Author: Matt Cameron Have you ever wondered what parrots eat in the wild? Or why so many species live in the Amazon? How intelligent are parrots? What is the worlds rarest parrot? Parrots: The Animal Answer Guide provides detailed, factual answers to the ninety questions most on our minds. There are more than 350 species of these colorful callers, ranging in size from the diminutive lovebird to the massive macaw. Many species can live to be octogenarians in captivitysometimes outliving their human caretakers by decades. The beautiful plumage of parrots and the ability to mimic sounds are both a blessing and a curse. A number of species are in danger of extinction because they are captured and sold into the pet trade by unscrupulous dealers. Fortunately, most parrot owners and retailers rely on captive breeding, although an appalling amount of wild collection continues. In addition to discussing parrot behavior and biology, Matt Cameron reveals the truth about the trade in wild parrots and explains what each of us can do to help save native populations. Whether you are a parrot owner, birder, ornithologist, or curious naturalist, you will find that Cameron asks and fully answers every question you have about these incredible birds.
Author: Tom Inglis
This book examines the extent and nature of Irish social and cultural difference. It is a collection of twenty-three short essays written in a clear and accessible manner by human scientists who are international experts in their area. The essays cover topics covered include the nature of Irish nationalism and capitalism, the Irish political elite, the differences and similarities of the Irish family, the upsurge in immigration, Northern Ireland, the Irish diaspora, the Irish language, sport, music and many other topics. The book will be bought by those who have an academic and personal interest in Irish Studies. It will be attractive to those who are not familiar with the theories and methods of the human sciences and how they can shine a light on the transformations that have taken place in Ireland. Tom Inglis, the editor of the collection, is a sociologist who has written extensively on Irish culture and society.
Author: Michael J. Schell
Tony Gwynn is the greatest hitter in the history of baseball. That's the conclusion of this engaging and provocative analysis of baseball's all-time best hitters. Michael Schell challenges the traditional list of all-time hitters, which places Ty Cobb first, Gwynn 16th, and includes just 8 players whose prime came after 1960. Schell argues that the raw batting averages used as the list's basis should be adjusted to take into account that hitters played in different eras, with different rules, and in different ballparks. He makes those adjustments and produces a new list of the best 100 hitters that will spark debate among baseball fans and statisticians everywhere. Schell combines the two qualifications essential for a book like this. He is a professional statistician--applying his skills to cancer research--and he has an encyclopedic knowledge of baseball. He has wondered how to rank hitters since he was a boy growing up as a passionate Cincinnati Reds fan. Over the years, he has analyzed the most important factors, including the relative difficulty of hitting in different ballparks, the length of hitters' careers, the talent pool that players are drawn from, and changes in the game that raised or lowered major-league batting averages (the introduction of the designated hitter and changes in the height and location of the pitcher's mound, for example). Schell's study finally levels the playing field, giving new credit to hitters who played in adverse conditions and downgrading others who faced fewer obstacles. His final ranking of players differs dramatically from the traditional list. Gwynn, for example, bumps Cobb to 2nd place, Rod Carew rises from 28th to 3rd, Babe Ruth drops from 9th to 16th, and Willie Mays comes from off the list to rank 13th. Schell's list also gives relatively more credit to modern players, containing 39 whose best days were after 1960. Using a fun, conversational style, the book presents a feast of stories and statistics about players, ballparks, and teams--all arranged so that calculations can be skipped by general readers but consulted by statisticians eager to follow Schell's methods or introduce their students to such basic concepts as mean, histogram, standard deviation, p-value, and regression. Baseball's All-Time Best Hitters will shake up how baseball fans view the greatest heroes of America's national pastime.
Author: Richard Francaviglia
Transference of Oriental images and identities to the American landscape and its inhabitants, especially in the Westin other words, portrayal of the West as the Orienthas been a common aspect of American cultural history. Place names offer notable examplesthink of the Jordan River or Pyramid Lakebut the imagery and its varied meanings are more widespread and significant. Understanding that range and significance, especially to the western part of the continent, means coming to terms with the complicated, nuanced ideas of the Orient and of the North American continent that European Americans brought to the West. Such complexity is what historical geographer Richard Francaviglia unravels in this book.
Author: David A. F. Sweet
One. Two. Three. Thats as long as it took to sear the souls of a dozen young American men, thanks to the craziest, most controversial finish in the history of the Olympicsthe 1972 gold-medal basketball contest between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the worlds two superpowers at the time. The U.S. team, whose unbeaten Olympic streak dated back to when Adolf Hitler reigned over the Berlin Games, believed it had won the gold medal that September in Munichnot once, but twice. But it was the third time the final seconds were played that counted. What happened? The head of international basketballflouting rules he himself had createdtrotted onto the court and demanded twice that time be put back on the clock. A referee allowed an illegal substitution and an illegal free-throw shooter for the Soviets while calling a slew of late fouls on the U.S. players. The American players became the only Olympic athletes in the history of the games to refuse their medals. Of course, the 1972 Olympics are remembered primarily for a far graver matter, when eleven Israeli team members were killed by Palestinian terrorists, stunning the world and temporarily stopping the games. One American player, Tommy Burleson, had a gun to his head as the hostages were marched past him before their deaths. Through interviews with many of the American players and others, the author relates thehorrorof terrorism, the pain of losing the mostcontroversialchampionship game in sports history to a hated rival, and the consequences of the players decision to shun their Olympic medals to this day.
Author: C. Sylvester Whitaker Jr.
Taking Northern Nigeria during the years 1946 to 1966 as an example, Professor Whitaker shows how modern institutionsparliamentary representation, a cabinet system, popular suffrage, and political partieswere introduced and how they resulted not in a displacement of tradition but in an astute absorption by traditional forces.Originally published in 1970.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Len Gutkin
The dandy, a nineteenth-century character and concept exemplified in such works as Wildes The Picture of Dorian Gray, reverberates in surprising corners of twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture. Establishing this character as a kind of shorthand for a diverse range of traits and tendencies, including gentlemanliness, rebelliousness, androgyny, aristocratic pretension, theatricality, and extravagance, Len Gutkin traces Victorian aesthetic precedents in the work of the modernist avant-garde, the noir novel, Beatnik experimentalism, and the postmodern thriller. As defined in the period between the fin de siecle and modernism, dandyism was inextricable from representations of queerness. But, rinsed of its suspect associations with the effeminate, dandyism would exert influence over such macho authors as Hemingway and Chandler, who harnessed its decadent energy. Dandyism, Gutkin argues, is a species of gendered charisma. The performative masquerade of Wildes decadent dandy is an ancestor to both the gender performance at work in American cowboy lore and the precious self-presentation of twenty-first-century hipsters. We cannot understand modernism and postmodernisms negotiation of gender, aesthetic abstraction, or the culture of celebrity without the dandy. Analyzing the characteristic focus on costume, consumption, and the well-turned phrase in readings of figures ranging from Wyndham Lewis, Djuna Barnes, and William Burroughs to Patricia Highsmith, Bret Easton Ellis, and Ben Lerner, Dandyism reveals the Victorian dandys legacy across the twentieth century, providing a revisionist history of the relationship between Victorian aesthetics and twentieth-century literature.
Author: Roxanne Warren
The United States has evolved into a nation of twenty densely populated megaregions. Yet despite the environmental advantages of urban density, urban sprawl and reliance on the private car still set the pattern for most new development. Cars guzzle not only gas but also space, as massive acreage is dedicated to roadways and parking. Even more pressing, the replication of this pattern throughout the fast-developing world makes it doubtful that we will achieve the reductions in carbon emissions needed to avoid climate catastrophe. In Rail and the City, architect Roxanne Warren makes the case for compact urban development that is supported by rail transit. Calling the automobile a relic of the twentieth century, Warren envisions a release from the tyrannies of traffic congestion, petroleum dependence, and an oppressively paved environment. Technical features of rail are key to its high capacities, safety at high speeds, and compactness -- uniquely qualifying it to serve as ideal infrastructure within and between cities. Ultimately, mobility could be achieved through extensive networks of public transit, particularly rail, supplemented by buses, cycling, walking, car-sharing, and small, flexible vehicles. High-speed rail, fed by local transit, could eliminate the need for petroleum-intensive plane trips of less than 500 miles.Warren considers issues of access to transit, citing examples from Europe, Japan, and North America, and pedestrian- and transit-oriented urban design. Rail transit, she argues, is the essential infrastructure for a fluidly functioning urban society.
Author: Henry Bibb
Henry Bibb (1815-1854) was born to an enslaved woman named Mildred Jackson in Shelby County, Kentucky. His father was a state senator who never acknowledged him. His narrative documents his persistent attempts to escape to freedom, beginning at age ten, offering an insider's view of the degradation and varieties of slavery as well as its bitter legacies within families. Having finally settled in Detroit in 1842, Bibb joined the abolitionist lecture circuit and lived the rest of his days as a well-known African American activist who believed that Canada might offer a haven for the formerly enslaved.Bibb's autobiography, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, was published in 1849. Scholars have pointed out that Bibb's narrative has several distinguishing features among the larger body of slave narratives. Unusually, Bibb survived enslavement in the Deep South and later described it, and his narrative offers documentation of African folkways including conjuring and an account of Native American slaveholding practices as well. Henry Bibb was above all resilient and determined to achieve freedom for himself and others. Unwilling to abandon those he loved, he risked recapture several times to free them from enslavement, too. In the small span of his thirty-nine years he would live to be reunited with three of his brothers who had fled to Canada.
Author: William H. Roberts
Now for the Contest tells the story of the Civil War at sea in the context of three campaigns: the blockade of the southern coast, the raiding of Union commerce, and the projection of power ashore. The Civil War at sea was profoundly influenced by innovation and asymmetryboth sides embraced innovation, but differences in their resources and their strategic objectives pushed them down different paths. At its peak the Union navy boasted over fifty thousand men and nearly seven hundred ships. The Confederate navy was far smaller, never exceeding some five thousand men, and it numbered its ships in the tens rather than the hundreds. The Confederacys technology strategy and its overseas programs formed the main counterweight to the Unions numerical force.Now for the Contest also examines how both sides mobilized and employed their resources for a war that proved to be of unprecedented intensity and duration. For both antagonists the conduct of the naval war was complicated by rapid technological change, as steam power, metal armor, and more powerful ordnance sparked experiment and innovation both in naval construction and in tactics. The war years brought tremendous change to a service that did not always welcome it. Innovative technologies flourished in this hothouse atmosphere, however, and a rising generation of naval leaders would carry the knowledge of combat into the long peace that followed.