Science for All


Book Description

Recent scholarship has revealed that pioneering Victorian scientists endeavored through voluminous writing to raise public interest in science and its implications. But it has generally been assumed that once science became a profession around the turn of the century, this new generation of scientists turned its collective back on public outreach. Science for All debunks this apocryphal notion. Peter J. Bowler surveys the books, serial works, magazines, and newspapers published between 1900 and the outbreak of World War II to show that practicing scientists were very active in writing about their work for a general readership. Science for All argues that the social environment of early twentieth-century Britain created a substantial market for science books and magazines aimed at those who had benefited from better secondary education but could not access higher learning. Scientists found it easy and profitable to write for this audience, Bowler reveals, and because their work was seen as educational, they faced no hostility from their peers. But when admission to colleges and universities became more accessible in the 1960s, this market diminished and professional scientists began to lose interest in writing at the nonspecialist level. Eagerly anticipated by scholars of scientific engagement throughout the ages, Science for All sheds light on our own era and the continuing tension between science and public understanding.




Loch Ness, Nessie & Me (6x9 Edition)


Book Description

Written with authority and a deep understanding of the mystery, the expeditions and the individual researchers, this is the first book to have been penned by a loch-side resident intimately involved in presenting the subject to the public for three decades. For anyone who wants to get to the truth about Loch Ness, this book is essential reading. However, It has more to offer than just the monster. Within its pages we discover how the Loch Ness Centre was conceived and created, and how this changed the lives of the author and his wife. The author's relationship with the researchers, the local businesses and even the black Benedictine monks is explained with great humour and pathos. This is a GEOGRAPHY of the world's most famous body of freshwater, the BIOGRAPHY of the most endearing monster of our time and the AUTOBIOGRAPHY of the best known commentator. All of this makes the book a most delightful and exciting read whether or not there be a Nessie in the great depths of Loch Ness.




Imagining the Past


Book Description

How we make history--and what we then make of it--is engagingly dramatized in T. H. Breen's portrait of a 350-year-old American community faced with the costs of its “progress.” In the particulars of one town's struggle to check development and save its natural environment, Breen shows how our sense of history reflects our ever-changing self-perceptions and hopes for the future. Breen first went to East Hampton, the celebrated Long Island resort town, to write about the Mulford Farmstead, a picturesque saltbox dating from the 1680s. Through his research, he came across a fascinating cast of local characters, past and present, who contributed to, invented, and reinvented the town's history. Breen's work also drew him into contemporary local affairs: factionalism among residents, zoning disputes, and debates over resource management. Driving these heated issues, Breen found, were some dearly held notions about a harmonious, agrarian past that conflicted with what he had come to know about the divisiveness and opportunism of East Hampton's early days. Imagining the Past is about the interplay between some of the East Hampton histories Breen encountered: the “official” histories of many generations, the myths and oral traditions, and the curious stories that Breen, as an outsider, discerned in the town's rich holdings of artifacts and documents. With a warm yet wry regard for human nature, Breen obliges us to confront our pasts in all their complexities and ironies, no matter how unsettling or inconvenient the experience.




The empire of nature


Book Description

This study assesses the significance of the hunting cult as a major element of the imperial experience in Africa and Asia. Through a study of the game laws and the beginnings of conservation in the 19th and early-20th centuries, the author demonstrates the racial inequalities which existed between Europeans and indigenous hunters. Africans were denied access to game, and the development of game reserves and national parks accelerated this process. Indigenous hunters in Africa and India were turned into "poachers" and only Europeans were permitted to hunt. In India, the hunting of animals became the chief recreation of military officers and civilian officials, a source of display and symbolic dominance of the environment. Imperial hunting fed the natural history craze of the day, and many hunters collected trophies and specimens for private and public collections as well as contributing to hunting literature. Adopting a radical approach to issues of conservation, this book links the hunting cult in Africa and India to the development of conservation, and consolidates widely-scattered material on the importance of hunting to the economics and nutrition of African societies.




Compton's Pictured Encyclopedia


Book Description




The Breathless Zoo


Book Description

From sixteenth-century cabinets of wonders to contemporary animal art, The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing examines the cultural and poetic history of preserving animals in lively postures. But why would anyone want to preserve an animal, and what is this animal-thing now? Rachel Poliquin suggests that taxidermy is entwined with the enduring human longing to find meaning with and within the natural world. Her study draws out the longings at the heart of taxidermy—the longing for wonder, beauty, spectacle, order, narrative, allegory, and remembrance. In so doing, The Breathless Zoo explores the animal spectacles desired by particular communities, human assumptions of superiority, the yearnings for hidden truths within animal form, and the loneliness and longing that haunt our strange human existence, being both within and apart from nature.




Federation


Book Description

The author wishes to make it very clear that this book has nothing to do with Star Trek. Recent review: 5 stars "A fascinating combination of science and politics this is a thrilling read." - wondrous science fiction for the thinking person! FEDERATION takes close encounters to a whole new level. An oft-used and laughed about sentence is when an alien arrives and asks, "Take me to your leader!" What if this really happened? Who is the leader? There is no world leader - only many individuals who would like to be. Federation takes the answer seriously and so begins a trilogy which has compared with Foundation with aliens. A galactic empire of a quarter of a million worlds stumbles across the Earth. With elements of a political thriller, there is an intriguing storyline which addresses the environmental and myriad social problems faced by the world today. The aliens’ philosophy on life is totally unexpected. With the help of intelligent automatons, they've turned what many on Earth believe to be a reviled political system into a utopia for the masses, but are they a force for good or evil, and will the wealthy make the compromises needed for a successful outcome? A Daragnen university professor, Yol Rummy Blin Breganin, discovers that Earth failed in its attempt to join the Federation, and, for some unknown reason, members are forever banned from visiting or contacting the planet. Rummy had never heard of a whole world being outlawed. Perhaps it would be sensible to leave well enough alone but no, he decides to investigate… FEDERATION is the first in a trilogy of near-future, hard science-fiction novels by Tony Harmsworth, the First Contact specialist. Submerge yourself in humankind’s cultural and economic dilemma. Get FEDERATION today.