"A treasure trove of delightful stories, filled with wit, wisdom, and know-how for all gardens—a rare horticultural treat." —Carl H. Klaus, author of My Vegetable Love and Weathering Winter Amy Stewart had a simple dream. She yearned for a garden filled with colorful jumbles of vegetables and flowers. After she and her husband finished graduate school, they pulled up their Texas roots and headed west to Santa Cruz, California. With little money in their pockets, they rented a modest seaside bungalow with a small backyard. It wasn't much—a twelve-hundred-square-foot patch of land with a couple of fruit trees, and a lot of dirt. A good place to start. From the Ground Up is Stewart's quirky, humorous chronicle of the blossoms and weeds in her first garden and the lessons she's learned the hard way. From planting seeds her great-grandmother sends to battling snails, gophers, and aphids, Stewart takes us on a tour of four seasons in her coastal garden. Confessing her sins and delighting in small triumphs, she dishes the dirt for both the novice and the experienced gardener. Along the way, she brings her quintessential California beach town to life—complete with harbor seals, monarch butterfly migrations, and an old-fashioned seaside amusement park just down the street. Each chapter includes helpful tips alongside the engaging story of a young woman's determination to create a garden in which the plants struggle to live up to the gardener's vision.

Cole (director, California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation's Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment) and Foster (law, Rutgers University) examine the movement for environmental justice in the United States. Tracing the movement's roots and illustrating the historical and contemporary causes of environmental racism, they combine their analysis with a narrative account of struggles from around the country--including those in Kettleman City, California, Chester, Pennsylvania, and Dilkon, Arizona. In so doing, they consider the transformative effects this movement has had on individuals, communities, and environmental policy. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Paris is the most personal of cities. There is a Paris for the medievalist, and another for the modernistÑa Paris for expatriates, philosophers, artists, romantics, and revolutionaries of every stripe. James H. S. McGregor brings these multiple perspectives into focus throughout this concise, unique history of the City of Light. His panorama begins with an ancient Gallic fortress on the Seine, burned to the ground by its own defenders in a vain effort to starve out CaesarÕs legions. After ninth-century raids by the Vikings ended, Parisians expanded the walls of their tiny sanctuary on the Ile de la CitŽ, turning the riverÕs right bank into a thriving commercial district and the Rive Gauche into a college town. Gothic spires expressed a taste for architectural novelty, matched only by the palaces and pleasure gardens of successive monarchs whose ingenuity made Paris the epitome of everything French. The fires of Revolution threatened all that had come before, but Baron Haussmann saw opportunity in the wreckage. No planned city in the world is more famous than his. Paris from the Ground Up allows readers to trace the cityÕs evolution in its architecture and artÑfrom the Roman arena to the MusŽe dÕOrsay, from the LouvreÕs defensive foundations to I. M. PeiÕs transparent pyramids. Color maps, along with identifying illustrations, make the city accessible to visitors by foot, Metro, or riverboat.

Metaphor from the Ground Up introduces Conceptual Filtering Theory, a theory of mental processing that describes figurative language communication in terms of conceptual domain projection and contextual disambiguation. In an attempt to match theoretical observations from cognitive semantics and pragmatics with related knowledge about mental processes from cognitive neuroscience, CFT first examines the distributed nature of conceptualization and then uses this background information to explain metonymic “binding” and metaphoric “mapping.” Once the perceptual origins of metonymy and metaphor have been demonstrated, CFT offers a detailed account of how salient aspects of conceptualization differentially combine to achieve predictable inferencing results in linguistic communication. In addition, CFT characterizes the role of contextual effects in pruning salient inferencing options and demonstrates how situational frames can be manipulated to guide semantic outcomes. The book as a whole will assert that figurative language processing cannot be characterized in terms of a generically constituted base system that receives inputs and spits out predictable results according to logical probability in a situational vacuum. Rather, it is a dynamic, context-sensitive process that continually reweights the underlying system so as to rapidly select situation-relevant lines of inferencing from among a variety of salient inferencing options.

Venice came to life on spongy mudflats at the edge of the habitable world. Protected in a tidal estuary from barbarian invaders and Byzantine overlords, the fishermen, salt gatherers, and traders who settled there crafted an amphibious way of life unlike anything the Roman Empire had ever known. In an astonishing feat of narrative history, James H. S. McGregor recreates this world-turned-upside-down, with its waterways rather than roads, its boats tethered alongside dwellings, and its livelihood harvested from the sea. McGregor begins with the river currents that poured into the shallow Lagoon, carving channels in its bed and depositing islands of silt. He then describes the imaginative responses of Venetians to the demands and opportunities of this harsh environment—transforming the channels into canals, reclaiming salt marshes for the construction of massive churches, erecting a thriving marketplace and stately palaces along the Grand Canal. Through McGregor’s eyes, we witness the flowering of Venice’s restless creativity in the elaborate mosaics of St. Mark’s soaring basilica, the expressive paintings in smaller neighborhood churches, and the colorful religious festivals—but also in theatrical productions, gambling casinos, and masked revelry, which reveal the city’s less pious and orderly face. McGregor tells his unique history of Venice by drawing on a crumbling, tide-threatened cityscape and a treasure-trove of art that can still be seen in place today. The narrative follows both a chronological and geographical organization, so that readers can trace the city’s evolution chapter by chapter and visitors can explore it district by district on foot and by boat.

A Brookings Institution Press and Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation publication This book is based on a simple concept: no one is in a better position to hold a government accountable than those it governs. When governments fail to meet the needs of their citizens, the international community often turns to large external organizations such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank. These analysts and monitors may have the resources and expertise to analyze and advise on public spending and governance, but where do they go when the time comes to implement new policies? And can they really have a more nuanced understanding of the country's problems than its own citizens? Who is there to watch day and night to hold the government accountable? From the Ground Up proposes that the international community's efforts to improve public expenditure and budget execution decisions would be more effective if done in collaboration with local independent monitoring organizations. Stephen Kosack, Courtney Tolmie, and Charles Griffin track the work of sixteen independent monitoring organizations from across the developing world, demonstrating how these relatively small groups of local researchers produce both thoughtful analysis and workable solutions. They achieve these results because their vantage point allows them to more effectively discern problems with governance and to communicate with their fellow citizens about the ideals and methods of good governance. The authors also outline some disadvantages facing independent monitoring organizations, such as insufficient resources, inadequate access to data, and too little influence with high government officials. Collaboration with larger international organizations could help independent monitoring organizations overcome such obstacles, increasing their chances of improving governance—from the ground up.