carrol Fleming, The Caribbean Writer. Geoffrey Philp was born in Jamaica. He now lives and works in Miami.