Photographic portfolios and text essays present the beauty and wonder of the natural world, from the rain forests of the Asian tropics to Antarctica.

If you drive through Mpumalanga with an eye on the landscape flashing by, you may see, near the sides of the road and further away on the hills above and in the valleys below, fragments of building in stone as well as sections of stone-walling breaking the grass cover. Endless stone circles, set in bewildering mazes and linked by long stone passages, cover the landscape stretching from Ohrigstad to Carolina, connecting over 10 000 square kilometres of the escarpment into a complex web of stone-walled homesteads, terraced fields and linking roads. Oral traditions recorded in the early twentieth century named the area Bokoni – the country of the Koni people. Few South Africans or visitors to the country know much about these settlements, and why today they are deserted and largely ignored. A long tradition of archaeological work which might provide some of the answers remains cloistered in universities and the knowledge vacuum has been filled by a variety of exotic explanations – invoking ancient settlers from India or even visitors from outer space – that share a common assumption that Africans were too primitive to have created such elaborate stone structures. Forgotten World defies the usual stereotypes about backward African farming methods and shows that these settlements were at their peak between 1500 and 1820, that they housed a substantial population, organised vast amounts of labour for infrastructural development, and displayed extraordinary levels of agricultural innovation and productivity. The Koni were part of a trading system linked to the coast of Mozambique and the wider world of Indian Ocean trade beyond. Forgotten World tells the story of Bokoni through rigorous historical and archaeological research, and lavishly illustrates it with stunning photographic images.

"The author's search for the annihilated Polish community captured in his grandfather's 1938 home movie. Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, David Kurtz, the author's grandfather, captured three minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland on 16 mm Kodachrome color film. More than seventy years later, through the brutal twists of history, these few minutes of home-movie footage would become a memorial to an entire community--an entire culture--that was annihilated in the Holocaust. Three Minutes in Poland traces Glenn Kurtz's remarkable four-year journey to identify the people in his grandfather's haunting images. His search takes him across the United States; to Canada, England, Poland, and Israel; to archives, film preservation laboratories, and an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield. Ultimately, Kurtz locates seven living survivors from this lost town, including an eighty-six-year-old man who appears in the film as a thirteen-year-old boy. Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, funny, harrowing, and surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven survivors and their Polish hometown. Originally a travel souvenir, David Kurtz's home movie became the sole remaining record of a vibrant town on the brink of catastrophe. From this brief film, Glenn Kurtz creates a riveting exploration of memory, loss, and improbable survival--a monument to a lost world"--

The landscapes of Madagascar have long delighted zoologists, who have discovered, in and among the island’s baobab trees and thickets, a dizzying array of animals, including something approaching one hundred species of lemur. Madagascar’s mammal fauna, for example, is far more diverse, and more endemic, than early explorers and naturalists ever dreamed of. But in the past 2,500 or so years—a period associated with natural climatic shifts and ecological change, as well as partially coinciding with the arrival of the island’s first human settlers—a considerable proportion of Madagascar’s forests have disappeared; and in the wake of this loss, a number of species unique to Madagascar have vanished forever into extinction. In Extinct Madagascar, noted scientists Steven M. Goodman and William L. Jungers explore the recent past of these land animal extinctions. Beginning with an introduction to the geologic and ecological history of Madagascar that provides context for the evolution, diversification, and, in some cases, rapid decline of the Malagasy fauna, Goodman and Jungers then seek to recapture these extinct mammals in their environs. Aided in their quest by artist Velizar Simeonovski’s beautiful and haunting digital paintings—images of both individual species and ecosystem assemblages reproduced here in full color—Goodman and Jungers reconstruct the lives of these lost animals and trace their relationships to those still living. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of Simeonovski’s artwork set to open at the Field Museum, Chicago, in the fall of 2014, Goodman and Jungers’s awe-inspiring book will serve not only as a sobering reminder of the very real threat of extinction, but also as a stunning tribute to Madagascar’s biodiversity and a catalyst for further research and conservation.

Originally inspired by his 1988 adventures in the Gran Sabana of Venezuela, the location for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's book The Lost World, Yeadon begins his odyssey this time in Zaire, searching for the Mountains of the Moon. Then in Central and South America he hacks his way through the jungle of Panama's Darien Gap to study the "Golden Time" ways of the Cuna tribespeople; moves across the vast, flat infinities of Venezuela's Los Llanos, living with the Llancro cowboys and learning their lore; travels on a mule to the great Andean ranges of Merida seeking a wise and elusive hermit; and narrowly avoids disaster in a small two-man yacht, sailing among the towering and virtually unknown fjords, glaciers, and islands of the southern Chilean coast.

Introducing a fabulous sci-fi adventure that will take your reading experience to a whole other level. Author Albert Taylor puts together a super complex adventure where you as the reader decide on how the story develops. Sounds too good to be true; well it’s here and packed with 71 different ways to make or break your story. It’s your story so you decide. The author Albert Taylor has been inspired by sci-fi, even before he could even walk, so this is the masterpiece he has been yearning to create; for a very, very long time. Ever since he was a child he has dreamed of creating his own style of science fiction, and finally it has become a possibility. Much more than just a simple book, the author has packed it with another dream; the dream of converting a simple book into something the reader could take and modify to his or her own desire! If you never liked the end of your favorite story, well here you actually have the option of changing that. You can end the story as tragically or heroically as you want to. You can run or hide, or just confront the multitudes of challenges that will try and end your story.Basically, if you are accustomed to the author leading you by the hand throughout the story to the very end, you will find that it’s not going to happen here. Consider that style to be kindergarten, for readers who depend on someone else telling them that there is no other way to go. Here you will have to come up with your own plan of survival, or face the consequences for reckless decisions. In this story the concept of parallel worlds is looked at in a more drastic, real life type of way. You’re pretty much faced with the big question of, what would I do if I discovered a parallel world. A million things probably come to mind, along with the big question of how to get back home. That’s the story in the nutshell, and you can go many ways, and even end up in some places where you would like to hang out a bit more. You can go that route, but you may find that it’s not at all that easy since your very presence has moved entire worlds! Your presence may have altered a bit more than you may have imagined, but leave that to book II, which is in reality your goal. If you survive and reach book II, then you have successfully reconstructed something compatible to the original story. You may want to get there another way though, which is not at all bad, and you may even be shocked to find out that there was a much better way to get to the end.