"In this elegant narrative, celebrated naturalist Ted Floyd guides you through a year of becoming a better birder. Choosing 200 top avian species to teach key lessons, Floyd introduces a new, holistic approach to bird watching and shows how to use the tools of the 21st century to appreciate the natural world we inhabit together whether city, country or suburbs." -- From book jacket.

This book explores how humans in the Renaissance lived with, attended to, and considered the minds, feelings, and sociality of other creatures. It examines how Renaissance literature and natural history display an unequal creaturely world: all creatures were categorized hierarchically. However, post-Cartesian readings of Shakespeare and other Renaissance literature have misunderstood Renaissance hierarchical creaturely relations, including human relations. Using critical animal studies work and new materialist theory, Bach argues that attending closely to creatures and objects in texts by Shakespeare and other writers exposes this unequal world and the use and abuse of creatures, including people. The book also adds significantly to animal studies by showing how central bird sociality and voices were to Renaissance human culture, with many believing that birds were superior to some humans in song, caregiving, and companionship. Bach shows how Descartes, a central figure in the transition to modern ideas about creatures, lived isolated from humans and other creatures and denied ancient knowledge about other creatures’ minds, especially bird minds. As significantly, Bach shows how and why Descartes’ ideas appealed to human grandiosity. Asking how Renaissance categorizations of creatures differ so much from modern classifications, and why those modern classifications have shaped so much animal studies work, this book offers significant new readings of Shakespeare’s and other Renaissance texts. It will contribute to a range of fields, including Renaissance literature, history, animal studies, new materialism, and the environmental humanities.

Sharon Moughtin-Mumby considers the often unrecognised impact of different approaches to metaphor on readings of the prophtic sexual and marital metaphorical language. She outlines a practical and consciously simplified approach to metaphor, placing strong emphasis on the influence of literary context on metaphorical meaning. Drawing on this approach, she read Hosea 4-14, Jeremiah 2:1-4:4, Isaiah, Ezekiel 16 and 23, and Hosea 1-3 with fresh eyes. Her lucid new readings reveal the way in which scholarship has repeatedly stifled the prophetic metaphorical language by reading it within the 'default contexts' of 'the marriage metaphor' and 'cultic prostitution', which for so many years have been simply assumed. Readers are encouraged instead to read these diverse metaphors and similes within their distinctive literary contexts in which they have the potential to rise vividly to life, provoking the question: how are we to respond to these disquieting, powerful texts in the midst of the Hebrew Bible?

In Nonel the author describes major events in the life of a young boy who grew up in Romania from 1939 1954. That was a period when the country switched from a monarchy (before 1947) to a communist dominated republic. The issues that affected Nonel during that period influenced his thought for the rest of his life. These experiences enabled the boy realize that as long as we continue to function, we must challenge lifes suffering and sorrows. Akin to our bodys attempts to heal, our mind must seek harmony and contentment. Perhaps we can amend for our trespasses not only by helping others, weaker than ourselves, but also by mending the distress in our lives and anguish of our souls. In essence, an evil person who attempts to accomplish good deeds all the time can confuse even God!

In his monumental research in ancient sanskrit literature the author has restored gaps in lexicons and removed doubts in the later sanskrit works about the identity of a very large number of birds of the Indian sub-continent. The ancient sages of India were great lovers of nature with keen powers of observation and an extraordinary sensitivity about aninal behaviour. The Vedas Puranas, Epics and Samhitas are full of descriptions of birds, animals and plants but the exact identification of names had got lost or confounded over the centuries.

A gorgeous story about friendship and working together from a star picture-book partnership, the inimitable Julia Donaldson and award-winning Catherine Rayner. Now available in paperback.The Go-Away bird sat up in her nest, With her fine grey wings and her fine grey crest. One by one, the other birds fly into her tree, wanting to talk or to play, but the Go-Away bird just shakes her head and sends them all away. But then the dangerous Get-You bird comes along, and she soon realizes that she might need some friends after all.The Go-Away Bird combines brilliant rhyming verse from much-loved children's author Julia Donaldson, creator of the bestselling picture books The Gruffalo and What the Ladybird Heard, with stunning illustrations from the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal-winning Catherine Rayner. A charming story about the power of friendship from a thrilling creative partnership, this beautiful book is perfect for reading together.

In October 1967, eighteen-year-old Patrick Bradley enlisted in the US Army and was later deployed to North Vietnam as a special operator with missions to kill high-value targets. Combat left him physically and psychologically wounded, as it does many veterans, and Bradley struggled to adjust when he returned home. He seemed destined for military prison after an altercation in which he broke a superior officer's jaw, but his life changed forever when a psychiatrist recommended a unique path for healing. Thanks to a program sponsored by the Canadian government, Bradley traveled to Canada to study bald eagles and document their behavior. He found himself recovering while living alone in the wild with minimal supplies or human contact. At the same time, his work was paving the way for groundbreaking research, including the discovery of a link between the use of the pesticide DDT and a decrease in southern bald eagle populations. Later, he forged a successful career training and managing wild animals and committed himself to helping other wounded warriors by cofounding the Avian Veteran Alliance, a nonprofit that pairs veterans suffering from PTSD and physical injuries with injured birds of prey. The Eagle on My Arm tells Bradley's inspirational story for the first time. This moving account reveals how a soldier became a dedicated healer, using his years of study and solitude to face his demons and turn his pain into a lifelong passion for helping others.

Lucile Garrett is just thirteen when she meets Clint Palmer, a charismatic stranger who will forever change her life. The year is 1934, and as the windblown dust of the Great Depression rakes the Oklahoma plains, Palmer offers Lucile and her father, homeless and hungry, the irresistible promise of a better future.But when they follow Palmer to Texas, Lucile's father mysteriously disappears, launching man and girl on an epic journey through the American Southwest: a spree of violence and murder that culminates in one of the most celebrated criminal trials of the era.Based on a true story, Hard Twisted is a chilling tale of survival and redemption, and a young girl's coming of age in a world as cruel as it is beautiful.

An enchanting--and twisted--tale of two sisters' quest to find their parents When their parents disappear in the middle of the night, young sisters Summer and Bird set off on a quest to find them. A cryptic picture message from their mother leads them to a familiar gate in the woods, but comfortable sights quickly give way to a new world entirely--Down--one inhabited by talking birds and the evil Puppeteer queen. Summer and Bird are quickly separated, and their divided hearts lead them each in a very different direction in the quest to find their parents, vanquish the Puppeteer, lead the birds back to their Green Home, and discover the identity of the true bird queen. With breathtaking language and deliciously inventive details, Katherine Catmull has created a world unlike any other, skillfully blurring the lines between magic and reality and bringing to life a completely authentic cast of characters and creatures.