When in school I commented that my dog seemed angry with me, my teacher replied: “Don’t be anthropomorphic by erroneously ascribing human emotions to animals.”
The view of animals as unemotional automatons was the prevailing scientific view for decades, although we pet owners suspected otherwise. Then observers such as Jane Goodall and de Vaal showed that we were right all along, as shown in many of De Vaal’s books.
Mama’s Last Hug begins with an account of the mutual emotions expressed by de Vaal and the chimpanzee matriarch Mama when she hugged him from her death bed. The book recounts many heartwarming examples of chimpanzees and other animals expressing emotions.
Since we have common evolutionary ancestors with other animals: why should we ever have thought we were unique in having intelligence and emotions?
Mama's Last Hug is a fascinating exploration of the rich emotional lives of animals, beginning with Mama, a chimpanzee matriarch who formed a deep bond with biologist Jan van Hooff. Her story and others like it-from dogs "adopting" the injuries of their companions, to rats helping fellow rats in distress, to elephants revisiting the bones of their loved ones-show that humans are not the only species with the capacity for love, hate, fear, shame, guilt, joy, disgust, and empathy. Frans de Waal opens our hearts and minds to the many ways in which humans and other animals are connected.
This wonderful autobiography tells of Laura Burton in 1907 at the age of 29 leaving Toronto to teach in the Klondike where she lived for decades.
In a preface, Robert Service, “Bard of the Yukon,” wrote: “This is a brave book... It is the gallant personality of the author, which shines on every page and makes her chronicle a saga of the High North…. All this told with humour [and] with graphic detail…” Burton, who knew Service and Jack London, shows that much that I thought was fiction about these times was truth.
For example, the famous sequence in the movie Gold Rush where the starving Charlie Chaplin eats his boots was not fiction but a recreation of the reality that many starving miners boiled and ate their leather boots.
In 1907, Laura Beatrice Berton, a 29-year-old kindergarten teacher, left her comfortable life in Toronto Ontario to teach in a Yukon mining town. She fell in love with the North--and with a northerner--and made Dawson City her home for the next 25 years. I Married the Klondike is her classic and enduring memoir.
When she first arrived by steamboat in Dawson City, Berton expected to find a rough mining town full of grizzled miners, scarlet-clad Mounties and dance-hall girls. And while these and other memorable characters did abound, she quickly discovered why the town was nicknamed the "Paris of the…
I can do no better than to repeat from the cover flap: “Are trees social beings...", well Peter Wolverine convincingly makes the case that, yes, the forest is a social network.
He draws on groundbreaking scientific discoveries to describe how trees are like human families: tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow, share nutrients with those who are sick or struggling, and even warn each of impending dangers.”
Almost every page brings a new surprise and I have to keep telling myself: if we go far enough back, we have a common ancestor and trees use the same DNA structure to reproduce as we do. Although they lack a central nervous system, we should not be surprised that they have evolved effective survival mechanisms.
"A paradigm-smashing chronicle of joyous entanglement that will make you acknowledge your own entanglement in the ancient and ever-new web of being."--Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast Are trees social beings? In this international bestseller, forester and author Peter Wohlleben convincingly makes the case that, yes, the forest is a social network. He draws on groundbreaking scientific discoveries to describe how trees are like human families: tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow, share nutrients with those who are sick or struggling, and even warn each other of impending dangers. Wohlleben…
A lifetime of dealing with economic policy has taught me the need to understand the importance of technology. To this end my co-authors and I discuss in Chapters 4-5 how 24 important technologies have transformed almost all aspects our lives over the past 10,000 years. Chapter 6 locates institutional changes in the Middle Ages as one of the causes of the Industrial Revolution that turned episodic into sustained economic growth. Chapter 7 argues that this Revolution did not occur in China because it lacked the key institutions present in the West. Chapters 16-17 consider the policy implications of technology constantly evolving rather than being fixed or changing for unexplained reasons, as often assumed in economic theory textbooks whose policy implications can, therefore, be misleading.
