Apparatus A : nightwind -- Introduction : earthly interphases -- Apparatus B : the wind tunnel -- Machine sky -- Apparatus C : a sheet of loose sand -- Groundwork -- Apparatus D : five thousand years -- Holding patterns -- Particulate exposures -- Apparatus E : wildfires -- City of chambers -- Apparatus F : a sinocene -- Downwinds -- Apparatus G : monsters.

Joan Baxter draws on more than two decades of living in and reporting from Africa to reveal that there is more to the continent than poverty and suffering, and far more to Western involvement than benevolent charity. Alternately funny, chilling, moving and disturbing, Dust from our Eyes is a fast-paced, passionate narrative told with journalistic accuracy and anthropological acumen.

Asian Atmospheric Pollution: Sources, Characteristics and Impacts provides a concise yet comprehensive treatment of all aspects of pollution and air quality monitoring, across all of Asia. It focuses on key regions of the world and details a variety of sources, their transport mechanism, long term variability and impacts on climate at local and regional scales. It also discusses the feedback on pollutants, on different meteorological parameters like radiative forcing, fog formations, precipitation, cloud characteristics and more. Drawing upon the expertise of multiple well-known authors from different countries to underline some of these key issues, it includes sections dedicated to treatment of pollutant sources, studying of pollutants and trace gases using satellite/station based observations and models, transport mechanisms, seasonal and inter-annual variability and impact on climate, health and biosphere in general. Asian Atmospheric Pollution: Sources, Characteristics and Impacts is a useful resource for scientists and students to understand the sources and dynamics of atmospheric pollution as well as their transport from one continent to other continents, helping the atmospheric modelling community to model different scenarios of the pollution, gauge its short term and long term impacts across regional to global scales and better understand the ramifications of episodic events. - Covers all of Asia in detail in terms of pollution - Focuses not only on local pollution, but on long-term transport of these pollutants and their impacts on other regions as well as the globe - Includes discussion of both particulate matter and greenhouse gases - Serves as a single resource on Asian air pollution and Impacts from the most current research across the globe including the US, Asia, Africa and Europe

The first decade of the 21st century has seen a proliferation of North American and European films that focus on African politics and society. While once the continent was the setting for narratives of heroic ascendancy over self (The African Queen, 1951; The Snows of Kilimanjaro, 1952), military odds (Zulu, 1964; Khartoum, 1966) and nature (Mogambo, 1953; Hatari!,1962; Born Free, 1966; The Last Safari, 1967), this new wave of films portrays a continent blighted by transnational corruption (The Constant Gardener, 2005), genocide (Hotel Rwanda, 2004; Shooting Dogs, 2006), ‘failed states’ (Black Hawk Down, 2001), illicit transnational commerce (Blood Diamond, 2006) and the unfulfilled promises of decolonization (The Last King of Scotland, 2006). Conversely, where once Apartheid South Africa was a brutal foil for the romance of East Africa (Cry Freedom, 1987; A Dry White Season, 1989), South Africa now serves as a redeemed contrast to the rest of the continent (Red Dust, 2004; Invictus, 2009). Writing from the perspective of long-term engagement with the contexts in which the films are set, anthropologists and historians reflect on these films and assess the contemporary place Africa holds in the North American and European cinematic imagination.

A New York Times Notable Book Chinese immigrants of the recent past and unfolding twenty-first century are in search of the African dream. So explains indefatigable traveler Howard W. French, prize-winning investigative journalist and former New York Times bureau chief in Africa and China, in the definitive account of this seismic geopolitical development. China’s burgeoning presence in Africa is already shaping, and reshaping, the future of millions of people. From Liberia to Senegal to Mozambique, in creaky trucks and by back roads, French introduces us to the characters who make up China’s dogged emigrant population: entrepreneurs singlehandedly reshaping African infrastructure, and less-lucky migrants barely scraping by but still convinced of Africa’s opportunities. French’s acute observations offer illuminating insight into the most pressing unknowns of modern Sino-African relations: Why China is making these cultural and economic incursions into the continent; what Africa’s role is in this equation; and what the ramifications for both parties and their people—and the watching world—will be in the foreseeable future. One of the Best Books of the Year at • The Economist • The Guardian • Foreign Affairs

"I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of smiling village where the movies from his youth were set. Instead he drove through a series of horrific burgs, which he renamed Smellville, Fartville, Coleslaw, Coma, and Doldrum. At best his search led him to Anywhere, USA, a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by obese and slow-witted hicks with a partiality for synthetic fibres. He discovered a continent that was doubly lost: lost to itself because he found it blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a foreigner in his own country.

Crabtree Publishing will sweep young readers away on an exploration of Earth's many continents in this latest title. Some of the topics covered in this book are bodies of water, the equator, poles, and hemispheres, latitude and longitude, urban and rural areas, landforms, extreme continents, and many more.

Once the third-largest lake in California and among the world's greatest sources of dust, for decades the dried Owens Lake was merely a footnote to the most notorious water grab in modern history. Now, the desert lake has been reassembled--not refilled--to redeem its lost value without returning Los Angeles's main water supply. In The Spoils of Dust, this bargain redemption and its surprise conjuring of an extraordinary landscape, is the backdrop for investigating contemporary relationships between landscape architecture, engineering, and perception. The Promethean terrain makes legible the frameworks we use to reinvent nature in the Anthropocene, revealing itself as a monument to the prismatic modes by which we know landscapes today. Almost by accident, this has made select landscape values the linchpin for major water resource decisions, thrusting landscape architecture into a consequential position. Answering the challenge, the book concludes with a speculative atlas and robotic tool for an imaginative and advanced approach to dry lake design.

Four tales of magic, adventure and love by award-winning author Catherine Asaro are yours in one great bundle! The Lost Continent Collection includes The Charmed Sphere, The Misted Cliffs, The Dawn Star, and The Fire Opal.

When Amber returns to her home in the Australian desert one year after her brother's death, her hope is to move on from her grief, to start again. Invited to do some work in a remote Aboriginal community, she relishes the opportunity to return to country she loves so deeply. She hadn't realised her friend Andrew had a reason to ask her to come back. She begins a three-day road trip on unsealed roads that link a constellation of Aboriginal communities. From the outset, it is as if she has been picked up willy willy on a windless day, and must be carried to the end of it -until the wind decides to drop. During this adventure, her composure is undone by a series of encounters, observations, the country itself, and she learns that grief takes its own time.