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A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice In the spring of 1950, Coral Glynn arrives at an isolated mansion in the English countryside to nurse the elderly Edith Hart. There, Coral meets Hart House's odd inhabitants: Mrs. Prence, the perpetually disgruntled housekeeper, and Major Clement Hart, her charge's war-ravaged son. When a child's game goes violently awry in the nearby woods, a great shadow—love, perhaps—descends upon its residents. Other seemingly random events—a torn dress, a missing ring, a lost letter—propel Coral and Clement precipitously into the mysterious thicket of marriage. Written with his unique sense of wit and empathy, Peter Cameron's brilliant novel is a stunning exploration of how need and desire can blossom into love—and just as quickly transform into something less categorical.
Sampling-based computational methods have become a fundamental part of the numerical toolset of practitioners and researchers across an enormous number of different applied domains and academic disciplines. This book provides a broad treatment of such sampling-based methods, as well as accompanying mathematical analysis of the convergence properties of the methods discussed. The reach of the ideas is illustrated by discussing a wide range of applications and the models that have found wide usage. The first half of the book focuses on general methods; the second half discusses model-specific algorithms. Exercises and illustrations are included.
This edited collection brings together research that focuses on historic figures who have been largely neglected by history or forgotten over time. The question of how to recover, reclaim or retell the histories and stories of those obscured by the passage of time is one of growing public and scholarly interest. The volume includes chapters on a diverse array of topics, including semi-biographical fiction, digital and visual biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs, among others. Apart from the largely forgotten, the book provides fresh perspectives on historical figures whose biographies are distorted by their fame or limited by public perception. The subjects explored here include, among others, a child author, a Finnish grandmother, a cold war émigré, an Elizabethan era playwright, a castaway, a celebrated female artist, and the lauded personalities Mary Shelley, Judy Garland and J.R.R. Tolkien. Altogether, the chapters included in this collection offer a much-needed snapshot of new research on biography and its many variations and hybrids which will be of interest to academics and students of biography and life writing in general.
During the late 1960s and 1970s, massive herds of poisonous crown-of-thorns starfish suddenly began to infest coral reef communities around the world, leaving in their wake devastation comparable to a burnt-out rainforest. In What is Natural?, Jan Sapp both examines this ecological catastrophe and captures the intense debate among scientists about what caused the crisis, and how it should be handled. The crown-of-thorns story takes readers on tropical expeditions around the world, and into both marine laboratories and government committees, where scientists rigorously search for answers to the many profound questions surrounding this event. Were these fierce starfish outbreaks the kind of ma...
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Geographers regard fieldwork as a vital instrument for understanding our world through direct experience, for gathering basic data about this world, and as a fundamental method for enacting geographical education. The range of international geography and educational experts who contributed to this volume has demonstrated that the concept of fieldwork has a considerable history in the field of geography. They have demonstrated that the theoretical aspects of fieldwork have been interpreted differently in regions around the world, but the importance of fieldwork remains strong globally. A fresh look at the pedagogic implications for fieldwork in formal education offers ideas both for promoting it in geographical education and for maintaining its place in the geography curriculum. Audience: Forward-looking geographers and educators now recognise that alternative strategies, especially those involving the use of information technology, should be developed to reaffirm the centrality of fieldwork in geographical and wider education.
On 4 June 1629, the Batavia, pride of the Dutch East India Company Fleet, was wrecked on her maiden voyage in a seemingly empty expanse of the Indian Ocean. The question “how did this happen?” led to 300 years of investigation by those curious to solve the enigma: what are corals and how are coral reefs formed?. Relying heavily on primary source material Part 1 traces the sequential evolution of scientific thought and practice as the author explores the way this evolution is reflected in the search for understanding corals. At each stage, answers lead to fresh questions that challenge investigators to solve the riddle and new branches of science emerge. Then, with the first enigma finally understood, a new enigma arose. Why are Reefs dying? Part 2 traces the range of problems that have emerged in the past 50 years as marine, ecological, reef and climate scientists attempt to put the pieces of the jigsaw together. Is there a new “canary in the coal mine” warning of the fate of the world as we know it if man’s impact on his environment continues unchecked?.