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This book of drawings explores the mystery and mythology of the whale in a rich graphic poetry, full of allegory and metaphor. Stark, evocative drawings are set against excerpts from literature and ancient poems, and a detailed appendix chronicles the evolution of the perception of the whale throughout the ages.
"A spellbinding work of literature, Latitudes of Longing follows the interconnected lives of characters searching for true intimacy. The novel sweeps across India, from an island, to a valley, a city, and a snow desert to tell a love story of epic proportions. We follow a scientist who studies trees and a clairvoyant who speaks to them; a geologist working to end futile wars over a glacier; octogenarian lovers; a mother struggling to free her revolutionary son; a yeti who seeks human companionship; a turtle who transforms first into a boat and then a woman; and the ghost of an evaporated ocean as restless as the continents. Binding them all together is a vision of life as vast as the universe itself. A young writer awarded one of the most prestigious prizes in India for this novel, Shubhangi Swarup is a storyteller of extraordinary talent and insight. Richly imaginative and wryly perceptive, Latitudes of Longing offers a soaring view of humanity: our beauty and ugliness, our capacity to harm and love each other, and our mysterious and sacred relationship with nature"--
“Crichton’s ultimate adventure.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Pirates Latitudes has the loot: Gore, sex, action….A lusty, rollicking 17th century adventure.” —USA Today “Riveting….Great entertainment….The pages and minutes fly by.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer #1 New York Times bestselling author, the incomparable Michael Crichton (“One of the great storytellers of our age” —Newsday) takes to the high Caribbean seas for an irresistible adventure of swashbuckling pirates, lost treasure, sword fights, duplicity, and hair-breadth escapes in the New World.
This bountiful, magical novel opens with the discovery by two fishermen of a baby floating in a cradle on an ice pan in the North Atlantic off the coast of Newfoundland in 1912. To the small fishing community into which the foundling is adopted, Aurora, as they name her – with her shock of white hair, one blue eye and one brown – is clearly enchanted. But it is not until Aurora is herself an old woman that she learns the heart-wrenching story behind her miraculous survival on the ice.
Latitude is a gloriously exciting tale of adventure and scientific discovery that has never been told before. Crane, the former president of the Royal Geographic Society, documents the remarkable expedition undertaken by a group of twelve European adventurer-scientists in the mid-eighteenth century. The team spent years in South America, scaling volcanoes and traversing jungles before they achieved their goal of establishing the exact shape of the Earth by measuring the length of 1 degree latitude at the equator. Their endeavors were not limited to this one achievement. Not only did their discovery open up the possibility for safe, accurate navigation across the seas, they also discovered rubber and quinine. With a narrative that reads like it was taken from the script of an adventure movie, Nicholas Crane brings to life a narrative that is a timely remind of how scientific discovery can change the world and our future. By knowing the shape of the earth we can create maps, survive the oceans, navigate the skies, and travel across the globe. Without latitude, maps and navigation wouldn’t be accurate, lives would have been lost, and exact locations of cities and rivers would never be known. After ten grueling years in search of a magic number, the survivors returned to Europe with their historical discovery and fueled the public’s interest in science. Twent-five years ago, Dava Sobel’s bestselling Longitude was a global publishing phenomenon, yet it told only one half of the story. With Latitude, this cornerstone piece of our shared history is now complete with this tale of a trip that changed the course of human civilization. Filled with raw excitement and danger, Latitude brings the challenges that faced these explorer-scientists to vivid life.
In an exhilarating tale of historic adventure, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Confederates in the Attic retraces the voyages of Captain James Cook, the Yorkshire farm boy who drew the map of the modern world Captain James Cook's three epic journeys in the 18th century were the last great voyages of discovery. His ships sailed 150,000 miles, from the Artic to the Antarctic, from Tasmania to Oregon, from Easter Island to Siberia. When Cook set off for the Pacific in 1768, a third of the globe remained blank. By the time he died in Hawaii in 1779, the map of the world was substantially complete. Tony Horwitz vividly recounts Cook's voyages and the exotic scenes the captain encountered: tropical orgies, taboo rituals, cannibal feasts, human sacrifice. He also relives Cook's adventures by following in the captain's wake to places such as Tahiti, Savage Island, and the Great Barrier Reef to discover Cook's embattled legacy in the present day. Signing on as a working crewman aboard a replica of Cook's vessel, Horwitz experiences the thrill and terror of sailing a tall ship. He also explores Cook the man: an impoverished farmboy who broke through the barriers of his class and time to become the greatest navigator in British history. By turns harrowing and hilarious, insightful and entertaining, BLUE LATITUDES brings to life a man whose voyages helped create the 'global village' we know today.
"During the Depression years, J. Arthur Rath spent his early childhood shuttled between relatives and foster parents in Hawai'i and on the mainland while his single mother, Hualani, struggled to make a living. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, his grandparents sent him to the Big Island and Konawaena School, where he heard the Kamehameha Schools boy choir at a school assembly. The performance made a deep impression on Rath, and a year later, in 1944, he entered Kamehameha as an eighth-grade boarder. Thus began Rath's love affair with an institution that he credits with turning his life around, with giving him and other disadvantaged children of native ancestry - Hawai'i's "lost generations" - the confidence and support necessary to make something of themselves. This is the story of that love affair. It is also the story of Rath's recent battle, together with other alumni, for the integrity of his beloved Kamehameha against the school's trustees and their organization, the powerful Bishop Estate." "Intelligent and impressionable, Rath spent an idyllic four years at Kamehameha. In a lively talk-story manner, he reminisces about campus life and his classmates, many of whom became lifelong friends and influential members of the Hawaiian community: Don Ho, Nona Beamer, Oswald Stender, Tom Hugo, William Fernandez. Years later Rath, a successful retired businessman, would call on these same friends to hold Kamehameha's trustees accountable for their mismanagement of Bishop Estate's vast financial holdings and ultimately their failure to carry out founder Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop's mandate to educate Hawaiian children. Rath draws on his many personal ties to the school and the estate to provide surprising revelations on the trustees and the "Bishop Estate Scandal," which made headlines daily throughout the mid-1990s."--BOOK JACKET.
The dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of one man's forty-year obsession to find a solution to the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day--"the longitude problem." Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that "the longitude problem" was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day-and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration had been literally lost at sea as soon as they lost sight of land. Thousands of lives and the increasing fortunes of nations hung on a resolution. One man, John Harrison, in complete opposition to the scientific community, dared to imagine a mechanical solution-a clock that would keep precise time at sea, something no clock had ever been able to do on land. Longitude is the dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of Harrison's forty-year obsession with building his perfect timekeeper, known today as the chronometer. Full of heroism and chicanery, it is also a fascinating brief history of astronomy, navigation, and clockmaking, and opens a new window on our world.
Gold Medal Winner, Autobiography/Memoir, 2015 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards. A father makes the fateful decision to leave a successful career in the US behind and move to an isolated beach in the Dominican Republic. He plants ten thousand coconut seedlings, transplants his wife and two young daughters to a small village, and declares they are the luckiest people alive. In reality, the family is in the path of hurricanes and in the grip of a brutal dictator, Rafael Trujillo—and the children are additionally under the thumb of an increasingly volatile and alcoholic father. Set against a backdrop of shimmering palms and kaleidoscope sunsets, The Coconut Latitudes is Rita Gardner’s compelling memoir of a childhood in paradise, a journey into unexpected misery, and a twisted path to redemption and truth.
Readers follow in the search for a beautiful but amoral woman by a husband who is determined to redeem her. In a series of dazzling flashes from the Southern California underworld, an extraordinary carnival of characters appears.
