Book Description
One hundred and fifty years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, award-winning environmental reporter Alanna Mitchell set out to retrace the idea of evolution and grapple with the fact that a massive extinction of the planet's species was well under way. So began a three-year odyssey in which Mitchell picked up where Darwin left off, examining not just the origin but also the ultimate fate of our world.
Combining scientific curiosity with travel and adventure, Dancing at the Dead Sea takes the reader on an intimate tour through the world's environmental hotspots. Readers join Mitchell as she tracks the spectacular biodiversity of regions as extraordinary as the island of Madagascar, the rain forests of Suriname, the parched oases of Jordan, the Arctic desert of Banks Island, the volcanic crests of Iceland, and, ultimately, the Galapagos archipelago, where Darwin conducted his famous research. Along the way, Mitchell introduces us to the numerous scientists and conservationists who are working to protect these endangered places. She also chronicles the courageous efforts of everyday men and women in these regions as they try to convince governments to turn the world's hotspots into environmentally protected areas.
Ultimately, Mitchell's travels around the world compel her to ponder our shelf life as a species in the grand evolutionary scheme of the planet. She wonders what Darwin would make of the profound ecological destruction she witnesses. Is the human race suicidal? What can help our species avert extinction? Posing tough and cutting questions such as these, Dancing at the Dead Sea is a must-read for aficionados of good science writing and travel literature alike.
Customer Reviews:
One person's journey.......2005-10-31
This book was a refreshing look at the environmental devastation happening on earth. It is a book that gives hope and I don't believe is meant to speak on a scientific level about these problems. It is one woman's journey and how she has connected global warming, deforestation etc. with the teachings of Darwin and the importance of oral histories and legends.
Step Forward and Step Back.......2005-08-04
However, Alanna takes a step back from the subject. The book is written by a journalist - and it feels like it. The book could have been so much more with more soul, feeling, emotion, and conviction dripping from the words. The final chapter makes an attempt at this. I get the feeling that the book was edited so that it would not offend anyone.
It doesn't. But this is a book with a subject that should attempt to make some waves. Perhaps, if the reader already has a connection with Darwin or with some of the locations described in the book, there would be more of an impact.
For me, I think the book only lightly touched the more important journey. From I can gather, the writer was recently divorced and on a journey to heal herself. The title of the book "Dancing at the Dead Sea" described an enchanting inspired moment at the Dead Sea. Later, Alanna dipped into piranha-infested waters to cool down - facing one of her grandest fears and conquering to the melodies of "pings".
"Are we a suicidal species?".......2004-11-19
At first glance, this seems a foolish question. All creatures strive for survival. None have ever been known to vote for extinction. Alanna Mitchell, disturbed by what she has observed around the planet, still poses the question to the researchers she meets. Will we soon go extinct through our own thoughtless activities? Will we continue to denude forests of their trees? Will we allow our auto exhausts to melt the polar ice fields? How many other species will we drive into extinction before we follow? These aren't new questions. Nor does Mitchell pose them in any particularly unique way. However, her personal anguish comes through vividly in this string of powerfully evocative essays. As a "new learner" in observing ecological disaster, her concern is one we should all share.
Mitchell is almost unique in her descriptives prowess as she tours the planet's ecological "hot spots". She has discovered Charles Darwin, followed some of his travels and drunk deeply of the wisdom he imparted. The Pierean spring, cautions the cliche, scorns the shallow questor, and Mitchell has followed that dictum. In some haste, she turns to those on the sites for further information. They don't fail her as she watches attempts to restore trees in Madagascar, where only ten percent of the original stands survive. She learns that ancient cultures aren't easily cast aside - the Malagasy think the trees will go on forever. They spend more time and energy following the shrinking forest without considering the possibility that the trees may not be there someday. A familiar outlook, reflecting the energy use in our own society, she reminds us.
Her study of Darwin leads her to compare his ordeal in bringing natural selection to a skeptical Victorian England to today's outlook about nature's resources. Where the Victorians believed life couldn't change, our society views the Earth's assets as infinite - "it will always be there". Mitchell contests this fallacy with vigour, as she visits sites displaying contrary evidence. Darwin explained how everything undergoes constant change. She uses an ancient example to express her warning. Returning to Canada, paleontologist Phil Currie takes her into the Alberta Badlands to refute the popular notion that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. 'Where are the fossils that should be near the impact time?' is his rhetorical question. His answer is that the dinosaurs, life's most successful lifeform, were lost due to climate change. If they couldn't survive, Mitchell contends, can we?
Further north, she sees the effect of climate change in Canada's Arctic. Climate experts know the warming atmosphere will have earlier and more drastic impact here. Already the effect is showing in mild winters, earlier Spring and diminished hunting. The story is repeated endlessly - humans have soiled their nest with overcutting of trees, pumping too much water from limited acquifers, and emissions of gases choking the atmosphere we must all share. It's a bleak picture, with a label tacked on: "Fix this now!"
Some "fixing" is under way. In South America, a consortium struggles to convert sacred sites into eco-tourist meccas. Remote tribes can entertain visitors, earning income while protecting their homelands from the chainsaw. In Iceland, where the world is splitting open, geothermal power is a major replacement for oil heating. Transportation may replace petrol in vehicles travelling the limited distances of the island with the most common fuel type in the universe - hydrogen. Back in Canada, Mitchell rejoices over a strange alliance. A major logging firm and environmentalists have agreed to terms protecting the boreal forest. Certainly a liasion unthinkable a short time ago, but one giving strong promise of real progress in sustainability.
Of the many works on our environmental crises now available, Mitchell's is one offering the most dramatic examples, while holding out the best promise for the future. Her penetrating observations and personalised style place her in a special relationship with us as readers. While she recounts the larger scientific questions, she's also able to show how environmental issues are daily fare for many. Including you.
[stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
A fascinating, sometimes disturbing, book.......2004-10-06
This book is an entertaining and often sobering look at environmental degradation that is occurring around the world. Author Alanna Mitchell, who was named the best environmental reporter in the world by the World Conservation Union and the Reuters Foundation, writes about several environmental catastrophes that are taking place including the effects global warming is having on the Arctic, the destruction of wetlands in Jordan where species are going extinct "at the rate of about one a year," and deforestation in Madagascar which, according to Mitchell, "is the world's top extinction hotspot."
While some of Mitchell's observations of how our species is destroying the very ecosystems we depend on for life are depressing, other prominent people's views on how destructive our species is are further disturbing.
"Leakey, the eminent Kenyan paleoanthropologist and authority on human evolution, is convinced that humans are poised to become 'the greatest catastrophic agent' the world has ever seen, a highly intelligent, highly lethal species set to destroy billions of years of evolutionary advances."
Much of Mitchell's book looks at how humans have decimated the planet, but she also writes about some environmental success stories including how Suriname's rainforest, thanks to conservationists, is almost entirely intact. Mitchell, in the chapter "Iceland's New Power" reports on how Iceland is "doing away with fossil fuels in favor of harnessing the mythical energy of hydrogen," and how, in the next couple of decades, they will switch their cars and ships to hydrogen and then won't require any oil.
Dancing at the Dead Sea is a fascinating, sometimes disturbing, book, but it is one which needs to be read. If we are to overcome our destructive, short-sighted ways and begin living in harmony with the other species, we need to be fully aware of what we're capable of - both in terms of causing environmental catastrophes and healing the planet. --Glenn Perrett
A quest for hope.......2004-09-25
Having won an international award for environmental journalism, Alanna Mitchell benefited from a study time-off included with the prize. She used her time well. Pursuing research topics close to her heart, she investigated what environmental hotspots can teach us about our past and the future of human evolution. Combining scientific curiosity with enthusiasm for "adventure", her travels have taken her to somewhat remote places - in Jordan, Iceland, Madagascar, the Galapagos and the high Arctic among them. She accompanied numerous specialists in biology, marine ecology, anthropology and other fields, plus local experts, on explorations in their field of study. She meets extraordinary people, confronting delicate and sometimes dangerous situations. She skillfully explains some of the complex climatology and other science for the non-specialist reader. The result is an engaging book, part travelogue, part environmental analysis, within a historical context.
With Darwin's journals of his voyage on the Beagle in hand, she traces his footsteps on the Galapagos. There and elsewhere she maintains an internal dialogue with Darwin wondering what he would have made of the ecological destruction she witnesses. Like the local people in Evatraha, Madagascar, who believe that trees "carry their own magic of regeneration", we are destroying precious resources somehow believing that "there will always be another tree". The evidence, Mitchell warns, attests to the opposite. Today, more species are endangered than ever before and some fragile ecosystems are beyond recovery. Reflecting on the five mass extinctions on our planet, she casts some doubt on our "shelf life" in the grand evolutionary scheme of the planet. Unless, that is, we can learn the lesson that nature's resources are finite and we are not in control of the ecosystems. Mitchell draws comparisons between Darwin's contemporary critics of his new theories of evolution and our own society's inability or unwillingness to "understand evolution as it applies to the future".
In personal encounters with her travel companions Mitchell has a series of questions to pose. The most fundamental one among them is: "Is the human species suicidal? What could help us pull back from the brink? What can we learn from past experiences?" While most of the findings expose the serious threats to our habitat and even question long term survival, Mitchell finds also encouraging trends. There are signs, she eagerly records, that people are learning lessons and are working together to make a difference. The most spectacular of these positive development she finds in Suriname, where large areas of tropical rainforest are being protected as part of a UNESCO World Heritage site. The point is, explains primatologist Russ Mittermeier, for rainforest conservation to be sustainable it has to make economic sense to the local people. "Environmentalists who are innocent of economics have no audience." He's the motor driving this and other conservation projects and an enthusiastic buyer of local artifacts. This particular story, "Where the rainforest goes on forever", alone makes the book worth reading. Still, it is only one of the highly informative while at the same time entertaining chapters. It is, though, the most optimistic.
In the end, as she reflects in the remoteness of the boreal forest in northern Canada on her own lessons learned, Mitchell acknowledges that she has been on a "quest for hope". Share her "world wind" tour, enjoy and follow the call for reflection. [Friederike Knabe, Ottawa Canada]
Book Description
James Clerk Maxwell published the Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in 1873. At his death, six years later, his theory of the electromagnetic field was neither well understood nor widely accepted. By the mid-1890s, however, it was regarded as one of the most fundamental and fruitful of all physical theories. Bruce J. Hunt examines the joint work of a group of young British physicists—G. F. FitzGerald, Oliver Heaviside, and Oliver Lodge—along with a key German contributor, Heinrich Hertz. It was these "Maxwellians" who transformed the fertile but half-finished ideas presented in the Treatise into the concise and powerful system now known as "Maxwell's theory."
Customer Reviews:
The Triumph of Reason.......1999-09-14
Book describes the social/intellectual processes underlying the simplification of Maxwell's formulas regarding electromagentic phenomena. Three individuals were involved in the process, each having diverse personalities, backgrounds, and levels of social influence. Although they never met each other personally, 'in spirit', they worked as a unified team. The book shows the problematic changes in paradigms, such as models regarding the aether, as well as trace the socio-economic underpinnings of their work. England at the time was undergoing a tremendous imperialistic expansion, which helped stimulate inter-oceanic cables, and, in turn, drive the development of its science. An engaging book with a fluid storyline which was both intellectually and emotionally appealing. In many ways, it plotted the fortunate triumph of 'truth' over entrenched hierarchical biases. The science presented in the book was never so complicated that a willing layman, without due effort, could not understand, and should not intimidate any reader from 'giving it a go'.
Average customer rating:
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Transport Phenomena and Kinetic Theory: Applications to Gases, Semiconductors, Photons, and Biological Systems (Modeling and Simulation in Science, Engineering and Technology)
Manufacturer: Birkhäuser Boston
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ASIN: 081764489X |
Book Description
The study of kinetic equations related to gases, semiconductors, photons, traffic flow, and other systems has developed rapidly in recent years because of its role as a mathematical tool in many applications in areas such as engineering, meteorology, biology, chemistry, materials science, nanotechnology, and pharmacy. Written by leading specialists in their respective fields, this book presents an overview of recent developments in the field of mathematical kinetic theory with a focus on modeling complex systems, emphasizing both mathematical properties and their physical meaning.
The overall presentation covers not only modeling aspects and qualitative analysis of mathematical problems, but also inverse problems, which lead to a detailed assessment of models in connection with their applications, and to computational problems, which lead to an effective link of models to the analysis of real-world systems. The book is divided into three parts: Part I presents fundamental aspects of the Boltzmann equation; Part II deals with the modeling of semiconductor devices as well as related applications and computational topics; Part III covers a variety of applications in physics and the natural sciences, offering a range of very different conceivable developments of mathematical kinetic theory.
Transport Phenomena and Kinetic Theory is an excellent self-study reference for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners working in pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, and engineering. The work may be used in courses or seminars on selected topics in transport phenomena or applications of the Boltzmann equation.
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Hertz and the Maxwellians: A Study and Documentation of the Discovery of Electromagnetic Wave Radiation, 1873-1894 (Iee History of Technology, 8)
J. G. O'Hara , and
D. W. Pricha
Manufacturer: Institution of Electrical Engineers
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ASIN: 0863411010 |
Product Description
This is a AIR FORCE INST OF TECH WRIGHT-PATTERSON AFB OH SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND MANAGEMENT report procured by the Pentagon and made available for public release. It has been reproduced in the best form available to the Pentagon. It is not spiral-bound, but rather assembled with Velobinding in a soft, white linen cover. The Storming Media report number is A131514. The abstract provided by the Pentagon follows: Spacecraft charging threatens to disable spacecraft components and adversely impact any satellite function. Electrostatic charge, and especially discharge, can hinder the proper operation of, or destroy, spacecraft components, thereby rendering the spacecraft ineffective or inoperative. The level of charging is dependent on the particle energy (speed) distribution. Current spacecraft design and material provide limited protection against the dangers of electrostatic discharge, and active measures such as beam emission are also employed.
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Magnetoelectrostatic confinement of Maxwellian and nonMaxwellian plasmas.: An article from: Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science
R. Jones
Manufacturer: Kansas Academy of Science
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ASIN: B0008F7RXU
Release Date: 2005-07-30 |
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This digital document is an article from Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science, published by Kansas Academy of Science on April 1, 2002. The length of the article is 1075 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Magnetoelectrostatic confinement of Maxwellian and nonMaxwellian plasmas.
Author: R. Jones
Publication:
Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science (Refereed)
Date: April 1, 2002
Publisher: Kansas Academy of Science
Page: 72(7)
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
In a masterly translation by Norman Shapiro, this selection of poems from Les Fleurs du mal demonstrates the magnificent range of Baudelaire's gift, from the exquisite quatrains to the formal challenges of his famous sonnets. The poems are presented in both French and English, complemented by the work of illustrator David Schorr. As much a pleasure to look at as it is to read, this volume invites newcomers and devotees alike to experience Baudelaire's genius anew.
"A fine, formal translation of the best poems of France's founder of the symbolist movement."—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"It's rare to find a rewarding translation of a masterwork, particularly a collection of groundbreaking poetry. . . . Through Shapiro's skillful wordsmithing, the reader can fully appreciate Baudelaire's control of the soul and the word which is the ancient and indefatigable ambition of all great poets. . . . Shapiro's interpretations set the standard for future English translations."—Virginia Quarterly Review
Customer Reviews:
The finest translation of Baudelaire in English.......2001-06-21
This bilingual edition (masterfully translated by Norman Shapiro) carefully transposes the French originals into a formal, poetic English idiom, which captures both the meaning and the music of Baudelaire, the fallen angel and champion of evil. Though conventional in terms of his metrics and poetic forms, Baudelaire is arguably the first great Modernist poet. One dives into the murky miasmata of these pages to discover a world of perverse pleasures, wrathful and sordid imagery and unregenerate vice glorified by one of its most eloquent spokesmen. Baudelaire, a tortured personality, in which profound guilt is contraposed with carnal lust, Satanism, delight in cruelty and a longing for hell, is one of the towering giants of modern European literature. His poetry is a bitter fruit that few can savour with impunity.
By far the best treatment Baudelaire has received in English.......1998-09-11
Shapiro manages to capture Baudelaire's essence without sacrificing his form. These versions read like English poetry. They are the best I have read--and I have read them all, past and present. Highly recommended for admirers of Baudelaire and students of the craft (and art!) of literary translation.
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