An old man's quick thinking saves an entire Japanese fishing village.

The first novel from Madagascar ever to be translated into English, Naivo’s magisterial Beyond the Rice Fields delves into the upheavals of the nation’s precolonial past through the twin narratives of a slave and his master’s daughter. Fara and her father’s slave, Tsito, have shared a tender intimacy since her father bought the young boy who’d been ripped away from his family after their forest village was destroyed. Now in Sahasoa, amongst the cattle and rice fields, everything is new for Tsito, and Fara at last has a companion to play with. But as Tsito looks forward toward the bright promise of freedom and Fara, backward to a twisted, long-denied family history, a rift opens that a rapidly shifting political and social terrain can only widen. As love and innocence fall away, their world becomes defined by what tyranny and superstition both thrive upon: fear. With captivating lyricism and undeniable urgency, Naivo crafts an unsentimental interrogation of the brutal history of nineteenth-century Madagascar as a land newly exposed to the forces of Christianity and modernity, and preparing for a violent reaction against them. Beyond the Rice Fields is a tour de force about the global history of human bondage and the competing narratives that keep us from recognizing ourselves and each other, our pasts and our destinies.

This book discusses the important issue of the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of agricultural residue burning, common in agricultural practices in many parts of the world. In particular, it focuses on the pollution caused by rice residue burning using primary survey data from Punjab, India. It discusses emerging solutions to agricultural waste burning that are cost-effective in terms of both money and time. The burning of agricultural residue causes severe pollution in land, water and air and contributes to increased ozone levels and climate change in the long term. However, appropriate assessments have not been undertaken so far to demonstrate the relevant impact of agriculture-based pollution, especially residue burning. This book addresses this gap in the literature. Punjab has been used as a case study as it is the chief granary of India, contributing to 27.2 percent of the Indian national produce of rice and 43.8 percent of wheat. It is presumed that the findings from this state will be useful not only for other agricultural areas in India, but across the world. This book, therefore, sensitizes policy makers, researchers and students about the impacts of air pollution caused by agricultural residue burning---a subject not much dealt in the literature---and provides a way forward.

"The basis for this book began twenty years ago when I enrolled in the College of Charleston's summer archaeological field school. After spending the first half of the semester honing our technique by digging five-foot by five-foot units, identifying soil stratigraphy, and collecting artifacts at the Charleston Museum's Stono Plantation, the archaeologists reoriented us students to a new site. For the remainder of the field school we investigated Willtown Bluff on the Edisto River, an early-eighteenth century township surrounded by plantations. My interest in inland rice cultivation grew from our work at the James Stobo site, a 1710 plantation located on the edge of the Willtown township and one mile from the tidal river. For three archaeological seasons between 1997 and 1999, I participated in excavations of the Stobo Plantation house foundation located on a hardwood knoll surrounded by a sea of low-lying Cypress wetlands. During this time, I had a unique opportunity to walk off the dry terra firma and explore miles of inland rice embankments sprawling to the east and to the south of the house site. Major embankments traverse the wetlands on a magnetic north/south and east/west axis, intersected by smaller check banks and drainage canals as far as the eye can see under the dense cypress and hardwood canopy"--