Trefil's preeminent reputation for explaining complex, scientific principles in an engaging and lucid manner results in a most fascinating and elegantly guided tour through mountains and the natural and scientific world. 23 black-and-white photographs. 71 line drawings.

Like the adventurer who circled an iceberg to see it on all sides, Mariana Gosnell, former Newsweek reporter and author of Zero Three Bravo, a book about flying a small plane around the United States, explores ice in all its complexity, grandeur, and significance.More brittle than glass, at times stronger than steel, at other times flowing like molasses, ice covers 10 percent of the earth’s land and 7 percent of its oceans. In nature it is found in myriad forms, from the delicate needle ice that crunches underfoot in a winter meadow to the massive, centuries-old ice that forms the world’s glaciers. Scientists theorize that icy comets delivered to Earth the molecules needed to get life started, and ice ages have shaped much of the land as we know it.Here is the whole world of ice, from the freezing of Pleasant Lake in New Hampshire to the breakup of a Vermont river at the onset of spring, from the frozen Antarctic landscape that emperor penguins inhabit to the cold, watery route bowhead whales take between Arctic ice floes. Mariana Gosnell writes about frostbite and about the recently discovered 5,000-year-old body of a man preserved in an Alpine glacier. She discusses the work of scientists who extract cylinders of Greenland ice to study the history of the earth’s climate and try to predict its future. She examines ice in plants, icebergs, icicles, and hail; sea ice and permafrost; ice on Mars and in the rings of Saturn; and several new forms of ice developed in labs. She writes of the many uses humans make of ice, including ice-skating, ice fishing, iceboating, and ice climbing; building ice roads and seeding clouds; making ice castles, ice cubes, and iced desserts. Ice is a sparkling illumination of the natural phenomenon whose ebbs and flows over time have helped form the world we live in. It is a pleasure to read, and important to read—for its natural science and revelations about ice’s influence on our everyday lives, and for what it has to tell us about our environment today and in the future.

One of the world’s most beloved and bestselling writers takes his ultimate journey -- into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer. In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trail -- well, most of it. In In A Sunburned Country, he confronted some of the most lethal wildlife Australia has to offer. Now, in his biggest book, he confronts his greatest challenge: to understand -- and, if possible, answer -- the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world’s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, travelling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. Science has never been more involving or entertaining.

Provides information on ideas concerning people, places, ideas, and events currently under discussion, including gene therapy, NAFTA, pheromones, and Kwanzaa.

A radical approach to the environment which argues that by harnessing the power of science for human benefit, we can have a healthier planet As a prizewinning theoretical physicist and an outspoken advocate for scientific literacy, James Trefil has long been the public's guide to a better understanding of the world. In this provocative book, Trefil looks squarely at our environmental future and finds-contrary to popular wisdom-reason to celebrate. For too long, Trefil argues, humans have treated nature as something separate from themselves-pristine wilderness to be saved or material resources to be exploited. What we need instead is a scientific approach to the environment that embraces the human transformation of nature for our benefit. In Human Nature, Trefil exposes the benefits of genetically modified species, uncovers vital facts about droughts and global warming, and points to examples of environmental management where catering to humans reaps greater rewards than sheltering other species. By taking advantage of explosive advances in the sciences, we can fruitfully manage the planet, if we rise to the challenge. Like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb, Human Nature promises to fundamentally alter the way we perceive our relationship to the Earth-but with optimism rather than alarm.

The essays in this book, written by poets, novelists, mountain-climbers and academics from all over the world, evoke the representation of mountains in the English-speaking world as artists, writers, philosophers or mountain-climbers have represented them from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. From the Alps to the Pyrenees, from Mount Fuji to Mount Shasta, from the Himalayas to the Scottish Highlands, from Ikere in Nigeria to Devil's Tower in the United States, from Uluru in Australia to the most northern mountain of the Arctic, the shapes of the world speak the same language and tell the world its own story. This interdisciplinary book, weaving together mountaineering, literature, philosophy, painting, cinema, ecology, history, palaeontology, geography, geopolitics, toponymy, law, religion and myth, invites people to an innovative reading of mountains: it reveals the close relationship existing between the shapes of the world and all forms of writing and, at the same time, it shows how the representations of the imagination may be instrumental in protecting the natural world. The story told by the landscape inscribes a broken line in the shapes of the world, tearing the landscape like a fragile page whenever historical and political events (wars, mining or deforestation) leave scars in the landscape; but writers' and artists' representations of mountains constitute a path to awareness as they are not only a painting of beauty, but an image of our link to nature and a warning as well. For centuries the image of the mountain has conveyed a symbolism telling the story of human thought, and this book shows to what extent literature and art play an essential part in our awareness of nature.

Whether in the bleakest moment of bidding goodbye to her dying father or in the pain she hears as she counsels gay youth, Tarbox's ears and eyes are attuned to the hopes and the solace that she finds in nature -- in the gentle sounds in a stand of pines, in the intensive chore of splitting wood. These meditations will comfort and inspire. Part of the UUA Meditation Manual series.