Falcon Crest and its hidden machinations have taken much from the Heroes of Dragon's Nest, but the cost just might not have been for nothing. Change is on the horizon in the form of holding the powerful to task and the possible formation of a new royal lineage. The burden of completing the task for ancient, now-revealed entity, however, soon pushes Jack, Tanner, Allie, and Gefnar back out across a war-torn continent, and new obstacles arise. Samanir forces are now guided by a different hand, one that seeks to gather half-breed factions for peace talks, in hopes of bringing the fighting to a speedy close. But many have plans for the future of all half-breeds, including new allies and old enemies. And if Jack is to keep her people, both those of blood and those of duty sworn, from harm, she may have to take irrevocable steps on the path fate has laid before her.

The Forest of Changes (Jiao Shi Yi Lin) is a Han Dynasty book of divination based on the Yi Jing. It expands the 64 hexagrams of the Yi Jing into 4096 verses, with one verse for each possible combination of two hexagrams. The work was created in the latter part of the Western Han or during the reign of Wang Mang. Much more than a diviners' tool, it contains numerous important insights into early Chinese culture, religion, history, myth and philosophy. This is the first translation of the entire work into a western language.Note! Now available: The Merchant's and Traveler's Forest of Changes. This is the first of three volumes in the Forest of Changes Oracle series, a resyncing of the Forest to the Yi Jing to create a working oracle. See my author's page for details.

In the Qing period (1644–1912), China's population tripled, and the flurry of new development generated unprecedented demand for timber. Standard environmental histories have often depicted this as an era of reckless deforestation, akin to the resource misuse that devastated European forests at the same time. This comprehensive new study shows that the reality was more complex: as old-growth forests were cut down, new economic arrangements emerged to develop renewable timber resources. Historian Meng Zhang traces the trade routes that connected population centers of the Lower Yangzi Delta to timber supplies on China's southwestern frontier. She documents innovative property rights systems and economic incentives that convinced landowners to invest years in growing trees. Delving into rare archives to reconstruct business histories, she considers both the formal legal mechanisms and the informal interactions that helped balance economic profit with environmental management. Of driving concern were questions of sustainability: How to maintain a reliable source of timber across decades and centuries? And how to sustain a business network across a thousand miles? This carefully constructed study makes a major contribution to Chinese economic and environmental history and to world-historical discourses on resource management, early modern commercialization, and sustainable development.

The recent interpretation of Maya hieroglyphs has given us the first written history of the New World as it existed before the European invasion. Now, two central figures in the massive effort to decode the glyphs, Linda Schele and David Freidel, make this history available for the first time in all its detail. A Forest of Kings is the story of Maya kingship, from the beginning of its institution and the first great pyramid builders two thousand years ago to the decline of Maya civilization and its destruction by the Spanish. Here the great historic rulers of Precolumbian civilization come to life again with the decipherment of the writing. At its height, Maya civilization flourished under great kings like Shield-Jaguar, who ruled for over sixty years, expanding his kingdom and building some of the most impressive works of architecture in the ancient world. Long placed on a mist-shrouded pedestal as austere, peaceful stargazers, the Maya elites are now known to have been the rulers or populous, aggressive city-states. Hailed as "a Rosetta Stone of Maya civilization" (Brian M. Fagan, author of People of the Earth), A Forest of Kings is "a must for interested readers," says Evon Vogt, professor of anthropology at Harvard University.

Family isn't just important. It's everything. From lions hunting as a pride to penguins huddling together to keep from freezing in the bitter Antarctic winter, many animals are dependent on complex social relationships for their survival. Powerful dynasties lay claim to vast swathes of territory, fighting off rivals and securing their hunting grounds for generations to come. Dynasties offers an immersive insight into the shifting hierarchies of animal families. Each chapter follows a different dynasty, from the Marsh Lions of the Masai Mara to rival packs of painted wolves, from a tiger protecting her newborn cubs to a chimpanzee troop and the penguin colonies of the Antarctic. Alongside tender moments when bonds are strengthened through grooming and play, the book charts the rivalries that tip the balance of power, when family members turn against each other and younger animals grow strong enough to challenge for control. With over 200 stunning photographs and insights from the crew of the BBC series, Dynasties reveals in astonishing detail the intricate social lives of our planet’s most fascinating animals.

Using Manchu and Chinese sources, this book explores the environmental history of Qing China's Manchurian, Inner Mongolian, and Yunnan borderlands.

The Forest of Changes was written in the Han Dynasty, 2,000 years ago. The book is an expansion of the Yi Jing, the book that is at the core of Chinese religion and philosophy. This first volume in a series of three serves two purposes. It separates out much of the traveling merchant layer of verses in the Forest. It also is the first attempt in over 1,000 years to repair the Forest of Changes. At some point between its writing and the Song Dynasty (960 to 1279 CE), the book was damaged badly, losing many of its original 4096 verses. A later hand or hands duplicated some verses, perhaps adding some other work of their own, leaving us with the current hodgepodge of a text. The trouble with that reconstructed Forest is that it is very negative, and the images are not lined up with the Yi Jing. Although it isn't possible to perfectly align the two works, I have made a first go at it, associating Forest verse to Yi Jing text based on favorability and image to create a working oracle. I have also added an element. The Merchant's and Traveler's Forest of Changes has All Lines Change texts for all the hexagrams rather than just the first two as in the original Yi Jing. This brings the number of texts to 512 and adds an element to use interpreting results. Helpful for making decisions, particularly regarding business and travel obviously, and also an excellent work to use in concert with the Yi Jing from which it developed.Many of the footnotes and glossary from the main edition of the Forest appear here to aid the user in orienting themselves in Han China as seen by a traveling merchant, a place that is distant in both time and culture from today's world.