The Book of Unconformities

The Book of Unconformities PDF Author: Hugh Raffles
Publisher: Verse Chorus Press
ISBN: 1891241745
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
From the author of lnsectopedia, a powerful exploration of loss, grief, endurance, and the absences that permeate the present. Unconformities are gaps in the geological record, physical evidence of breaks in time. For Hugh Raffles, these holes in history are also fissures in feeling, knowledge, memory, and understanding. In this endlessly inventive, riveting book, Raffles enters these gaps, drawing together threads of geology, history, literature, philosophy, and ethnography to trace the intimate connections between personal loss and world historical events, and to reveal the force of absence at the core of contemporary life. Through deeply researched explorations of Neolithic stone circles, Icelandic lava, mica from a Nazi concentration camp, petrified whale blubber in Svalbard, the marble prized by Manhattan's Lenape, and a huge Greenlandic meteorite that arrived in New York City along with six Inuit adventurers in 1897, Raffles shows how unconformities unceasingly incite human imagination and investigation yet refuse to conform, heal, or disappear. A journey across eons and continents, The Book of Unconformities is also a journey through stone: this most solid, ancient, and enigmatic of materials, it turns out, is as lively, capricious, willful, and indifferent as time itself.

The Book of Unconformities

The Book of Unconformities PDF Author: Hugh Raffles
Publisher: Verse Chorus Press
ISBN: 1891241745
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 415

Get Book

Book Description
From the author of lnsectopedia, a powerful exploration of loss, grief, endurance, and the absences that permeate the present. Unconformities are gaps in the geological record, physical evidence of breaks in time. For Hugh Raffles, these holes in history are also fissures in feeling, knowledge, memory, and understanding. In this endlessly inventive, riveting book, Raffles enters these gaps, drawing together threads of geology, history, literature, philosophy, and ethnography to trace the intimate connections between personal loss and world historical events, and to reveal the force of absence at the core of contemporary life. Through deeply researched explorations of Neolithic stone circles, Icelandic lava, mica from a Nazi concentration camp, petrified whale blubber in Svalbard, the marble prized by Manhattan's Lenape, and a huge Greenlandic meteorite that arrived in New York City along with six Inuit adventurers in 1897, Raffles shows how unconformities unceasingly incite human imagination and investigation yet refuse to conform, heal, or disappear. A journey across eons and continents, The Book of Unconformities is also a journey through stone: this most solid, ancient, and enigmatic of materials, it turns out, is as lively, capricious, willful, and indifferent as time itself.

The Book of Unconformities

The Book of Unconformities PDF Author: Hugh Raffles
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0804197997
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
From the author of the acclaimed Insectopedia, a powerful exploration of loss, endurance, and the absences that permeate the present When Hugh Raffles’s two sisters died suddenly within a few weeks of each other, he reached for rocks, stones, and other seemingly solid objects as anchors in a world unmoored, as ways to make sense of these events through stories far larger than his own. A moving, profound, and affirming meditation, The Book of Unconformities is grounded in stories of stones: Neolithic stone circles, Icelandic lava, mica from a Nazi concentration camp, petrified whale blubber in Svalbard, the marble prized by Manhattan’s Lenape, and a huge Greenlandic meteorite that arrived with six Inuit adventurers in the exuberant but fractious New York City of 1897. As Raffles follows these fundamental objects, unearthing the events they’ve engendered, he finds them losing their solidity and becoming as capricious, indifferent, and willful as time itself.

Insectopedia

Insectopedia PDF Author: Hugh Raffles
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1400096960
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book A stunningly original exploration of the ties that bind us to the beautiful, ancient, astoundingly accomplished, largely unknown, and unfathomably different species with whom we share the world. For as long as humans have existed, insects have been our constant companions. Yet we hardly know them, not even the ones we’re closest to: those that eat our food, share our beds, and live in our homes. Organizing his book alphabetically, Hugh Raffles weaves together brief vignettes, meditations, and extended essays, taking the reader on a mesmerizing exploration of history and science, anthropology and travel, economics, philosophy, and popular culture. Insectopedia shows us how insects have triggered our obsessions, stirred our passions, and beguiled our imaginations.

Ossianic Unconformities

Ossianic Unconformities PDF Author: Eric Gidal
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 081393818X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
In a sequence of publications in the 1760s, James Macpherson, a Scottish schoolteacher in the central Highlands, created fantastic epics of ancient heroes and presented them as genuine translations of the poetry of Ossian, a fictionalized Caledonian bard of the third century. In Ossianic Unconformities Eric Gidal introduces the idiosyncratic publications of a group of nineteenth-century Scottish eccentrics who used statistics, cartography, and geomorphology to map and thereby vindicate Macpherson's controversial eighteenth-century renderings of Gaelic oral traditions. Although these writers primarily sought to establish the authenticity of Macpherson's "translations," they came to record, through promotion, evasion, and confrontation, the massive changes being wrought upon Scottish and Irish lands by British industrialization. Their obsessive and elaborate attempts to fix both the poetry and the land into a stable set of coordinates developed what we can now perceive as a nascent ecological perspective on literature in a changing world. Gidal examines the details of these imaginary geographies in conjunction with the social and spatial histories of Belfast and the River Lagan valley, Glasgow and the Firth of Clyde, and the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland, regions that form both the sixth-century kingdom of Dál Riata and the fabled terrain of the Ossianic poems. Combining environmental and industrial histories with the reception of the poems of Ossian, Ossianic Unconformities unites literary history and book studies with geography, cartography, and geology to present and consider imaginative responses to environmental catastrophe.

In Amazonia

In Amazonia PDF Author: Hugh Raffles
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400865271
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
The Amazon is not what it seems. As Hugh Raffles shows us in this captivating and innovative book, the world's last great wilderness has been transformed again and again by human activity. In Amazonia brings to life an Amazon whose allure and reality lie as much, or more, in what people have made of it as in what nature has wrought. It casts new light on centuries of encounter while describing the dramatic remaking of a sweeping landscape by residents of one small community in the Brazilian Amazon. Combining richly textured ethnographic research and lively historical analysis, Raffles weaves a fascinating story that changes our understanding of this region and challenges us to rethink what we mean by "nature." Raffles draws from a wide range of material to demonstrate--in contrast to the tendency to downplay human agency in the Amazon--that the region is an outcome of the intimately intertwined histories of humans and nonhumans. He moves between a detailed narrative that analyzes the production of scientific knowledge about Amazonia over the centuries and an absorbing account of the extraordinary transformations to the fluvial landscape carried out over the past forty years by the inhabitants of Igarapé Guariba, four hours downstream from the nearest city. Engagingly written, theoretically inventive, and vividly illustrated, the book introduces a diverse range of characters--from sixteenth-century explorers and their native rivals to nineteenth-century naturalists and contemporary ecologists, logging company executives, and river-traders. A natural history of a different kind, In Amazonia shows how humans, animals, rivers, and forests all participate in the making of a region that remains today at the center of debates in environmental politics.

Geological Objects and Structures in 3D

Geological Objects and Structures in 3D PDF Author: Dominique Frizon de Lamotte
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1000075575
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
Geologists must be able to “read” a geological map. That means interpreting the vertical dimension through the 2D view represented on the map and at different scales. The main objective of this book is to help students during this difficult learning process. Based on an abundant iconography (field photos, maps, cross-sections) and on basics in mathematics and mechanics, the book dissects the geometry of emblematic geological structures and objects in order to build 3 D models, printable in 3D. The book is dedicated to structural geology with a particular emphasis on kinematics of faulting and folding and on salt tectonics (chapters III, IV and V). The origin of continental great unconformities and oceanic break-up unconformities is also discussed (chapter II). The audience of the book is broad and includes (under)graduate students in Earth Sciences, professors of Natural Sciences, and professional or amateur geologists.

Paleokarst

Paleokarst PDF Author: Noel P. James
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461237483
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
Landscapes of the past have always held an inherent fascination for ge ologists because, like terrestrial sediments, they formed in our environment, not offshore on the sea floor and not deep in the subsurface. So, a walk across an ancient karst surface is truly a step back in time on a surface formed open to the air, long before humans populated the globe. Ancient karst, with its associated subterranean features, is also of great scientific interest because it not only records past exposure of parts of the earth's crust, but preserves information about ancient climate and the movement of waters in paleoaquifers. Because some paleokarst terranes are locally hosts for hydrocarbons and base metals in amounts large enough to be economic, buried and exhumed paleokarst is also of inordinate practical importance. This volume had its origins in a symposium entitled "Paleokarst Systems and Unconformities-Characteristics and Significance," which was orga nized and convened by us at the 1985 midyear meeting of the Society of Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists on the campus of the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. The symposium had its roots in our studies over the last decade, both separately and jointly, of a number of major and minor unconformities and of the diverse, and often spectacular paleokarst features associated with these unconformities.

Designs and Anthropologies

Designs and Anthropologies PDF Author: Keith M. Murphy
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826362788
Category : Anthropology
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
The chapters in this captivating volume demonstrate the importance and power of design and the ubiquitous and forceful effects it has on human life within the study of anthropology. The scholars explore the interactions between anthropology and design through a cross-disciplinary approach, and while their approaches vary in how they specifically consider design, they are all centered around the design-and-anthropology relationship. The chapters look at anthropology for design, in which anthropological methods and concepts are mobilized in the design process; anthropology of design, in which design is positioned as an object of ethnographic inquiry and critique; and design for anthropology, in which anthropologists borrow concepts and practices from design to enhance traditional ethnographic forms. Collectively, the chapters argue that bringing design and anthropology together can transform both fields in more than one way and that to tease out the implications of using design to reimagine ethnography--and of using ethnography to reimagine design--we need to consider the historical specificity of their entanglements.

Elemental

Elemental PDF Author: Erika Kobayashi
Publisher: Calico
ISBN: 9781949641110
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Elemental, the third book in the Calico Series from Two Lines Press, is a whirlwind of fiction and reportage from Japan, Iran, Germany, Israel, Poland, Madagascar, Norway, and Iraq that explores how earth, wind, water, and fire continue to shape our narratives and alter our existence.

The Age of Wonderful Nonsense

The Age of Wonderful Nonsense PDF Author: Ryan W. Jones
Publisher: Balboa Press
ISBN: 1982208945
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Being in your 20s is like losing your parents at Disneyland, but for the rest of your life. Sure, its all fun and games because at least Mickey Mouse is there and cotton candy is flowing. Then you realize, Wait, what the heck am I supposed to do now? MOM, DAAAAAAD!?! ANYBODYYYY!?! Some people are lucky. They know exactly what they want out of life early on and are relentless in attaining it. Good for them they deserve it. Most of us, however, are forced to continuously alter our path, always striving to reinvent ourselves and find our passion somewhere along the way. Whichever category you fall in, at one point or another, we all find ourselves lost, trying to navigate our way through the storms of life. Whatever walk (or storm) youre on, theres no doubt in my mind that you seek more out of this life. I wrote this book for one reason - to serve as a roadmap for those searching to live a successful, peaceful, and purpose-filled life. Will we allow our past to alter our present? Or will we decide to find our Purpose, Escape our past, take Action, Change our autopilot, and become Empathetic to our surroundings? Yes, for those of you paying attention - those five steps I just listed off spell P.E.A.C.E. See, not as dumb as I look crouching in that field below.