They glitter. They shimmer. They bask in the glow of gently rotating color wheels. They last forever. Aluminum Christmas trees are the most spectacular souvenirs of our most recent Christmas Past-the Christmases of the super-mom 1960s.Season's Gleamings is the first book to celebrate these magnificent trees. More than 45 stunning color photographs reveal the beauty and range of aluminum arbor, from red-foil tabletop models to majestic seven-footers. Photographers J. Shimon & J. Lindemann have trained their camera on their own collection of vintage trees, capturing them complete with hi-fi's and highballs.Aluminum trees were born in 1959 in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, once the "Aluminum Cookware Capitol of the World." Within a couple of years, shiny, foil-branched Christmas trees were being made by dozens of companies and selling in the millions. Elvis adorned Graceland's front yard with a row of lighted aluminum trees. Their most famous appearance was in A Charlie Brown Christmas, when Lucy ordered Charlie Brown to "get the biggest aluminum tree you can find."Today the trade in vintage aluminum trees is fierce, and these crisp, beautiful symbols of modern living are again brightening thousands of American holidays. Season's Gleamings is a reminder of how beautiful an aluminum tree can be and makes a perfect gift for lovers of Christmases both real and artificial.

The season finale is here! At long last, the Big Bad stands revealed—Angel is back, and it's tearing the Scoobies apart, testing the limits of their friendship. But Twilight's unmasking is only the beginning, and Buffy must still face the ultimate betrayal. Series creator Joss Whedon writes the final story arc of Buffy Season 8, taking his greatest characters to places only he can! Teamed with series artist Georges Jeanty, Joss reunites the dysfunctional gang of Buffy, Angel, and Spike, in the thick of it together for the first time since Season 3, and gives the Scoobies their gravest challenge ever, defending reality itself from the onslaught of demons. It's the biggest Buffy finale ever! • Collects Buffy Season 8 #36–#40. • This volume also includes the spy-thriller Riley one-shot by Buffy series writer Jane Espenson and artist Karl Moline.

Although the seasons have been a perennial theme in literature and art, their significance for philosophy and environmental theory has remained largely unexplored. This pioneering book demonstrates the ways in which inquiry into the seasons reveals new and illuminating perspectives for philosophy, environmental thought, anthropology, cultural studies, aesthetics, poetics, and literary criticism. The Seasons opens up new avenues for research in these fields and provides a valuable resource for teachers and students of the environmental humanities. The innovative essays herein address a wide range of seasonal cultures and geographies, from the traditional Western model of the four seasons––spring, summer, fall, and winter––to the Indigenous seasons of Australia and the Arctic. Exemplifying the crucial importance of interdisciplinary research, The Seasons makes a compelling case for the relevance of the seasons to our daily lives, scientific understanding, diverse cultural practices, and politics.

Critics since the eighteenth century have puzzled over the form of James Thomson’s composite long poem, The Seasons (1730, 1744, 1746), its generically hybrid make-up, and its relationship to established genres both Classical and modern. The textual condition of the work is complicated by the fact that it started as a stand-alone poem, Winter (1726), but was subsequently expanded—as part of a revision process that lasted almost two decades—through the addition of three further seasons poems. Transforming from primarily devotional poem to georgic account of the role of man’s laboring role in the creation, the meaning of The Seasons shifted with each addition of new material. Each revision introduced diverse subject matter while existing material was reorganized and occasionally moved from one season installment to another. The Genres of Thomson’s The Seasons is the first collection of essays exclusively devoted to the study of the work’s formal heterogeneity, polyvocality, and polygeneric character. All contributions examine the different modes (descriptive, reflective, pastoral, hymnal, amatory, epic, georgic, dramatic), discourses (political, sentimental, scientific), and kinds that cooperate to make up the different installments and variants of The Seasons. They probe the multifarious interactions between different genres and modes and how a renewed focus on the form of Thomson’s long poem will result in an understanding of the processual character of The Seasons as a synthesizing simulacrum of various discourses and theories of composition. The volume’s essays map the generic anatomy of the poem in its different incarnations. They shed light on the poet’s conception of the descriptive long poem and his engaging with formal traditions that would have enabled contemporaneous readers to conceive of The Seasons as an assimilating and learned work to be read through both the works of the Classics and moderns. Contributions revisit models explaining the structural complexity of The Seasons, proposing others in their stead, and consider Thomson as the author of a long poem in relation to other poets both English and (in a transnational study) Swedish. The poem is furthermore contextualized in terms of sexuality and animal studies.

Fire is a fearsome constant in the America West. As the author David J. Strohmaier notes, "Whether we have tended a campfire along Oregon's Deschutes River in March, engaged the advancing front of a Great Basin wildfire in the torrid heat of August, or watched fire settle into the subdued, smoldering leaf piles of October, all of our lives, to one degree or another, are bracketed by fire." In The Seasons of Fire, Strohmaier effectively blends nature writing, personal essay, and philosophical analysis as he deliberately crosses disciplinary boundaries. He discusses the "moral" dimensions of fire—not only whether fires are good, bad, or indifferent phenomena, but also how fire, more generally understood, shapes meaning for human life. The consequences of discussing the moral side of fire speak directly to the contours of the human soul, and to our sense of our place on the land. Strohmaier, a long-term firefighter himself, includes accurate and sometimes gut-wrenching descriptions of the firefighter's experience.