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The Tourist Trail: A Novel John Yunker Some people stop at the water's edge.
Some keep going...
Biologist Angela Haynes is accustomed to dark, lonely nights as one of the few humans at a penguin research station in Patagonia. She has grown used to the cries of penguins before dawn, to meager supplies and housing, to spending most of her days in one of the most remote regions on earth. What she isn’t used to is strange men washing ashore, which happens one day on her watch.
The man won’t tell her his name or where he came from, but Angela, who has a soft spot for strays, tends to him, if for no other reason than to protect her birds and her work. When she later learns why he goes by an alias, why he is a refugee from the law, and why he is a man without a port, she begins to fall in love—and embarks on a journey that takes her deep into Antarctic waters, and even deeper into the emotional territory she thought she’d left behind.
Against the backdrop of the Southern Ocean, The Tourist Trail weaves together the stories of Angela as well as FBI agent Robert Porter, dispatched on a mission that unearths a past he would rather keep buried; and Ethan Downes, a computer tech whose love for a passionate activist draws him into a dangerous mission.
294 pages
REVIEWS
"What’s impressive about this novel [is that] it occupies so much literary territory. It is at once a romance, an adventure story, an environmental polemic, and a keen study of just how animalistic humans are...It is a reader’s pleasure, due in large part to the meticulous control with which Yunker commands his language." -- Phoebe Literary Journal
"This immensely readable and exciting novel brings together the seemingly disjointed lives of characters who share a common thread: whether they know it or not, their purpose is to be devoted to the cause of helping animals...The Tourist Trail is epic, sprawling and strikingly cinematic."
-- Our Hen House
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On the Duty of Civil Disobedience Henry David Thoreau Civil Disobedience argues that citizens should not permit their governments to overrule their consciences, and that they have a duty to avoid allowing their acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. Thoreau was motivated in part by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican-American War, but the sentiments he expresses here are just as pertinent today as when they were first written. A true American classic. |
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Walden Henry David Thoreau Arguably America's most famous nonconformist, Thoreau lived at Walden Pond from July 1845 to September 1847, chronicling his experiences there. It was an experiment in living a life unhindered by social trappings and tradition. His work was not widely renowned for years after his death, but later became a staple in modern culture, defining not only what it means to be an American, but what it means to be human. Come see where the idea of marching to the beat of a different drummer originated. Walden is a classic and essential reading. |
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Life on the Mississippi (Bantam Classics) Mark Twain Mark Twain's own story of his youthful years as a cub-pilot on a steamboat plowing up and down the Mississippi River. |
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Our Mutual Friend (New Oxford Illustrated Dickens) Charles Dickens Charles Dickens's last completed novel tells the story of a young man who must marry a stranger in order to win his inheritance. Wanting to learn the lady's nature, John Harmon fakes his own death and takes on a new identity. As the complexities of the deceit are revealed, Dickens gives us his most profoundly cynical, yet brilliantly funny, insight into the corruption of wealth on human nature. 40 illustrations. |
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The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals Michael Pollan "What should we have for dinner?" To one degree or another this simple question assails any creature faced with a wide choice of things to eat. Anthropologists call it the omnivore's dilemma. Choosing from among the countless potential foods nature offers, humans have had to learn what is safe, and what isn't-which mushrooms should be avoided, for example, and which berries we can enjoy. Today, as America confronts what can only be described as a national eating disorder, the omnivore's dilemma has returned with an atavistic vengeance. The cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast-food outlet has thrown us back on a bewildering landscape where we once again have to worry about which of those tasty-looking morsels might kill us. At the same time we're realizing that our food choices also have profound implications for the health of our environment. The Omnivore's Dilemma is bestselling author Michael Pollan's brilliant and eye-opening exploration of these little-known but vitally important dimensions of eating in America. Pollan has divided The Omnivore's Dilemma into three parts, one for each of the food chains that sustain us: industrialized food, alternative or "organic" food, and food people obtain by dint of their own hunting, gathering, or gardening. Pollan follows each food chain literally from the ground up to the table, emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the species we depend on. He concludes each section by sitting down to a meal—at McDonald's, at home with his family sharing a dinner from Whole Foods, and in a revolutionary "beyond organic" farm in Virginia. For each meal he traces the provenance of everything consumed, revealing the hidden components we unwittingly ingest and explaining how our taste for particular foods reflects our environmental and biological inheritance. We are indeed what we eat-and what we eat remakes the world. A society of voracious and increasingly confused omnivores, we are just beginning to recognize the profound consequences of the simplest everyday food choices, both for ourselves and for the natural world. The Omnivore's Dilemma is a long-overdue book and one that will become known for bringing a completely fresh perspective to a question as ordinary and yet momentous as What shall we have for dinner? A few facts and figures from The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals -
Of the 38 ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, there are at least 13 that are derived from corn. 45 different menu items at Mcdonald’s are made from corn. -
One in every three American children eats fast food every day. -
One in every five American meals today is eaten in the car. -
The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States¯more than we burn with our cars and more than any other industry consumes. -
It takes ten calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food energy to an American plate. -
A single strawberry contains about five calories. To get that strawberry from a field in California to a plate on the east coast requires 435 calories of energy. -
Industrial fertilizer and industrial pesticides both owe their existence to the conversion of the World War II munitions industry to civilian uses—nerve gases became pesticides, and ammonium nitrate explosives became nitrogen fertilizers. -
Because of the obesity epidemic, today’s generation of children will be the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy will actually be shorter than their parents’ life expectancy. -
In 2000 the UN reported that the number of people in the world suffering from o... |
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1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus Charles C. Mann In this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, Charles C. Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.
Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering. Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew. |
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Down from the Mountain James MacKrell Down from the Mountain is being hailed as one of the best Dog Stories of our time. Set in the mountains of Montana this is the story of the bravery and loyalty of Bandit, an Australian Shepherd who is raised by the wolf Sheena. A gripping adventure that will keep the pages turning. Through tears and sorrow this great dog returns to his home to be the protector of everything the Shepherd has. Bandit is an Adventure, Love Story and Action novel all wrapped up into one. |
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Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions Dan Ariely Why do our headaches persist after taking a one-cent aspirin but disappear when we take a 50-cent aspirin? Why does recalling the Ten Commandments reduce our tendency to lie, even when we couldn't possibly be caught? Why do we splurge on a lavish meal but cut coupons to save twenty-five cents on a can of soup? Why do we go back for second helpings at the unlimited buffet, even when our stomachs are already full? And how did we ever start spending $4.15 on a cup of coffee when, just a few years ago, we used to pay less than a dollar? When it comes to making decisions in our lives, we think we're in control. We think we're making smart, rational choices. But are we? In a series of illuminating, often surprising experiments, MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. Blending everyday experience with groundbreaking research, Ariely explains how expectations, emotions, social norms, and other invisible, seemingly illogical forces skew our reasoning abilities. Not only do we make astonishingly simple mistakes every day, but we make the same types of mistakes, Ariely discovers. We consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. We fail to understand the profound effects of our emotions on what we want, and we overvalue what we already own. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They're systematic and predictable...making us predictably irrational. From drinking coffee to losing weight, from buying a car to choosing a romantic partner, Ariely explains how to break through these systematic patterns of thought to make better decisions. Predictably Irrational will change the way we interact with the world...one small decision at a time. |
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¤ ¤ ¤ ILLUSTRATED ¤ ¤ ¤ On The Origin Of Species, by Charles Darwin - NEW Illustrated Classics 2011 Edition (FULLY OPTIMIZED FOR KINDLE) Charles Darwin
This is the Novellum Ebook Works Illustrated Classics 2011 Edition of On The Origin Of Species, by Charles Darwin.
Peppered throughout the full, beautifully presented text are over 240 finely-detailed illustrations that flesh out the places and species referenced in the book, along with biographical photographs of the major players in this, the greatest intellectual adventure of human history.
Illustrations are presented with informative captions, and in high definition, allowing the Kindle's full-page zoom function to explore them in detail, and active chapter links are provided to navigate crisply through Darwin's masterpiece of scientific discovery.
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