No matter how you voted in the 2010 election, both Democrats and Republicans can agree that there is one indispensable guide to people, politics, and power in Washington. The Almanac of American Politics is the gold standard—the book everyone involved, invested, or interested in American politics must have on their reference shelf.
As in previous editions, the 2012 Almanac includes profiles of every member of Congress and every governor. It offers in-depth and completely up-to-date narrative profiles of all 50 states and 435 House districts, covering everything from economics to history to, of course, politics. The new edition also contains Michael Barone’s sharp-eyed analysis of the 2010 congressional elections, detailing significant trends, redistricting initiatives, and the like.
Full of maps, census data, and information on topics ranging from campaign expenditures to voting records to interest group ratings, the 2012 Almanac of American Politics presents everything you need to know about American politics in snappy prose and framed by cogent analysis.
“Real political junkies get two Almanacs: one for the home and one for the office.”—Chuck Todd, NBC
“It’s simply the oxygen of the political world. We have the most dog-eared copy in town.”—Judy Woodruff, PBS News Hour
“Michael Barone is to politics what statistician-writer Bill James is to baseball, a mix of historian, social observer, and numbers cruncher who illuminates his subject with perspective and a touch of irreverence.”—Chicago Tribune
“Indispensable . . . this compendium of statistics and information has gone as far as humanly possible.”—Washington Post
While the poems in Steve Straight’'s new collection lead the reader "into the dark forest of memory / or onto the carnival ride of hypothesis, / or even right off the cliff of surprise," they maintain a sure course through the din and distraction of modern life. Bits of news from the natural sciences, chance encounters, and even convicted felon and crafting queen Martha Stewart all fall under Straight’s observant eye. The result is a collection of conversational poems that lend a sense of wonder to the commonplace.
Seeking a closer connection with nature than the manicured lawns of suburbia, naturalist Fred Gehlbach and his family built a house on the edge of a wooded ravine in Central Texas in the mid-1960s. On daily walks over the hills, creek hollows, and fields of the ravine, Gehlbach has observed the cycles of weather and seasons, the annual migrations of birds, and the life cycles of animals and plants that also live in the ravine.
In this book, Gehlbach draws on thirty-five years of journal entries to present a composite, day-by-day almanac of the life cycles of this semiwild natural island in the midst of urban Texas. Recording such events as the hatching of Eastern screech owl chicks, the emergence of June bugs, and the first freeze of November, he reminds us of nature's daily, monthly, and annual cycles, from which humans are becoming ever more detached in our unnatural urban environments. The long span of the almanac also allows Gehlbach to track how local and even global developments have affected the ravine, from scars left by sewer construction to an increase in frost-free days probably linked to global warming.
This long-term record of natural cycles provides one of only two such baseline data sets for North America. At the same time, the book is an eloquent account of one keen observer's daily interactions with his wild and human neighbors and of the lessons in connectedness and the "play of life" that they teach.
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