I’m a teacher, sailor, kayaker, and environmental-vegan animal lover. I live by the sea among marine wildlife. I grew up sailing, then sailed the Pacific on the tiny wooden boat that was my first marital home. We had no engine, no modern technology. Like the sea beings, we had a wing in the wind and a fin in the sea so we lived in their world, on their terms. Alone, helming under the stars, I dreamed of dolphin culture and mentally made lists of possible dolphin vocations. This helped me create fiction from the dolphin viewpoint. Input from scientists brought authenticity to my marine environmental fantasies and messages.
Ripple is the twenty million-year-old story of how love inspired one dolphin to an intellectual achievement that changed the universe.
Recently, forces from the universe decided that time was running out for humans to hear the defining story of their planet. This book is that story. Are humans the last intelligent beings in the developed universe to hear it? Have you ever wondered what goes on in the great marine intellects which evolved millions of years before humans came down from the trees? Find out by following Ripple as she negotiates the beauties and horrors of the ancient oceans and falls in love with the fighter Cosmo in the wild surf of Point Savage.
This long narrative poem has the most lyrical descriptions of sailing I’ve ever read, so back in my teens, I memorized it. It takes 30 minutes to recite. While voyaging under sail in the Pacific, reciting it twice would get me though the first lonely hour of my long night watch. Even today, reciting the poem sends my spirit back to the open sea.
The first turning point of the story is when the charismatic albatross is shot for no reason. The second turning point is when the mariner breaks the curse by overcoming his revulsion for the ocean’s non-charismatic “slimy things that crawl” and he blesses them. So we learn to value all life, charismatic or not.
Great title poem plus "Kubla Khan," "Christabel," 20 other sonnets, lyrics, odes: "Frost at Midnight," "The Nightingale," "The Pains of Sleep," "To William Wordsworth," "Youth and Age," more. All reprinted from authoritative edition.
This book is about taking the physical path to spiritual freedom, without the need for any religion. It inspired me to cross oceans under sail, to complete ultra-distance multi-disciplinary sports events, and to build my own faith in the divineness of the natural world. Would you believe it helped me win bike races?
And I love that it does all this through the lens of a beautiful feathered sea being. This non-human viewpoint released the author from the prison of human arrogance. Glorious. And it inspired some wonderful music.
This classic work is now available for the first time in paperback. Since 1951, when the last of the Witchcraft Acts was repealed, many books have been written about the reappearance of witchcraft and the development of a pagan theology. Churchmen have denounced it. Sociologists have wondered at it. Journalists have penned sensational stories about it. But until the publication of this book, no one had told the real story of it from the inside as frankly as it is told here.
Doreen Valiente, one of witchcraft's most widely known figures, was a close friend of the late Gerald Gardner,…
It’s not so much the book itself as what it achieved. Hundreds of books were previously written about horses, especially how best to exploit them, but this was the first to let readers experience the human/horse relationship from the viewpoint of the horse. Previously, humans saw horses as a resource to be used up for human convenience like machines. Black Beauty showed us what that was like for the horse. It broke the hearts of readers and changed their attitudes. It broke my own childish heart and taught me to always try to see things from the angle of the animal, whether that animal was a dolphin, a seagull, a cat, or a horse.
Continuously in print and translated into multiple languages since it was first published, Anna Sewell's Black Beauty is a classic work of children's literature and an important text in the fields of Victorian studies and animal studies. Writing to ""induce kindness, sympathy and an understanding treatment"", Sewell realistically documents the working conditions of Black Beauty, who moves down the social scale from a rural carriage horse to a delivery horse in London. Sewell makes visible and tangible the experience of animals who were often treated as if they were machines. Though she died shortly after it was published, Sewell's book…
This book is about the power of story. The protagonist believed three different religions at once because he saw power in all their stories. All of us are free to choose the stories we live by, in mind, body, and spirit. The story features animals and makes some incredible animal/human interactions believable. It promoted respect for animals, while making me question if it should make any ethical difference anyway, whether the animals adrift on the ocean with Pi were really humans or not. Humans are animals too, aren’t we? Life deserves the same respect whatever species we happen to be. And of course, I loved the open-sea setting.
After the sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a wounded zebra, an orangutan—and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger.
Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi Patel, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with the tiger, Richard Parker, for 227 days while lost at sea. When they finally reach the coast of Mexico, Richard Parker flees to the jungle, never to be seen again. The Japanese authorities who interrogate Pi refuse to believe his…
Richard Adams himself signed my copy of this book when he visited New Zealand long ago. If he hadn’t looked deep into my eyes at the time and promised me it had a happy ending I might never have made it to the end, so harrowing was the story. But I finished it and he was right. The story questions the ethics of human exploitation of animals. To me, Plague Dogs was his greatest work, far more important than Watership Down, and certainly no children’s book. Adams is a true master at presenting the animal's point of view. This book hit me like a sledgehammer and like Watership Down, it beautifully evoked the natural world of its setting.
Two dogs, Snitter and Rowf, escape from a research laboratory in the Lake District where it is wrongly supposed they have been purposely infected with a deadly virus and now pose a dangerous threat to the human population. As the authorities give chase, the two friends make their way through the hills and across the moors, along the way learning to survive on their wits and finding friendship and help from a fox they encounter. They dream of finding their original owners and a safe haven - but the hunt is on.
Gabrielle found her grandfather’s diaries after her mother’s death, only to discover that he had been a Nazi. Born in Berlin in 1942, she and her mother fled the city in 1945, but Api, the one surviving male member of her family, stayed behind to work as a doctor in a city 90% destroyed.
Gabrielle retraces Api’s steps in the Berlin of the 21st century, torn between her love for the man who gave her the happiest years of her childhood and trying to come to terms with his Nazi membership, German guilt, and political responsibility.
Api's Berlin Diaries: My Quest to Understand My Grandfather's Nazi Past
"This is not a book I will forget any time soon."
Story Circle Book Reviews
Moving and provocative, Api's Berlin Diaries offers a personal perspective on the fall of Berlin 1945 and the far-reaching aftershocks of the Third Reich.
After her mother's death, Robinson was thrilled to find her beloved grandfather's war diaries-only to discover that he had been a Nazi.
The award-winning memoir shows Api, a doctor in Berlin, desperately trying to help the wounded in cellars without water or light. He himself was reduced to anxiety and despair, the daily diary his main refuge. As Robinson retraces Api's…
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