Emiko Amai is six years old in August 1945 when the Hiroshima bomb burns away half of her face. To Anton, a young German physicist involved in the Manhattan Project, that same bomb represents the pinnacle of scientific elegance. And for his Austrian wife Sophie, a Jewish refugee, it marks the start of an irreparable fissure in their new marriage. Fifty years later, seemingly far removed from the day that defined their lives, Emiko visits Anton and Sophie, and in Dennis Bock’s powerfully imagined narrative, their histories converge.

Offers a fascinating window into how the fraught politics of apology in the East Asian region have been figured in anglophone literary fiction. The Pacific War, 1941-1945, was fought across the world’s largest ocean and left a lasting imprint on anglophone literary history. However, studies of that imprint or of individual authors have focused on American literature without drawing connections to parallel traditions elsewhere. Beyond Hostile Islands contributes to ongoing efforts by Australasian scholars to place their national cultures in conversation with those of the United States, particularly regarding studies of the ideologies that legitimize warfare. Consecutively, the book examines five of the most significant historical and thematic areas associated with the war: island combat, economic competition, internment, imprisonment, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Throughout, the central issue pivots around the question of how or whether at all New Zealand fiction writing differs from that of the United States. Can a sense of islandness, the ‘tyranny of distance,’ Māori cultural heritage, or the political legacies of the nuclear-free movement provide grounds for distinctive authorial insights? As an opening gambit, Beyond Hostile Islands puts forward the term ‘ideological coproduction’ to describe how a territorially and demographically more minor national culture may accede to the essentials of a given ideology while differing in aspects that reflect historical and provincial dimensions that are important to it. Appropriately, the literary texts under examination are set in various locales, including Japan, the Solomon Islands, New Zealand, New Mexico, Ontario, and the Marshall Islands. The book concludes in a deliberately open-ended pose, with the full expectation that literary writing on the Pacific War will grow in range and richness, aided by the growth of Pacific Studies as a research area.

An interdisciplinary text on the world's savannas, covering the geography, ecology, economics and politics of savanna regions. Savannas are a distinct vegetation type, covering a third of the world's land surface area and supporting a fifth of the world's population. There has been a wide range of literature on the subject, but the majority of work has focused on the ecology or development of savanna areas, ignoring the wider interdisciplinary issues affecting contemporary savannas. World Savannas aims to buck this trend, providing students with an up-to-date and comprehensive introduction to the global importance of savannas.

Miombo woodlands and their use: overview and key issues. The ecology of miombo woodlands. Population biology of miombo tree. Miombo woodlands in the wider context: macro-economic and inter-sectoral influences. Rural households and miombo woodlands: use, value and management. Trade in woodland products from the miombo region. Managing miombo woodland. Institutional arrangements governing the use and the management of miombo woodlands. Miombo woodlands and rural livelihoods: options and opportunities.

Vibrant interviews from the radio program, Open Books

Southern Africa is certainly not a naturally bounded area so that there are several possibilities for delineating it and concepts about its extent. Wellington* discussed the various possibilities for delineation and suggested that one line stands out more clearly and definitely as a physical boundary than any other, namely the South Equatorial Divide, the watershed between the ZaIre, Cuanza and Rufiji Rivers on the one hand and the Z ambezi, Cunene and Rovuma Rivers on the other. This South Equatorial Divide is indeed a major line of separation for some organisms and is also applicable in a certain geographical sense, though it does not possess the slightest significance for many other groups of organisms, ecosystems or geographical and physical features of Africa. The placing of the northern boundary of southern Africa differs in fact strongly per scientific dis cipline and is also influenced by practical considerations regarding the possibilities of scientific work as subordinate to certain political realities and historically grown traditions. This is illustrated, for example, in such works as the Flora of Southern Africa, where the northern boundary of the area is conceived as the northern and eastern political boundaries of South West Africa, South Africa and Swaziland. Botswana, traditionally included in the area covered by the Flora Zambesiaca, thus forms a large wedge in 'Southern Africa'.

The African Husbandman helped a generation of scholars and officials to appreciate that Africans' agricultural practices were both more complex and more malleable than was often thought. Allan's work also pioneered research methods that wedded ethnographic and ecological fieldwork in ways that demonstrated the inextricable links between social arrangements, environmental conditions, and land use patterns. If certain facets of Allan's analysis have now come under scrutiny, his general tenet that to improve agricultural prospects in Africa one first has to understand it from the cultivators' point of view has only been strengthened with time. As long as there are individuals struggling to make sense of African agricultural productivity, The African Husbandman will remain a classic.