Life is splashing along for Hooker, as he cruises the South end of San Jose in his custom built 1959 Marmon tow-truck with his trusty side-kick Box, snoring between the seats. The serious end of fall has settled into a myriad of jumpstarts and drivers re-learning how to park in the middle of rain-washed freeways. Blood ally is working overtime on its name. A rash of “suicide by oncoming car” takes over as IBM starts another round of layoffs that runs a cold blade through the lower ribs of the indentured Santa Clara valley. Mudslides make recoveries of wrecks over cliffs—dicey; and the unusual cold has done unkind things to many people. But for Hooker and the local police—it is just another fall with colder rain. A car recovery over a muddy cliff turns up a dead body; or more exactly—four skeletons, and bags of curious jewelry and gold statues. It would all be a “walk away” for Hooker, but one of the skeletons is sporting a watch and dog tags that make it personal; very personal. And then Hooker desperately wishes for the warmth of summer. The Squirt is back and gets some hot attention, as some old bones heat up a cold case that never saw the light of day. This could change everything.

This collection offers an in-depth look at Cora Diamond’s distinctive approach to ethics and its philosophical significance. It comprises a new essay by Cora Diamond on the policing of concepts, followed by ten original chapters by world-class scholars covering conceptual loss, moral theory, the category of the human, the moral consideration of animals, and the meaning of narcissism. Including comparisons to the work of other contemporary moral philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum, Jeff McMahan, Rai Gaita, Eva Kittay, Christine Korsgaard, and Edward Harcourt, the volume also creates interdisciplinary links between Diamond’s work and other fields of study, including psychoanalysis and contemporary ethology. Showcasing the vital importance of Diamond’s contribution to philosophy, this volume is essential reading for scholars working in ethics, philosophy of language and literature.

How worldwide plant circulation and new botanical ideas enabled Americans to radically re-envision politics and society The Garden Politic argues that botanical practices and discourses helped nineteenth-century Americans engage pressing questions of race, gender, settler colonialism, and liberal subjectivity. In the early republic, ideas of biotic distinctiveness helped fuel narratives of American exceptionalism. By the nineteenth century, however, these ideas and narratives were unsettled by the unprecedented scale at which the United States and European empires prospected for valuable plants and exchanged them across the globe. Drawing on ecocriticism, New Materialism, environmental history, and the history of science—and crossing disciplinary and national boundaries—The Garden Politic shows how new ideas about cultivation and plant life could be mobilized to divergent political and social ends. Reading the work of influential nineteenth-century authors from a botanical perspective, Mary Kuhn recovers how domestic political issues were entangled with the global circulation and science of plants. The diversity of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s own gardens contributed to the evolution of her racial politics and abolitionist strategies. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s struggles in his garden inspired him to write stories in which plants defy human efforts to impose order. Radical scientific ideas about plant intelligence and sociality prompted Emily Dickinson to imagine a human polity that embraces kinship with the natural world. Yet other writers, including Frederick Douglass, cautioned that the most prominent political context for plants remained plantation slavery. The Garden Politic reveals how the nineteenth century’s extractive political economy of plants contains both the roots of our contemporary environmental crisis and the seeds of alternative political visions.

Beginner gardeners all across the great plains of the Midwest will be informed on the best plants for their regional gardens. Get planting today!

A guide to gardening in the Intermountain West, which includes parts of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming.

A psychopathic, sociopath mutilator is leaving cut-up bodies in the south Bay Area—again. This time around, everything becomes very personal as Hooker is dragged into things, but can't drive with a cast on his arm. Mae West has a blown engine, and the Squirt is still in the hospital recovering from "Dime Poisoning". Then Hooker gets word from his sister that she needs help. She can help him—but he has to pay the price she is asking... How do you save someone—by killing them? It is going to take everything Hooker's strange extended family can do to pull it off... And even then, it may be too late.