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66 books match the query 'Year' and 9 start with a

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A Year In Place

W Scott Olsen

University of Utah Press, 2001

W. Scott Olsen and Bret Lott invited a dozen friends to consider one particular calendar month in the place they call home. The result is A Year in Place, a captivating collection of new writing by twelve eminent American writers.

More than a montage of voices and experiences, A Year in Place illustrates, as Olsen and Lott explain in their introduction, the trends in American thinking about who we are and what we care about. Rick Bass takes us to the Yaak Valley of Montana in June, where fawns are arriving, "newly-emerged, knocked-legged and groggy, legs still unfolding from that long sleeping passage." Peggy Shumaker explores the special social and cultural time that is March in Fairbanks, Alaska, where a long winter has whetted the psychic despair of inhabitants who find in the "sky’s unbearable brightness . . . a waking pain beyond endurance." Michael Martone transports us through memory to Indiana in the 1950s where each May a blimp "yawed and floated up," wallowing above a suburban neighborhood on its way to the Indianapolis 500.

These and nine other contributions yield an unforgettable book about "the places we find ourselves blessed enough to be."

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A Year in White

Cultural Newcomers to Lukumi and Santería in the United States

Carr, C. Lynn

Rutgers University Press, 2016

In the Afro-Cuban Lukumi religious tradition—more commonly known in the United States as Santería—entrants into the priesthood undergo an extraordinary fifty-three-week initiation period. During this time, these novices—called iyawo—endure a host of prohibitions, including most notably wearing exclusively white clothing. In A Year in White, sociologist C. Lynn Carr, who underwent this initiation herself, opens a window on this remarkable year-long religious transformation.

In her intimate investigation of the “year in white,” Carr draws on fifty-two in-depth interviews with other participants, an online survey of nearly two hundred others, and almost a decade of her own ethnographic fieldwork, gathering stories that allow us to see how cultural newcomers and natives thought, felt, and acted with regard to their initiation. She documents how, during the iyawo year, the ritual slowly transforms the initiate’s identity. For the first three months, for instance, the iyawo may not use a mirror, even to shave, and must eat all meals while seated on a mat on the floor using only a spoon and their own set of dishes. During the entire year, the iyawo loses their name and is simply addressed as “iyawo” by family and friends.

Carr also shows that this year-long religious ritual—which is carried out even as the iyawo goes about daily life—offers new insight into religion in general, suggesting that the sacred is not separable from the profane and indeed that religion shares an ongoing dynamic relationship with the realities of everyday life. Religious expression happens at home, on the streets, at work and school.

Offering insight not only into Santería but also into religion more generally, A Year in White makes an important contribution to our understanding of complex, dynamic religious landscapes in multicultural, pluralist societies and how they inhabit our daily lives.

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A Year in the Life of the Supreme Court

Rodney A. Smolla, ed.

Duke University Press, 1995

Despite its importance to the life of the nation and all its citizens, the Supreme Court remains a mystery to most Americans, its workings widely felt but rarely seen firsthand. In this book, journalists who cover the Court—acting as the eyes and ears of not just the American people, but the Constitution itself—give us a rare close look into its proceedings, the people behind them, and the complex, often fascinating ways in which justice is ultimately served. Their narratives form an intimate account of a year in the life of the Supreme Court.

The cases heard by the Supreme Court are, first and foremost, disputes involving real people with actual stories. The accidents and twists of circumstance that have brought these people to the last resort of litigation can make for compelling drama. The contributors to this volume bring these dramatic stories to life, using them as a backdrop for the larger issues of law and social policy that constitute the Court’s business: abortion, separation of church and state, freedom of speech, the right of privacy, crime, violence, discrimination, and the death penalty. In the course of these narratives, the authors describe the personalities and jurisprudential leanings of the various Justices, explaining how the interplay of these characters and theories about the Constitution interact to influence the Court’s decisions.

Highly readable and richly informative, this book offers an unusually clear and comprehensive portrait of one of the most influential institutions in modern American life.

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A Year in the Story Room

Ready-to-Use Programs for Children

Dawn R. Roginski

American Library Association, 2014

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A Year of Iowa Nature

Discovering Where We Live

Carl Kurtz

University of Iowa Press, 2014

Every Sunday evening for almost ten years, Iowa photographer and naturalist Carl Kurtz has e-mailed a photo and an extended caption to hundreds of outdoor enthusiasts. Engaging and informative, the photos focus on the world around and away from his tallgrass prairie homeplace: snow buntings in a blizzard, maple leaves in fall, migrating snow geese and red-winged blackbirds and monarchs, prairie spiderworts in spring bloom, leopard frogs loafing on waterlily leaves, northern flickers feeding young, and all the inhabitants and moods of the passing seasons. Now, in A Year of Iowa Nature, he presents fifty-five of his favorite photos along with an evocative introduction that urges us to go forth and discover the beauty in our own backyards.

Concentrating on Iowa’s tallgrass prairie, Kurtz also points his viewfinder toward the great variety of natural habitats in the eastern United States. Arranged chronologically throughout the year, the fifty-five color photos and their accompanying narratives rotate through the seasons like a nature film. The winter months showcase a frost-covered white-tailed deer, cedar waxwings feeding on winter apples, a muskrat on the surface of an icy pond, and dune-like snowdrifts. Kurtz’s palette warms up in springtime with stunning photos of Virginia bluebells, fox cubs, juvenile chipmunks, and ruddy ducks. Summer brings a host of butterflies, frogs, and goldfinches as well as blooming prairie plants. The colors become more subdued in fall with the change in light, revealing the rich hues of Indian grass and big bluestem and the subtle plumage of migrating warblers.

Just as Kurtz’s Practical Guide to Prairie Reconstruction offers an indispensable manual for individuals and land managers working to create a diverse prairie community, so does A Year of Iowa Nature point the way toward a sincere, month-by-month appreciation of the natural world around us.

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A Year of Programs for Millennials and More

Amy Alessio

American Library Association, 2015

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A Year of Programs for Teens 2

Amy Alessio

American Library Association, 2011

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A Year of Wild Sex

Twelve Months of Animal Mating

Julie Feinstein

University of Chicago Press, 2026

An eye-opening, unexpected year of animals' most intimate encounters.

It was a chance meeting with mating silverfish behind her bathroom cabinet that made biologist Julie Feinstein more curious about, well, the birds and the bees. How do other animals have sex? How do turtles do it? Or starfish without obvious sex organs? What about dangerous animals, like alligators? Or those historically associated with sex, like an oyster or a stork? What if all the animals that we see in zoos, TV ads, and children’s books, she wondered, had sex lives as seemingly strange as those of silverfish?

Feinstein’s humorous, accessible, and deeply researched text answers these and other questions on nature’s most surprising sexual behaviors, including firefly suitors bearing nutritious “nuptial gifts” and post-copulatory slug penis amputations. She raises an eyebrow at all the mammals—from goats to giraffes—that incorporate urine into courtship. She explains the complex interactions of amorous cockroaches and their equally complex genitalia. She laments that dyeing poison dart frog tadpoles sometimes commit cannibalism for a better shot at growing up and then, eventually, coupling up. In this little black book of animal sex, Feinstein guides readers through the year, drawing connections that illuminate the associations between animals’ mating behaviors and our monthly calendars. She details some animals’ peak bursts of activity, such as Atlantic white shrimp spawning in July, porcupines breeding in October, and bald eagles, decorators extraordinaires, working on their nests in December. Scorpions enter whimsically under the astrological sign of Scorpio in November, and when a holiday nears, she explains the mating nitty-gritty of species with deep cultural connections to a specific day, like New Year storks, Thanksgiving turkeys, or Christmas reindeer. Presenting a pair of animals for each month, Feinstein offers an entertaining and illuminating Noah’s ark and a year of wacky, unbelievable, truly wild sex.

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