While we New Zealanders live off the cow's back, our long-term economic prognosis looks grim. Our economic growth lags behind Australia and other countries in the OECD. Our universities fall each year in international rankings. We export 24 per cent of our university graduates. The country's lack-lustre economic performance following the free-market reforms of the 1980s is often cast as a paradox: why haven't sound economic policies led to growth? In this book two of New Zealand's leading thinkers tell us to 'get off the grass!' - and explain how we might do so. Shuan Hendy and Paul Callaghan argue that the New Zealand 'paradox' can be explained by our struggle to innovate. On a per-capita basis, OECD countries on average produce four times as many patents as New Zealand. Why is this? What determines a country's capacity for innovation? Shaun Hendy and Paul Callaghan take a quantitative look at how innovation works both in New Zealand and around the world. They show that economic geography plays a key role in determining rates of innovation and productivity. If New Zealand is to grow its economy more rapidly it must overcome geography to build nationwide communities of innovators, entrepreneurs and businesses. It must get off the grass and diversify its economy beyond the primary sector. Hendy and Callaghan pose deep challenges to the country: Can New Zealand learn to innovate like a city of four million people? Can New Zealand become a place where talent wants to live? Can we learn to live off knowledge rather than nature? Are we willing to take science seriously? In a brilliant intellectual adventure that takes us from David Ricardo and Adam Smith to economic geography and the science of complex networks, Shaun Hendy and Paul Callaghan pose the tough questions and provide some powerful answers for New Zealand's future.

Describes marijuana, traces its history, and explains its adverse effects upon the lungs, reproductive function, immune system, and brain

Appeared on best of the year lists from The New York Times, The Guardian, and more! Winner of The Cartoonist Studio Prize for Best Print Comic of the Year! Grass is a powerful antiwar graphic novel, telling the life story of a Korean girl named Okseon Lee who was forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War—a disputed chapter in twentieth-century Asian history. Beginning in Lee’s childhood, Grass shows the lead-up to the war from a child’s vulnerable perspective, detailing how one person experienced the Japanese occupation and the widespread suffering it entailed for ordinary Koreans. Keum Suk Gendry-Kim emphasizes Lee’s strength in overcoming the many forms of adversity she experienced. Grass is painted in a black ink that flows with lavish details of the beautiful fields and farmland of Korea and uses heavy brushwork on the somber interiors of Lee’s memories. The cartoonist Gendry-Kim’s interviews with Lee become an integral part of Grass, forming the heart and architecture of this powerful nonfiction graphic novel and offering a holistic view of how Lee’s wartime suffering changed her. Grass is a landmark graphic novel that makes personal the desperate cost of war and the importance of peace.

With a direct, bold and sometimes irreverent style, Health Coach and Personal Trainer Scott Graham challenges you to get rid of your riding lawnmower and practice what he calls "fitness mowing". Persuasively written and interspersed with engaging anecdotes from the author's own experience, this book will entertain and motivate you to push your way to better health and fitness.

On any list of the world's most pressing problems, water scarcity and water quality inevitably rank high. These issues and their related concerns often emerge in the major topics of the day, including Walkerton, free trade and globalization debates and drought. Despite all the pessimism surrounding the future of the world's drinking water, many predicaments can be remedied with simple conservation methods. Home-based water conservation starts with How to Get Your Lawn Off Grass, the only North America-wide guide on how to convert your yard from a water-sucking source of pollution runoff to a flourishing, productive showcase of natural vegetation. While 1.3 billion people on the planet don't have access to safe drinking water, 60% of ours goes into conventional turf-grass lawns and ornamental, exotic gardens. Runoff from chemical treatment of lawns and gardens has seriously compromised groundwater supplies everywhere in the United States and Canada. We have put garden cosmetics ahead of our health. How to Get Your Lawn Off Grass teaches how to conserve water and prevent the pollution of groundwater. It covers how to cut, roll up and compost turf-grass lawn (and water-sucking, ornamental "exotic" garden plants) and how to replace them with gorgeous native ground covers: flowers, shrubs, trees and grasses that will need no fertilizers, no chemical controls for pests, no mowing and, after the first year, no watering. This is a vital publication for all North Americans who are concerned about water scarcity and water quality.

What do you do when you are a twenty-five-year-old Yale graduate making half-a-million dollars a year as a hotshot investment banker on Wall Street? You bust your ass and become a millionaire by thirty, of course.Not if you are Samrat Ratan, born in the USA to immigrant Indian parents; you quit and enrol in business school in India instead.Samrat's rollercoaster journey begins at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Bangalore, where he spends his time getting high on marijuana while his grades - and self-confidence - plummet. Soon, Samrat's quest for identity turns increasingly bizarre as it takes him places he hadn't planned on visiting - prison, for example - and makes him do things he hadn't banked on doing: 'meditating' stoned with a sexy Danish hippie in the Himalayas, hanging out with a cannibal on the banks of the Ganga, and peddling soap to the formidable Raja Bhaiya in Benares. Does Samrat - Yale valedictorian, investment banker, convict, pothead - survive his fall from grace?

Wolfgang Koeppen’s postwar masterpiece in a luminous new translation by the poet Michael Hofmann Pigeons on the Grass is told over a single day in Munich in 1948. The first new cinemas and insurance offices are opening atop the ruins, Korea and Persia are keeping the world in panic, planes rumble in the sky (but no one looks up), newspaper headlines announce war over oil and atomic bomb tests. Odysseus Cotton, a black man, alights at the station and hires a porter; Frau Behrend disowns her daughter; with their interracial love affair, Carla Behrend and Washington Price scandalize their neighbors—who still expect gifts of chocolate and coffee; a boy hustles to sell a stray dog; Mr. Edwin, a visiting poet, prepares for a reading; Philipp gives himself up to despair; Emilia sells the last of her jewelry; Alexander stars as the Archduke in a new German Super-production; and Susanne seeks out a night to remember. In Michael Hofmann’s words, “in their sum, they are the totality of existence.” Koeppen spares no one and sees all in this penetrating and intense novel that surveys those who remain, and those who have just arrived, in a damaged society. As inventive as Joyce and as compulsively readable as Dickens, Pigeons on the Grass is a great lost classic.