“An amazing real-life perspective on an African safari that has been delightfully shared. Funny and witty. Footsteps well worth following.” –Philip Coetzee, South Africa, Advanced Nature Guide, author of Birds for Beginners. Four friends, all big-city dwellers, embark on their first African safari. An internationally published travel writer and her husband, an award-winning travel photographer, are joined by their life-long friends on a journey to South Africa and Zimbabwe. Previously, their exploration of over 60 countries took them to big cities, architectural masterpieces, and world-class museums around the globe. But this trip is different. Following laborious preparation, they find themselves face to face with the wild animals of the African savannah on their first of several African safari adventures. Traveling in a safari vehicle and on foot around Kruger National Park and Victoria Falls opens a new and exciting world of the animal kingdom to this group of friends. They crisscross the bush and meet African wildlife in its natural habitat. Which predators, grass eaters, branch nibblers, and birds of prey did they find? What did the African safari animals do in the presence of people? How did each traveler behave in unexpected and dangerous situations? How does it feel to be only a few feet away from a pride of lions devouring their kill, a herd of suspicious elephants, an intimidating Cape buffalo, or an unpredictable rhinoceros? In an easy-to-read, conversational style, the author, Alex Shaland, delivers a fair mix of wildlife photography, animal and bird factual data, and practical information. Shaland shares his experiences as a first-time safari explorer and sprinkles the narrative with a good dose of humor and personal stories. Starting out with the preparation for the trip, he talks about the options of safari game reserves, lodges, and vehicles that he and his wife considered and adds a touch of historical information related to the places they chose to visit. Chapters discussing individual animals and birds combine insightful information illustrated by an ample number of author’s photographs with his personal observations. If a trip to Africa is in your plans, this entertaining and informative book, jam-packed with photos of animals and birds, will help you make the first step on the way to your dream. If you like African stories and are interested in wildlife, nature, and animal protection, this story will enrich your knowledge of the animal kingdom. If you already read some of the other African safari books, this one will be a nice addition to your collection. At the very least, it is just fun to read.

The suburban lawn sprouts a crop of contradictory myths. To some, it's a green oasis; to others, it's eco-purgatory. Science writer Hannah Holmes spent a year appraising the lawn through the eyes of the squirrels, crows, worms, and spiders who think of her backyard as their own. Suburban Safari is a fascinating and often hilarious record of her discoveries: that many animals adore the suburban environment, including bears and cougars venturing in from the woods; how plants, in their struggle for dominance, communicate with their own kind and battle other species; and that ways already exist for us to grow healthier, livelier lawns.

Albert Hsu unpacks the spiritual significance of suburbia and explores how suburban culture shapes how we live and practice our faith. With broad historical background and sociological analysis, Hsu offers guidance and hope for all who would seek the welfare of the suburbs.

City planning is a practice and a profession. It is also a set of goals and--sometimes utopian--aspirations. Formal thought about the shaping of cities as physical spaces and social environments calls on the same range of disciplines and approaches that we use for understanding cities themselves, from art and literature through the social and natural sciences. Surrounding the core profession of city planning, also known as urban or town planning, are related fields of architecture, landscape design, engineering, geography, political science and policy, sociology, and social work. In addition, the legions of community and environmental activists influence debates and controversies within the field. This Very Short Introduction is organized around eight key aspects of city planning: street layout; congestion and decentralization; the response to suburbanization; the conservation and regeneration of older districts; cities as natural systems; cities and regions; social class and ethnicity; and disasters and resilience. The underlying assumption throughout is that decisions that we make today about cities and metropolitan regions are best understood as the continuation of past efforts to solve fundamental problems that have shifted and evolved over multiple generations. At its best, city planning utilizes technical tools to achieve goals set by community action and political debate. Carl Abbott's addition to Oxford's long-running Very Short Introduction series is a brief but concentrated look at past decisions about the management of urban growth and their effects on the creation of the twenty-first century city. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

The majority of the world’s population now live in urban areas and the 21st century has been declared as the "urban age". However, closer inspection of where people live in cities, especially within so-called advanced liberal democracies such as Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, reveals that most people live in different types of suburban environments. Drawing together scholars from across the globe, this book provides a series of national, regional, and local case studies from Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Ireland, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States to exemplify the diverse and dynamic nature and importance of suburbia in 21st century urban studies, city-building, and urbanism. This book explores the evolving social, physical, and economic character of the suburbs and how structural processes, market dynamics, and government policies have shaped and transformed suburbia around the world. It highlights the continuing importance of the suburbs and the suburban dream, which lives on albeit under increasing challenges, such as the global financial crisis, structural racism, and the Covid-19 pandemic, which have given rise to various suburban nightmares.

At the time of his death in 1921, John Burroughs (1837-1921) was America’s most beloved nature writer, a best-selling author whose friends and admirers included Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison. Burroughs was second only to Emerson in fostering the nature study movement of the nineteenth- century, and the popularity of his work inspired Houghton Mifflin to publish or reissue the work of numerous other nature writers, including that of Thoreau and Muir. His first collection of essays, Wake-Robin, was published in 1871, and over the next fifty years Burroughs wrote almost two dozen books, and hundreds of essays—not only on nature, but on literature, travel, philosophy, religion, and science. By the turn of the century, Burroughs was America’s most beloved nature writer, whose friends and admirers included Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison. Burroughs died in 1921 while on a train ride back to his New York from California. His final words—"Are we home yet?"—were a remarkably fitting coda to the career of a writer so closely identified with his native Catskill region of New York State. In many of his essays, Burroughs explores the woods and fields of home, and in doing so, like Henry Thoreau and his explorations of Concord, Massachusetts, he transcends the local and examines the universal theme of our relation with nature and our native landscape. Burroughs’s emphasis on "place" and the local now seems modern once again; as the current interest in bioregionalism and climate change demonstrates, it has become increasingly evident that "thinking locally" is "thinking globally." Since 1992, the SUNY College at Oneonta has hosted the biannual John Burroughs Nature Conference and Seminar ('Sharp Eyes'), which honors the influence of Burroughs on American nature writing. Distinguished keynote speakers who have addressed the conference include John Elder, John Tallmadge, Joy Harjo, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Edward Kanze, James Perrin Warren, and Edward J. Renehan, Jr. The scope of the conference is not limited solely to Burroughs, however, as each year the writers and scholars in attendance direct their attention toward a particular issue of significance to contemporary nature writers and scholars of environmental literature. The theme of this collection, "Writing the Land: John Burroughs and his Legacy" was featured in the 2006 conference, and includes essays on John Burroughs as well as essays on the work of other writers who, like Burroughs, are linked closely through their work to a particular landscape or region. The third and final section of this book features invited essays by three distinguished scholars, John Tallmadge, Robert Beuka, and Charlotte Zoë Walker, who consider the topic of what writing about the land and nature means from three different perspectives—urban, suburban, and rural.

"Irene Shaland takes you through the island treasures of the Mediterranean, a part of the ancient and modern Jewish world few of us know. This informative and scholarly book will make you want to start packing!" –Corinne Joy Brown, multi-award winning author and Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies editor HaLapid. Whether you are planning a trip to Malta and Corsica, or just love reading about Jewish communities in the most unlikely and exotic places on earth, this book is for you. Richly illustrated with 186 gorgeous, full-color photos and 12 maps, this guidebook is packed with historical and practical information and: · Illuminates 7,000 years of Malta’s historic past and its amazing present. Reveals Maltese Jewish story from 3,000 years ago when Israelites came to Malta—to the arrival of the Biblical Paul in the 1st century CE—through the dark times of Jewish slavery at the hands of the Knights of St. John’s in the 16th century—to today’s blossoming Jewish community. Did you know that Malta was the only country that admitted Jews without visas during the Holocaust? · Conveys the Jewish story of Corsica within the context of the island’s history and geography. Did you know that in 1763, Corsica was the first country to proclaim equality for the Jews, ahead of the U.S. and France? Do you want to know how the secret power of Omerta (the Mafia’s code of silence) saved thousands of Jews during the Holocaust? · Serves as a practical field guide to Jewish-related sites throughout Malta and Corsica. This guidebook is your best friend when planning your trip and when you arrive at your destination. You will know which sites to visit and how to find them. You will also learn about typical food that reflects the history of each island. Happy reading and traveling!