Gardening with Native Grasses in Cold Climates, is written for inexperienced as well as seasoned gardeners, landscape designers, garden center employees, and anyone interested in native grasses that grow well in cold climates. New information on the benefits of native grasses including their importance as host plants for native Lepidoptera is included. Combinations of specific grasses used by larvae and perennials that the adult butterflies feed on is new and timely information.

The demand for renewable energies from biomass is growing steadily as policies are enacted to encourage such development and as industry increasingly sees an opportunity to develop bio-energy enterprises. Recent policy changes in the EU, USA and other countries are spurring interest in the cultivation of energy crops such as switchgrass. Switchgrass has gained and early lead in the race to find a biomass feedstock for energy production (and for the almost requisite need for bio-based products from such feedstocks). Switchgrass: A Valuable Biomass Crop for Energy provides a comprehensive guide to the biology, physiology, breeding, culture and conversion of switchgrass as well as highlighting various environmental, economic and social benefits. Considering this potential energy source, Switchgrass: A Valuable Biomass Crop for Energy brings together chapters from a range of experts in the field, including a foreword from Kenneth P. Vogel, to collect and present the environmental benefits and characteristics of this a crop with the potential to mitigate the risks of global warming by replacing fossil fuels. Including clear figures and tables to support discussions, Switchgrass: A Valuable Biomass Crop for Energy provides a solid reference for anyone with interest or investment in the development of bioenergy; researchers, policy makers and stakeholders will find this a key resource.

Perennial Grasses for Bioenergy and Bioproducts: Production, Uses, Sustainability and Markets for Giant Reed, Miscanthus, Switchgrass, Reed Canary Grass and Bamboo brings together a team of international authors to explore the current utilization, sustainability and future perspectives of perennial grasses in the bioeconomy. The book begins by examining the role of these crops as feedstock for bioenergy, in particular advanced biofuels and bioproducts. It then offers five chapters, each covering one perennial grass type, namely giant reed, miscanthus, switchgrass, reed canary grass and bamboo. The book covers their breeding, cultivation, harvesting, pre-treatment, economics and characterization. The book goes on to present the thermochemical conversion pathways for different types of feedstock. The last chapter explores issues concerning sustainability of perennial grasses, including their production in marginal lands. This thorough overview is a helpful reference for engineering researchers and professionals in the bioenergy sector, whose understanding of feedstock characterization, sustainability and production is critical in the development of conversion technologies. Those in the industrial crops sector will benefit from discussion of various issues surrounding crop production, which can guide their feedstock cultivation, harvesting and pre-treatment for specific conversion processes or end use. The book is also a useful resource for instructors and students in Masters and PhD programs in the area of biomass and energy crops. Policy makers and government agents involved in regulating the bioenergy and bioproducts sector will find comprehensive information to guide their decision making. - Explores the whole value chain of grassy feedstock for advanced biofuels and bioproducts, from cultivation to end use, including biomass characterization (physical properties, chemical composition, etc.) and conversion and sustainability - Examines the sustainability and economic factors related to perennial grasses and their conversion into biofuels and bioproducts - Includes a complete list of grasses relevant for energy uses, and tables with their current and expected future uses and markets

During a deadly Chicago heat wave that's claiming hundreds of lives, Robert, who's stuck in his apartment alone, fears he's going to be the next victim. In the apartment above him lives a shell-shocked Vietnam veteran who talks obsessively about the corpses of his war experience while alternately listening to Die Meistersinger and Madama Butterfly. One day, Robert ventures forth into the searing heat to gas up his car. Immediately he encounters enigmatic Lucy who is trying to escape her brutal fiancé, Matthew Gliss. On a whim, Lucy invites Robert to her apartment where she shows him her mysterious tattoo and tells him of her dangerous life with Matthew Gliss. She warns Robert that if Matthew ever catches them together he should run, not walk, because Matthew won't think twice of killing him. So begins the risky, short-lived relationship that leads to a chilling climax. Each of Robert's increasingly hallucinatory recollections of what happened during the heat wave leads him to profoundly question his own culpability.

Donald Lystra's first novel, Something That Feels Like Truth, was the winner of the 2009 Midwest Book Award for fiction. This volume gathers a bracing selection of short stories by Lystra that are cut from the same cloth as his highly acclaimed novel. The stories in Something That Feels Like Truth confound expected plot turns, and Lystra develops his characters patiently and naturally, bringing them into convincing and honest actions. Every plot point in every story here holds an integral part in the imbuing of its beauty and meaning. You can also tell Lystra has read a lot of Hemingway and Chekhov: and that he aspires to be an inheritor of their effectively concise tradition. But there's a touch of Cheever in Lystra's stories as well: what that master storyteller did for the suburbs of New York, Lystra does for the Midwest.

Nancy Zafris is a critically acclaimed writer because of the highly distinctive, piercing intelligence that underlies her works. Her gifts accumulate in a vision that somehow combines just the right amount of irony, subtle humor, and compassion for characters you won't see anywhere else in contemporary fiction. Those characters are emotionally all over the map too: resolute, sympathetic, and indelible—their stories can be laugh-out-loud funny one minute and bittersweet the next. In The Home Jar, Zafris reconfirms herself to be among the keenest observers of the human condition around. This is her first short story collection since the critically acclaimed The People I Know, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and her most famous work, the New York Times notable novel The Metal Shredders. Zafris's very loyal following of readers will herald The Home Jar as a major event in American letters.

On April 19, 1995, a truck bomb exploded just outside of Oklahoma City's Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 people. Within a matter of hours, the FBI launched the largest manhunt in U.S. history, identifying the suspects as Timothy James McVeigh and John Doe No. 2, a stocky twentysomething with a distinctive tattoo on his left arm. Eventually the FBI retracted the elusive mystery man as a bombing suspect altogether, proclaiming that McVeigh had acted alone and that John Doe No. 2 was the byproduct of unreliable eyewitness testimony in the wake of the attack. Womack recreates the events that led up to this fateful day from the perspective of John Doe No. 2—or JD, as he is referred to in the book. With his ironic and curiously detached persona, JD narrates—from a second-person point of view—his secret life with McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and others in America's militia culture as McVeigh and JD crisscross the Midwest in McVeigh's beloved Chevy Geo Spectrum. John Doe No. 2 and the Dreamland Motel is the tragicomic account of McVeigh's last desperate months of freedom as he prepared to unleash one of the deadliest acts of domestic terrorism in the nation's history. Womack's novel traces one man's downward spiral toward the act of evil that will brand his name in infamy and another's desperate hope to save his friend's soul before it's too late.