The Language of the Skies chronicles one of the most bitter crises in French-English relations in Canada: the bilingual air traffic control conflict which arose in the mid-1970s when francophone controllers and pilots attempted to use French, as well as English, in Québec aviation.

Thomas Owens explores some of the exultant visions inspired by Wordsworth's and Coleridge's close scrutiny of the night sky, the natural world, and the domains of science. He examines a set of scientific patterns drawn from natural, geometric, celestial, and astronomical sources which Wordsworth and Coleridge used to express their ideas about poetry, religion, literary criticism, and philosophy, and establishes the central importance of analogy in their creative thinking. Analogies prompted the poets' imaginings in geometry and cartography, in nature (representations of the moon) and natural history (studies of spider-webs, streams, and dew), in calculus and conical refraction, and in the discovery of infra-red and ultraviolet light. Although this is primarily a study of the patterns which inspired their writing, the findings overturn the prevalent critical consensus that Wordsworth and Coleridge did not have the access, interest, or capacity to understand the latest developments in nineteenth-century astronomy and mathematics, which they did in fact possess. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and 'the language of the heavens' reinstates many relationships which the poets had with scientists and their sources. Most significantly, the book illustrates that these sources are not simply another context or historical lens through which to engage with Wordsworth's and Coleridge's work but are instead a controlling device of the symbolic imagination. Exploring the structures behind Wordsworth's and Coleridge's poems and metaphysics stakes out a return to the evidence of the Romantic imagination, not for its own sake, but in order to reveal that their analogical configuration of the world provided them with a scaffold for thinking, an intellectual orrery which ordered artistic consciousness and which they never abandoned.

A boy’s nomadic life in Mongolia is under threat in a novel that “captures the mountains, valleys and steppes in all their surpassing beauty and brutality” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). In the high Altai Mountains of northern Mongolia, a young shepherd boy comes of age, tending his family’s flocks on the mountain steppes and knowing little of the world beyond the surrounding peaks. But his nomadic way of life is increasingly disrupted by modernity. This confrontation comes in stages. First, his older siblings leave the family yurt to attend a distant boarding school. Then the boy’s grandmother dies, and with her his connection to the old ways. But perhaps the greatest tragedy strikes when his dog, Arsylang—“all that was left to me”—ingests poison set out by the boy’s father to protect his herd from wolves. “Why is it so?” Dshurukawaa cries out in despair to the Heavenly Blue Sky, to be answered only by the wind. Rooted in the oral traditions of the Tuvan people, The Blue Sky weaves the timeless story of a boy poised on the cusp of manhood with the story of a people on the threshold. “Thrilling. . . . Tschinag makes it easy for his readers to fall into the beautiful rhythms of the Tuvans’ daily life.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review “In this pristine and concentrated tale of miraculous survival and anguished loss, Tschinag evokes the nurturing warmth of a family within the circular embrace of a yurt as an ancient way of life lived in harmony with nature becomes endangered.” —Booklist

Presents the story of Luke Howard, an ameteur meterologist, and his groundbreaking work that began with naming and classifying clouds.

From the time of Aristotle until the late eighteenth century, meteorology meant the study of "meteors"—spectacular objects in the skies beneath the moon, which included everything from shooting stars to hailstorms. In Reading the Skies, Vladimir Jankovic traces the history of this meteorological tradition in Enlightenment Britain, examining its scientific and cultural significance. Jankovic interweaves classical traditions, folk/popular beliefs and practices, and the increasingly quantitative approaches of urban university men to understanding the wonders of the skies. He places special emphasis on the role that detailed meteorological observations played in natural history and chorography, or local geography; in religious and political debates; and in agriculture. Drawing on a number of archival sources, including correspondence and weather diaries, as well as contemporary pamphlets, tracts, and other printed sources reporting prodigious phenomena in the skies, this book will interest historians of science, Britain, and the environment.

Journeying between the stars and planets in the discovery of the universe.