1840 research outputs found
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The natural history of Big Sur
No full textEach year millions of people visit the area of rugged California coastline and wild mountains known as Big Sur. Finally here is a book that is both a natural history of this beautiful region and an excellent guide to its extensive public lands. The first section introduces the area's geology, climate, flora, fauna, and human history. The second section describes selected sites, trails, and features that are mentioned in Part One.Although Big Sur is world famous for awe-inspiring scenery, it is less known for its great ecological diversity and its significance as a haven for many species of terrestrial and marine wildlife. In no other part of the world do fog-loving coastal redwoods thrive on one slope of a canyon while arid-climate yuccas grow on the other. Similarly, sea otters and cormorants live near dry-climate creatures like canyon wrens and whiptail lizards. The area's staggering beauty and forbidding wilderness have inspired artists, poets, naturalists, and hikers - and also real estate developers.As increasing tourism, development pressure, and land-use decisions continue to affect Big Sur, this book will do much to heighten awareness of the region's biotic richness and fragility. Written in nontechnical language, with generous color photographs, drawings, maps, species lists, and a bibliography, it will attract both the casual and the serious naturalist, as well as anyone concerned about preserving California's natural heritage
In our own hands: a strategy for conserving California's biological diversity
No full text"Biodiversity." As argument over environmental and conservation policy grows more heated in California and throughout the nation, the term has become a buzzword. But what does biodiversity really mean? What really threatens it? Why should we care? In Our Own Hands offers a readable, scientifically sound view of California's biological diversity and what must be done to preserve it. The book will be an invaluable resource for environmental and natural resource specialists, educators, and general readers.Local and global forces threaten California's wetlands, dunes, oak woodlands, and riparian forest habitats - all declining habitats in a rapidly urbanizing, culturally heterogeneous, and politically turbulent state. Always a bellwether, California will be a model for the rest of the United States in its scientific and political solutions to conservation problems. This book proposes the first steps toward a unified national conservation policy for the twenty-first century
The Arab world: society, culture, and state
No full textThis wide-ranging examination of Arab society and culture offers a unique opportunity to know the Arab world from an Arab point of view. Halim Barakat, an expatriate Syrian who is both scholar and novelist, emphasizes the dynamic changes and diverse patterns that have characterized the Middle East since the mid-nineteenth century.The Arab world is not one shaped by Islam, nor one simply explained by reference to the sectarian conflicts of a "mosaic" society. Instead, Barakat reveals a society that is highly complex, with many and various contending polarities. It is a society in a state of becoming and change, one whose social contradictions are at the root of the struggle to transcend dehumanizing conditions. Arguing from a perspective that is both radical and critical, Barakat is committed to the improvement of human conditions in the Arab world
The state and the poor: public policy and political development in India and the United States
No full textThis comparison of rural development in India and the United States develops important departures from economic and historical institutionalism. It elaborates a new conceptual framework for analyzing state-society relations beginning from the premise that policy implementation, as the site of tangible exchanges between state and society, provides strategic interaction among self-interested individuals, social groups, and bureaucracies. It demonstrates how this interaction can be harnessed to enhance the effectiveness of public policy. Echeverri-Gent's application of this framework to poverty alleviation programs generates provocative insights about the ways in which institutions and social structure constrain policy-makers. In the process, he illuminates new implications for the concepts of state autonomy and state capacity.The book's original conceptual framework and intriguing findings will interest scholars of South Asia and American politics, social theorists, and policy-makers
Light moving in time: studies in the visual aesthetics of avant-garde film
No full textTo view a film is to see another's seeing mediated by the technology and techniques of the camera. By manipulating the cinematic apparatus in unorthodox ways, avant-garde filmmakers challenge the standardized versions of seeing perpetuated by the dominant film industry and generate ways of seeing that are truer to actual human vision.Beginning with the proposition that the images of cinema and vision derive from the same basic elements - light, movement, and time - Wees argues that cinematic apparatus and human visual apparatus have significant properties in common. For that reason they can be brought into a dynamic, creative relationship which the author calls the dialectic of eye and camera. The consequences of this relationship are what Wees explores.Although previous studies have recognized the visual bias of avant-garde film, this is the first to place the visual aesthetics of avant-garde film in a long-standing, multidisciplinary discourse on vision, visuality, and art
The flight of the mind: Virginia Woolf's art and manic-depressive illness
No full textIn this major new book on Virginia Woolf, Caramagno contends psychobiography has much to gain from a closer engagement with science. Literary studies of Woolf's life have been written almost exclusively from a psychoanalytic perspective. They portray Woolf as a victim of the Freudian "family romance," reducing her art to a neurotic evasion of a traumatic childhood.But current knowledge about manic-depressive illness - its genetic transmission, its biochemistry, and its effect on brain function - reveals a new relationship between Woolf's art and her illness. Caramagno demonstrates how Woolf used her illness intelligently and creatively in her theories of fiction, of mental functioning, and of self structure. Her novels dramatize her struggle to imagine and master psychic fragmentation. They helped her restore form and value to her own sense of self and lead her readers to an enriched appreciation of the complexity of human consciousness
Punishment: theory and practice
No full textWhat actions should be punished? Should plea-bargaining be allowed? How should sentencing be determined? In this original, penetrating study, Mark Tunick explores not only why society punishes wrongdoing, but also how it implements punishment.Contending that the theory and practice of punishment are inherently linked, Tunick draws on a broad range of thinkers, from the radical criticisms of Nietzsche, Foucault, and some Marxist theorists through the sociological theories of Durkheim and Girard to various philosophical traditions and the "law and economics" movement. He defends punishment against its radical critics and offers a version of retribution, distinct from revenge, that holds that we punish not to deter or reform, but to mete out just deserts, vindicate right, and express society's righteous anger. Demonstrating first how this theory best accounts for how punishment is carried out, he then provides "immanent criticism" of certain features of our practice that don't accord with the retributive principle.Thought-provoking and deftly argued, Punishment will garner attention and spark debate among political theorists, philosophers, legal scholars, sociologists, and criminologists
Birth as an American rite of passage
No full textWhy do so many American women allow themselves to become enmeshed in the standardized routines of technocratic childbirth - routines that can be insensitive, unnecessary, and even unhealthy? And why, in spite of the natural childbirth movement, has hospital birth become even more intensely technologized? Robbie Davis-Floyd argues that these obstetrical procedures are rituals that reflect a cultural belief in the superiority of science over nature. Her interviews with 100 mothers and many health care professionals reveal in detail both the trauma and the satisfaction women derive from childbirth. She also calls for greater cultural and medical tolerance of the alternative beliefs of women who choose to birth at home
Jinshan ge ji. English. Selections. English & Chinese.
No full textMarlon Hom has selected and translated 220 rhymes from two collections of Chinatown songs published in 1911 and 1915. The songs are outspoken and personal, addressing subjects as diverse as sex, frustrations with the American bureaucracy, poverty and alienation, and the loose morals of the younger generation of Americans. Hom has arranged the songs thematically and gives an overview of early Chinese American literature
Fifteen jugglers, five believers: literary politics and the poetics of American social movements
No full textT.V. Reed urges an affiliation between literary theory and political action - and between political action and literary theory. What can the "new literary theory" learn from "new social movements"; and what can social activists learn from poststructuralism, new historicism, feminist theory, and neomarxism?In strikingly new interpretations of texts in four different genres - Agee and Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , Ellison's Invisible Man, Mailer's Armies of the Night , and the ecofeminist Women's Pentagon Actions of the early 1980s - Reed shows how reading literary texts for their political strategies and reading political movements as texts can help us overcome certain rhetorical traps that have undermined American efforts to combat racism, sexism, and economic inequality