Growing up, I rewatched Star Wars until I wore out my VHS tape. I read every Dragonlancenovel. I played a bit of D&D. When I got to college, I finally was allowed work on things that interested me. I found Art History, dove into Medieval Studies, and, in grad school, got serious about monsters. Monster Studies didn’t exist, but books were out (especially by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen), and my advisor encouraged me to follow my passions. My 15-year-old self would be astonished to learn that I’d get to read monster books, study monster art, and watch monster movies as a job!
This is a brilliant, wide-ranging, deeply-sourced study of the dynamics that underpinned and justified early modern colonization of the Americas. Mandeville’sBook of Marvels and Travels is the prehistory of the horrors of colonization; the sources at the heart of Davies’s study are colonization’s architecture: maps, book illustrations, freestanding prints, published texts, letters, journals, and on. With nuance and care, Davies rewrites the intellectual history of this period, confronting the dehumanizing, demonizing, monsterizing visual and textual rhetoric of colonial enterprises (which directly contributed to large-scale violence), but also looking carefully at nuances, differences, and shifts in this rhetoric over the course of the Renaissance.
Giants, cannibals and other monsters were a regular feature of Renaissance illustrated maps, inhabiting the Americas alongside other indigenous peoples. In a new approach to views of distant peoples, Surekha Davies analyzes this archive alongside prints, costume books and geographical writing. Using sources from Iberia, France, the German lands, the Low Countries, Italy and England, Davies argues that mapmakers and viewers saw these maps as careful syntheses that enabled viewers to compare different peoples. In an age when scholars, missionaries, native peoples and colonial officials debated whether New World inhabitants could - or should - be converted or enslaved, maps…
My grandmother had what we in the South call the sight. I have it as well—that sense of foreboding. Of knowing what will happen next. Some call it a premonition, others Deja vu. Whatever you call it, I think it’s something we’ve all experienced at some point in our lives. Empathy, telepathy, telekinesis…the list is endless. There’s no proof that psychic abilities exist, but there’s no proof that they don’t, either. I find the concept fascinating, so when I started writing, it was a natural fit for me to combine my love for thrillers and mysteries with the added twist of psychic ability. I hope you love it too.
My favorite part of this book is the supporting characters. T.J., Dobbs, and Sparky—the wonder dog. Funny, smart, and wise, the two older gents carry the story from beginning to end, taking the town’s new arrival under their protective wings.
It’s Jessie, the new girl in town, who has the psychic ability, but it’s T. J. and Dobbs, who figure out how to put the pieces together. Like all my favorite books, there is mystery, suspense, and romance, but what I really like is the psychic element. It’s different from most.
From Ninie Hammon, the sorceress of psychological suspense, comes the first book of her long-anticipated and thrilling new Through The Canvas series: Black Water - a book that won't stop squeezing your book-loving heart before the final page.
Bailey Donahue was supposed to stay dead...
After witnessing her husband's murder, Bailey's been ripped from her life and secreted away in the Witness Protection Program.
Too bad the sleepy town of Shadow Rock was the wrong place to hide.
Believed dead by the mafia, Bailey finds herself trapped in a torturous limbo, walled-off from her old life. But that's where she…
I love knowing about things. Science is both a knowledge base and a way to discover new knowledge. I’ve been looking through microscopes and telescopes (that my dad built) from my earliest toddling. Though I have never been to university I have picked the brains of my scientific siblings (one of whom is a biology professor) and I read widely. Gathering crumbs from many sources gives a wider knowledge base than one university child afford. Scientists begin with speculation. I love inventing systems and worlds where we break one or a few of our known laws of nature or physics. Marrying science with fantasy births marvelous offspring!
Gripping character introductions, organic magic systems, extraordinary world-building, and superb writing. I felt the fire burn Selah and the yearning in William’s heart to do good despite loyalty to faulty leadership. Fighting galore!
I love weaving on a loom. I almost always write a weaver into my novels and Walker-Henderson’s series has a weaver too!
The Legendaries’ abilities - speed, strength, magnetic attraction, lung capacity, and resistance to fire are measurable and augmented in this story. Through the whole series geography is explored. Each Legendary comes from a different environment and climate. Selah comes from the desert. William comes from the mountains with mixed forest. They travel to the plains and the icy regions in their quest for the ancient relic that gives the possessor power over their destiny.
In a land of legends, three rival nations hunt the ancient relic that can control rare and powerful warriors.
With lightning speed and an affinity for knives, Desa is a legendary, one of the warriors the relic can enslave.
Disguised as a mercenary, she joins a band of enemy warriors who also hunt the relic. In the height of battle, a startling connection links her to their leader.
Will he help her find the relic or betray her for the glory of his northern kingdom? His aid could be worth the risk.
I am an anthropologist and professor at Cornell University, where I taught 20-year-olds for thirty years. It was my job to explore the world, learn about it, and then educate others, underscoring the notion that all peoples and cultures are equally interesting and valuable. I started out, as a graduate student, watching macaque monkeys for my research, testing if their behavior might give us clues to the evolution of human behavior. But then I switched to science journalism for the popular audience and have, for decades, written for magazines, newspapers, and many books about the intersection of biology and culture on human thought and behavior.
When we think of maps, we usually assume they are about established geography, but that is completely wrong. Maps have been used to hold and elucidate everything about human behavior, especially politics and world affairs, and they vary dramatically in their presentations; the word “geopolitics” is spot on.
You might envision the world as a blue, green, and brown sphere, but geographers (and world leaders and their kind) then load on every layer possible about how humans divide up this global space. Think of nations, names of continents, where people live, what they eat. And then think of maps that illustrate over the global landscape where we get sick (or not), what we eat, what we grow, how we earn money, where we shop—it’s mindboggling how geography can explain much of what people do, and how that can be exploited.
During much of our lives, we don’t even think about…
In this New York Times bestseller, an award-winning journalist uses ten maps of crucial regions to explain the geo-political strategies of the world powers—“fans of geography, history, and politics (and maps) will be enthralled” (Fort Worth Star-Telegram).
Maps have a mysterious hold over us. Whether ancient, crumbling parchments or generated by Google, maps tell us things we want to know, not only about our current location or where we are going but about the world in general. And yet, when it comes to geo-politics, much of what we are told is generated by analysts and other experts who have neglected…
I started my career in tourism but soon discovered my passion for urban heritage. Working as a site manager for a world heritage site, I gathered extensive insights on various levels of heritage management and urban governance from many colleagues around the world. Today there is no single project or meeting that does not address the challenges of climate change. Obtaining my Ph.D. late in life, in Heritage-Based Urban Development, I quicklybecame convinced that the traditional ideas of what cultural heritage is do not reflect the situation today and hinder giving cultural heritage a role in climate change prevention and adaption, beyond the narrative that it has to be preserved.
Climate change and urban transformation are global phenomena. It is, therefore, always great to broaden your horizons and learn from other regions of the world.
This book from Simone Sandholz offers great insights into the situation in Asia and Latin America, both regions with a strong dynamic of urbanization and urban centers where high density with correlating high diversity of sometimes conflicting urban functions meet urban cultural heritage. She embraces a holistic understanding of this heritage and focuses on the integration of heritage in urban planning and development.
I highly recommend this book not only for scholars and students who are working on urban issues in Asia and Latin America but also for any urban planner, urban analyst, urban geographer, or heritage scientist who wants to learn from experiences in these parts of the world.
For me, this book opened my eyes to the challenges that urban centers in Asia…
This book presents an overview of the challenges that cities in Latin America and Asia are facing regarding the preservation of their tangible and intangible heritage. It argues that urban heritage has a value that transcends the mere object's value, constituting a crucial source of identity for urban inhabitants. The same is true for the urban intangible values and practices that are often associated with places or buildings. The empirical research is based on case studies of Kathmandu in Nepal, Yogyakarta in Indonesia and Recife in Brazil; three cities that still comprise core areas with a high percentage of historic…
I am a Professor of English at the University of Sussex. I have worked on a wide range of subjects over the years, mainly about the English Renaissance. I have a long-standing interest in travel and colonial writing, the ways in which the English interacted with other peoples and other places, which started with my interest in Ireland where I studied and which was the subject of my early books. I have broadened my perspective as I have read more on the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia, over the years and am committed to uncovering the truth of the uncomfortable, challenging, and fascinating history of the early British Empire.
A careful, meticulous, and thoughtful analysis of the ways in which the opening up of the world for English audiences left its mark on the work of the most celebrated author of the period.
Gillies shows how Shakespeare thought about the key areas of the world, in passing as well as when writing directly about specific regions, notably, southern Europe, the Americas, the Mediterranean, France, Italy, and elsewhere.
In this engaging book, John Gillies explores Shakespeare's geographic imagination, and discovers an intimate relationship between Renaissance geography and theatre, arising from their shared dependence on the opposing impulses of taboo-laden closure and hubristic expansiveness. Dr Gillies shows that Shakespeare's images of the exotic, the 'barbarous, outlandish or strange', are grounded in concrete historical fact: to be marginalised was not just a matter of social status, but of belonging, quite literally, to the margins of contemporary maps. Through an examination of the icons and emblems of contemporary cartography, Dr Gillies challenges the map-makers' overt intentions, and the attitudes and assumptions…
After hurricane Katrina, I was shocked by the scale of displacement and devastation, and the failed government response. I decided to use my planning classes at MIT to assist with rebuilding efforts. Over the next ten years, my students and I worked with several dozen organizations across New Orleans and provided ongoing assistance to three neighborhoods. Through this work and my relationships with many New Orleanians, I learned so much about the city and came to appreciate how special New Orleans, its way of life and people are.
New Orleans is a historic, intriguing, and complicated city.
So many forces have shaped its settlement, development, culture, and character.
Pierce Lewis helped me understand how New Orleans’s location and geography brought it into being and influenced how it has grown, along with how different immigrants and the blending of their cultures have shaped the city.
He traces how the city’s economy has evolved in relationship to national economic trends and local political decisions on where and how to invest. The book is full of maps, photos, and images that enhance and illustrate the narrative and is written in an engaging style.
It ends with a clear-headed perspective on the problems faced by New Orleans at the turn of the 21st century.
In his now classic work of historical geography, published in 1976, Lewis traces the rise and expansion of New Orleans through four major historic periods. This revised and greatly expanded second edition brings that story up-to-date, illustrating how the city continues to overcome its site on the Mississippi Delta - ""a fearsome place, difficult enough for building houses, lunacy for wharves and skyscrapers.
I’ve always been fascinated by different cultures. I started to learn Russian in 1998, and intrigued by the language, I began to study Russia more—delving into history and politics and then doing a PhD in Russian foreign policy. Ever since, trying to learn about and understand Russia has been my professional focus. Alongside books in Russian, these books are all to hand on my reference shelf, well-thumbed and marked up, as I try to write my own work. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have!
I found this book to be full of insights into Russian thinking and culture. I never met Hingley, but would have loved to—his work has had a real influence on my own approach to studying and thinking about Russia. I find him a fluent writer who can take complex and controversial subjects and make them accessible. This is such a rich book. Hingley tries to explain problems of perspective in thinking about a different culture, before moving on to address a wide range of themes from Russian literature to history, geography, and politics. Times and attitudes change, but I find that it helps to frame some persistent questions about Russian life, and this book is such a good way to understand how things do—and don’t—happen in Russia.
I was fated to become a crusade historian. Research for my doctoral dissertation on medieval relations between the Churches of Rome and Constantinople inevitably led me to the Fourth Crusade. I was hooked, and for the past fifty-plus years the crusades have been a passion—I hope a healthy one. Although I have published two books on the Fourth Crusade, my crusading interests have now gone global, and I am currently studying sixteenth-century crusading in the eastern Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, Ethiopia, and the Americas. Perhaps someday I shall turn to more modern crusades. Sad to say, the crusades are still with us.
A solid grasp of crusading geography is essential for anyone who wishes to understand these complex holy wars, and this book is unsurpassed in providing such information in a clear and comprehensible manner. Its many maps and charts, each beautifully drawn and accompanied by insightful commentary and, in most cases, relevant illustrations and excerpts from primary sources, make this an indispensable resource that belongs in every crusade historian’s library. If you can find a used copy of this out-of-print treasure, buy it without hesitation. Be careful, there is another so-called atlas of the crusades out there by someone who is not a crusade historian, and it is filled with numerous errors.
The crusading movement was to play a dramatic role in the religious, political and economic development of Europe and the Near East over 700 years. In 1095 Pope Urban II called on the knights of Christendom to "liberate" Jerusalem from the Muslims. In response, crusaders from all over Europe were to claim by war, by diplomacy and by settlement, new Catholic Christian territories in the Holy Land. Over the following centuries, crusades were fought on land and at sea in many different theatres of war: the Eastern Mediterranean, the shores of the Baltic and the Black Sea, Spain, North Africa…
I am a Geography professor at DePaul University with a long-standing obsession with the world, comparing puddle shapes to countries as a small child and subsequently initiating map and flag collections that I cultivate to this day. Having lived in different parts of the UK and the USA, as well as being fortunate enough to travel further afield, I’ve relished the opportunity to explore widely and chat with the people who know their places best. I love books that alter how I look at the planet, and I am particularly intrigued by the subtle ways in which people have shaped our world—and our perceptions of it—both intentionally and inadvertently.
I regard this book as the quintessence of a modern geography trade book, a work that compels us to examine the places around us with an increasingly critical eye.
Drawing on current geographical thinking and a rich assortment of case studies from across the globe, Bonnett demonstrates why place matters: it is how we apply meaning to the world. Accordingly, to be placeless—whether through dispossession or demolition on the ground or deletion from the map—is tantamount to not existing at all.
Part of what makes this book such a captivating read is its attention to such concerns. Our relationship with the world may be quite innocuous, characterised by innocent curiosity and a craving for excitement, but it can also assume an ugly side, where people seek to seize places only for themselves. Ultimately, what we make of the planet, mundane and remarkable all at once,…
'A fizzingly entertaining and enlightening book' Daily Telegraph
'Mesmerising' Geographical Magazine
'A fascinating delve into uncharted, forgotten lost places. But it's not just a trivia-tastic anthology of remote destinations but a nifty piece of psycho-geography, explaining our human need for these cartographical conundrums.' Wanderlust
In a world of Google Earth, in which it is easy to believe that every discovery has been made and every adventure already had, Off the Map is a stunning testament to how mysterious our planet still is.
From forgotten enclaves to floating islands, from hidden villages to New York gutter spaces, Off the Map charts…
