Danger Flower

Danger Flower
Author: Jaclyn Desforges
Publisher: Anstruther Books
Total Pages: 80
Release: 2021-09
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9781989287835

A baby transforms into a reverse mermaid in a baptism gone wrong. After being stepped on, a snail exacts revenge. In Danger Flower, Jaclyn Desforges leads enlightened witnesses through a wild garden where archetypal tales are treated with tongue-in-cheek irreverence. Amidst nesting dolls and opossums, poison oak and Tamagotchis, the poet navigates gender roles, sexual indiscretions, episodic depression, and mothering, forming essential survival strategies for a changing world. Danger Floweris a necessary debut.

The Plant Lover's Guide to Magnolias

The Plant Lover's Guide to Magnolias
Author: Andrew Bunting
Publisher: Timber Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2016-04-13
Genre: Gardening
ISBN: 1604695781

Magnolias—beloved for their iconic spring blossoms—are among the most popular flowering trees. In The Plant Lover’s Guide to Magnolias expert Andrew Bunting shares a plant directory including 146 of the best magnolias for the garden. Featuring information on growth, care, and design, along with hundreds of gorgeous color photographs, it covers everything a home gardener needs to introduce these delightful trees into their garden.

The Humane Gardener

The Humane Gardener
Author: Nancy Lawson
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2017-04-18
Genre:
ISBN: 1616896175

In this eloquent plea for compassion and respect for all species, journalist and gardener Nancy Lawson describes why and how to welcome wildlife to our backyards. Through engaging anecdotes and inspired advice, profiles of home gardeners throughout the country, and interviews with scientists and horticulturalists, Lawson applies the broader lessons of ecology to our own outdoor spaces. Detailed chapters address planting for wildlife by choosing native species; providing habitats that shelter baby animals, as well as birds, bees, and butterflies; creating safe zones in the garden; cohabiting with creatures often regarded as pests; letting nature be your garden designer; and encouraging natural processes and evolution in the garden. The Humane Gardener fills a unique niche in describing simple principles for both attracting wildlife and peacefully resolving conflicts with all the creatures that share our world.

Dangerous Garden

Dangerous Garden
Author: David C. Stuart
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2004
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780674011045

As our earliest ancestors migrated out of Africa, they encountered entirely new floras. By sampling these, they found plants that appeared to (and sometimes did) heal wounds, cure maladies, and ease troubled minds. This process of discovery continues today, as multinational pharmaceutical companies bioprospect in the globe's remaining wild places for the next tamoxifen or digitalis. The gardener and botanist David Stuart tells the fascinating story of botanical medicine, revealing more than soothing balms and heroic cures. Most of the truly powerful and effective medicinal plants are double-edged, with a dark side to balance the light. They can heal or kill, calm or enslave, lift depression or summon our gods and monsters. Often the difference between these polar effects is a simple change in dosage. Stuart chronicles the tale of how the herbal materia medica of healing and killing plants has sparked wars, helped establish intercontinental trade routes, and seeded fortunes. As plant species traveled the globe, their medicinal uses evolved over miles and through centuries. Plants once believed to be cure-alls are now considered too dangerous for use. Others, once so valuable that they sowed the wealth of empires, are merely spices on the kitchen shelf. David Stuart recounts engrossing human stories too, not only of the scientists, explorers, and doctors who gathered, named, and prescribed these plants but also the shamans, magicians, and quacks who claimed to possess the ultimate herbal aphrodisiac or elixir.

Chemical agriculture and pollinators: signs of a Planet in danger

Chemical agriculture and pollinators: signs of a Planet in danger
Author: Giuseppe Zicari
Publisher: Youcanprint
Total Pages: 687
Release: 2023-02-24
Genre: Science
ISBN:

Bees, that have inhabited the Planet for over 100 million years, are the common thread that tells the story of various ecological challenges such as the reduction of biodiversity, climate change, soil degradation, and energy transition. Paradoxically, agriculture is one of the major causes of irreversible and, therefore, unsustainable changes such as global warming and the extinction of pollinators from which it derives its benefits and wealth. The massive use of fossil fuels, the distribution of poisons such as pesticides (persistent, toxic, and bioaccumulative), the loss of fertility in monocultures of plants selected to satisfy economic needs, are some of the main causes of an ecologically unsustainable food production system. The book tries to show a different vision of the World we are building, a story of backstories and underestimated dangers. This book received two prizes: "Steli di Pace" (Stems of Peace) by the Union of European Journalists and Communicators in 2023 and it was the winner of the "Concorso Nazionale per la divulgazione scientifica Kerit-LC Edizioni" (National Competition for science dissemination) in 2024.

The Gift of Danger

The Gift of Danger
Author: Mary Stein
Publisher: Blue Snake Books
Total Pages: 122
Release: 2009-08-25
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1583942734

Mary Stein took up aikido in her mid-fifties and quickly learned what it really means to face danger—both external and internal. In this powerful collection of short essays, she vividly describes learning an active and spirited defense on the mat, in the process uncovering a lifetime of habitual tensions and emotional reactions, of flight and ineffective fight. Stein’s thoughtful musings make clear how the practice of aikido can show what is really needed, right now. The Gift of Danger is aimed at men and women for whom the question of what is genuine in their lives has taken on fresh urgency. Above all, Stein shows that a sense of danger has extraordinary importance for the martial artist; when danger is present during training, one learns to test limits and respond quickly and accurately. We follow the author as she stands, tentative but determined, on the razor’s edge between knowing and not knowing, judgment and impartiality—the only place where real growth can occur. The Gift of Danger is both a striking story of personal growth and a potent argument for aikido as a model for human behavior. Please visit thegiftofdanger.com for more information on the book and author.

Danger! - A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations

Danger! - A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations
Author: William F. Howe
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2021-06-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1528791916

“Danger! - A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations” is an 1886 work by American lawyer William Frederick Howe. Howe worked for the Howe and Hummel New York City law firm, which became widely celebrated during the second half of nineteenth century for its cases related to world of crime and corruption. This volume goes into detail describing some of the firm's more notable cases and paints a vivid picture of New York City's criminal underbelly at the turn of the nineteenth century. Contents include: “Ancient and Modern Prisons”, “Criminals and their Haunts”, “Street Arabs of Both Sexes”, “Store Girls”, “The Pretty Waiter Girl”, “Shop-Lifters”, “Kleptomania”, “Panel Houses and Panel Thieves”, “A Theatrical Romance”, “A Mariner's Wooing”, “The Baron and 'Baroness'”, “The Demi-Monde”, “Passion's Slaves and Victims”, etc. Read & Co. History is proudly republishing this classic work now in a brand new edition complete with the introductory chapter 'The Pleasant Fiction of the Presumption of Innocence' by Arthur Train.

Tai Chen

Tai Chen
Author: Lucy Cuddy
Publisher:
Total Pages: 24
Release: 1927
Genre: Chinese drama
ISBN:

Lightning Flowers

Lightning Flowers
Author: Katherine E. Standefer
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2020-11-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0316450359

This "utterly spectacular" book weighs the impact modern medical technology has had on the author's life against the social and environmental costs inevitably incurred by the mining that makes such innovation possible (Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises). What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That's the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator. In this gripping, intimate memoir about health, illness, and the invisible reverberating effects of our medical system, Standefer recounts the astonishing true story of the rare diagnosis that upended her rugged life in the mountains of Wyoming and sent her tumbling into a fraught maze of cardiology units, dramatic surgeries, and slow, painful recoveries. As her life increasingly comes to revolve around the internal defibrillator freshly wired into her heart, she becomes consumed with questions about the supply chain that allows such an ostensibly miraculous device to exist. So she sets out to trace its materials back to their roots. From the sterile labs of a medical device manufacturer in southern California to the tantalum and tin mines seized by armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to a nickel and cobalt mine carved out of endemic Madagascar jungle, Lightning Flowers takes us on a global reckoning with the social and environmental costs of a technology that promises to be lifesaving but is, in fact, much more complicated. Deeply personal and sharply reported, Lightning Flowers takes a hard look at technological mythos, healthcare, and our cultural relationship to medical technology, raising important questions about our obligations to one another, and the cost of saving one life.

Why Are You So Quiet?

Why Are You So Quiet?
Author: Jaclyn Desforges
Publisher: Annick Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2020-09-08
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1773214357

Into a world where it often seems nobody is listening comes a poignant story that celebrates the power of silence. “Why are you so quiet?” Her teacher implores it, her classmates shout it, even her mom wonders it. Everyone, it seems, is concerned for Myra Louise. So, in search of an answer to the tiresome question nobody will stop asking, she invents a listening machine. If the raindrops, or the crickets, or the dryers at the laundromat can tell her why they’re so quiet, maybe Myra Louise can finally make everybody understand. But the more she listens, the less interested she becomes in finding any answer at all. Because Myra Louise comes to realize that all she really needs is someone else to listen alongside her. With gorgeous illustrations from Risa Hugo, Jaclyn Desforges’s first picture book champions introversion and the value of being a listener, a thinker, and an observer in our increasingly loud world.