Austin Clarke’s luminous novel, written in vivid, hypnotic prose, reveals the dislocations of place and the nature of memory and the past. Two elderly Barbadian men, childhood friends who haven’t seen each other in fifty years, collide in a snowstorm on a Toronto street. In the warmth of a nearby bar, through the afternoon and into the night, they relate stories, exchange opinions, and share memories of a past in Barbados when, as children, neither could conceive any other place existed for them. As these two men confess to each other their innermost truths, their exploits and their love affairs, one tells the haunting story of a young Chinese woman, the other of the real reason for his visit to Toronto. Infused with pathos and humour, and with an affecting nostalgia for the idea of home, The Origin of Waves is a stunning and original novel by one of the country’s most gifted writers.

Fischer has examined price records in many nations, and finds that great waves of rising prices in the 13th-, 16th-, 18th-, and 20th centuries were all marked by price swings of increasing volatility, falling wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, and an increase in violent crime, family disintegration, and cultural despair. 109 graphs & charts. 7 maps.

"Per the UK publisher William Collins's promotional copy: "There is a quarter of this planet which is often forgotten in the histories that are told in the West. This quarter is an oceanic one, pulsating with winds and waves, tides and coastlines, islands and beaches. The Indian and Pacific Oceans constitute that forgotten quarter, brought together here for the first time in a sustained work of history." More specifically, Sivasundaram's aim in this book is to revisit the Age of Revolutions and Empire from the perspective of the Global South. Waves Across the South ranges from the Arabian Sea across the Indian Ocean to the Bay of Bengal, and onward to the South Pacific and Australia's Tasman Sea. As the Western empires (Dutch, French, but especially British) reached across these vast regions, echoes of the European revolutions rippled through them and encountered a host of indigenous political developments. Sivasundaram also opens the door to new and necessary conversations about environmental history in addition to the consequences of historical violence, the extraction of resources, and the indigenous futures that Western imperialism cut short"--

Schrödinger's Universe: Einstein, Waves and the Origin of the Natural Laws Erwin Schrodinger (1937) perceived that the whole Universe, what we observe as material bodies and forces, are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. When he and Einstein debated the particle theorists led by Neils Bohr, most scientists thought they had lost it. This book shows they were right; that all matter is one Wave Structure in the space of the Universe. If the stars did not exist, we could not exist.

A biography of a staple grain we often take for granted, exploring how wheat went from wild grass to a world-shaping crop. At breakfast tables and bakeries, we take for granted a grain that has made human civilization possible, a cereal whose humble origins belie its world-shaping power: wheat. Amber Waves tells the story of a group of grass species that first grew in scattered stands in the foothills of the Middle East until our ancestors discovered their value as a source of food. Over thousands of years, we moved their seeds to all but the polar regions of Earth, slowly cultivating what we now know as wheat, and in the process creating a world of cuisines that uses wheat seeds as a staple food. Wheat spread across the globe, but as ecologist Catherine Zabinski shows us, a biography of wheat is not only the story of how plants ensure their own success: from the earliest bread to the most mouthwatering pasta, it is also a story of human ingenuity in producing enough food for ourselves and our communities. Since the first harvest of the ancient grain, we have perfected our farming systems to grow massive quantities of food, producing one of our species’ global mega crops—but at a great cost to ecological systems. And despite our vast capacity to grow food, we face problems with undernourishment both close to home and around the world. Weaving together history, evolution, and ecology, Zabinski’s tale explores much more than the wild roots and rise of a now-ubiquitous grain: it illuminates our complex relationship with our crops, both how we have transformed the plant species we use as food, and how our society—our culture—has changed in response to the need to secure food sources. From the origins of agriculture to gluten sensitivities, from our first selection of the largest seeds from wheat’s wild progenitors to the sequencing of the wheat genome and genetic engineering, Amber Waves sheds new light on how we grow the food that sustains so much human life.