"Sherwin Bitsui's new poetry collection, Flood Song—a sprawling, panoramic journey through landscape, time, and cultures—is well worth the ride."—Poets & Writers “Bitsui’s poetry is elegant, probative, and original. His vision connects worlds.”—New Mexico Magazine “His images can tilt on the side of surrealism, yet his work can be compellingly accessible.”—Arizona Daily Star “Sherwin Bitsui sees violent beauty in the American landscape. There are junipers, black ants, axes, and cities dragging their bridges. I can hear Whitman's drums in these poems and I can see Ginsberg's supermarkets. But above all else, there is an indigenous eccentricity, ‘a cornfield at the bottom of a sandstone canyon,’ that you will not find anywhere else.”—Sherman Alexie Native traditions scrape against contemporary urban life in Flood Song, an interweaving painterly sequence populated with wrens and reeds, bricks and gasoline. Poet Sherwin Bitsui is at the forefront of a new generation of Native writers who resist being identified solely by race. At the same time, he comes from a traditional indigenous family and Flood Song is filled with allusions to Dine (Navajo) myths, customs, and traditions. Highly imagistic and constantly in motion, his poems draw variously upon medicine song and contemporary language and poetics. “I map a shrinking map,” he writes, and “bite my eyes shut between these songs.” An astonishing, elemental volume. I retrace and trace over my fingerprints Here: magma, there: shore, and on the peninsula of his finger pointing west— a bell rope woven from optic nerves is tethered to mustangs galloping from a nation lifting its first page through the man hole—burn marks in the saddle horn, static in the ear that cannot sever cries from wailing. Sherwin Bitsui’s acclaimed first book of poems, Shapeshift, appeared in 2003. He has earned many honors for his work, including fellowships from the Witter Bynner Foundation and Lannan Foundation, and he is frequently invited to poetry festivals throughout the world. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

The basis for the new Amazon Prime Original Series! From the author of the imaginative and “awe-inspiring” (New York Journal of Books) narrative art book The Electric State comes the haunting sequel to his remarkable Tales from the Loop. Welcome back to the Loop. In 1954, the Swedish government ordered the construction of the world’s largest particle accelerator in the pastoral countryside of Mälaröarna. The local population called this marvel of technology The Loop and celebrated its completion. But Mälaröarna and the world would never be the same. Infused with strange machines and unfathomable creatures, Things from the Flood is transcendent look at technology that will stay with you long after you turn the final page.

In the early days of 1937, the Ohio River, swollen by heavy winter rains, began rising. And rising. And rising. By the time the waters crested, the Ohio and Mississippi had climbed to record heights. Nearly four hundred people had died, while a million more had run from their homes. The deluge caused more than half a billion dollars of damage at a time when the Great Depression still battered the nation. Timed to coincide with the flood's seventy-fifth anniversary, The Thousand-Year Flood is the first comprehensive history of one of the most destructive disasters in American history. David Welky first shows how decades of settlement put Ohio valley farms and towns at risk and how politicians and planners repeatedly ignored the dangers. Then he tells the gripping story of the river's inexorable rise: residents fled to refugee camps and higher ground, towns imposed martial law, prisoners rioted, Red Cross nurses endured terrifying conditions, and FDR dispatched thousands of relief workers. In a landscape fraught with dangers—from unmoored gas tanks that became floating bombs to powerful currents of filthy floodwaters that swept away whole towns—people hastily raised sandbag barricades, piled into overloaded rowboats, and marveled at water that stretched as far as the eye could see. In the flood's aftermath, Welky explains, New Deal reformers, utopian dreamers, and hard-pressed locals restructured not only the flood-stricken valleys, but also the nation's relationship with its waterways, changes that continue to affect life along the rivers to this day. A striking narrative of danger and adventure—and the mix of heroism and generosity, greed and pettiness that always accompany disaster—The Thousand-Year Flood breathes new life into a fascinating yet little-remembered American story.

Harsh attempts to discover what they believed their responsibilities were and what they tried to accomplish; to evaluate the human and logistical resources at their disposal; and to determine what they knew and when they learned it."--BOOK JACKET.

An instant New York Times bestseller! The definitive biography of guitar legend Stevie Ray Vaughan, with an epilogue by Jimmie Vaughan, and foreword and afterword by Double Trouble’s Chris Layton and Tommy Shannon. Just a few years after he almost died from a severe addiction to cocaine and alcohol, a clean and sober Stevie Ray Vaughan was riding high. His last album was his most critically lauded and commercially successful. He had fulfilled a lifelong dream by collaborating with his first and greatest musical hero, his brother Jimmie. His tumultuous marriage was over and he was in a new and healthy romantic relationship. Vaughan seemed poised for a new, limitless chapter of his life and career. Instead, it all came to a shocking and sudden end on August 27, 1990, when he was killed in a helicopter crash following a dynamic performance with Eric Clapton. Just 35 years old, he left behind a powerful musical legacy and an endless stream of What Ifs. In the ensuing 29 years, Vaughan’s legend and acclaim have only grown and he is now an undisputed international musical icon. Despite the cinematic scope of Vaughan’s life and death, there has never been a truly proper accounting of his story. Until now. Texas Flood provides the unadulterated truth about Stevie Ray Vaughan from those who knew him best: his brother Jimmie, his Double Trouble bandmates Tommy Shannon, Chris Layton and Reese Wynans, and many other close friends, family members, girlfriends, fellow musicians, managers and crew members.

From the bestselling author of the acclaimed Chaos and Genius comes a thoughtful and provocative exploration of the big ideas of the modern era: Information, communication, and information theory. Acclaimed science writer James Gleick presents an eye-opening vision of how our relationship to information has transformed the very nature of human consciousness. A fascinating intellectual journey through the history of communication and information, from the language of Africa’s talking drums to the invention of written alphabets; from the electronic transmission of code to the origins of information theory, into the new information age and the current deluge of news, tweets, images, and blogs. Along the way, Gleick profiles key innovators, including Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Samuel Morse, and Claude Shannon, and reveals how our understanding of information is transforming not only how we look at the world, but how we live. A New York Times Notable Book A Los Angeles Times and Cleveland Plain Dealer Best Book of the Year Winner of the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

This heavily illustrated book contains descriptions and geologic interpretations of photographs (mostly aerial) illustrating the power and magnitude of repeated Ice Age flooding in the Pacific Northwest, as recently as 14,000 years ago. The scale of Ice Age floods was so huge that today it is often difficult to see and appreciate the power and magnitude of such megafloods from ground level. However, from the air, landforms created by the floods often come into clear focus. Aerial images, obtained via unmanned aerial vehicle (drone) as well as fixed-wing airplane, add a new perspective on evidence gathered by dozens of scientists since 1923.

In the tradition of Silent Spring, a modern parable of the American experience and our paradoxical relationship with the natural world. Though it seems a part of the "natural" landscape of New England today, the Swift River Valley reservoir, dam, dike, and nature area was a triumph of civil engineering. It combined forward-looking environmental stewardship and social policy, yet the “little people”—and the four towns in which they lived—got lost along the way. Elisabeth Rosenberg has crafted Before the Flood to be both a modern and a universal story in a time when managed retreat will one day be a reality. Meticulously researched, Before the Flood, is the first narrative book on the incredible history of the Swift River Valley and the origins Quabbin Reservoir. Rosenberg dive into the socioeconomic and psychological aspects of the Swift River Valley’s destruction in order to supply drinking water for the growing populations of Boston and wider Massachusetts. It is as much a human story as the story of water and landscape, and Before the Flood movingly reveals both the stories and the science of the key players and the four flooded towns that were washed forever away.

Present at the Flood tells the story of the rise of structural molecular biology-proteins and DNA-by immersing the reader in the original papers, written by the scientists who actually did the work. 187 pages from 42 essential scientific papers are reprinted, along with diagrams and commentaries to make them intelligible to the modern reader. The book achieves a personal note because the author was a worker in later years of the field and knew many of the key participants .

"Gary Carden is a folklorist and storyteller. He was raised by his grandparents in a house filled with the past. He grew up listening to Grady Cole and Renfro Valley on the radio while his grandfather tuned musical instruments with a tuning fork and sang hymns from a shape-note songbook. He grew up with cows, June apple trees, comic books, the Farmers' Federation, and Saturday movies. He told his first stories to 150 white leghorn chickens in a dark chicken-house when he was six years old. His audience wasn't terribly attentive and tended to get hysterical during the dramatic parts."--