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An intellectual journey through 250 million years of stone

In the San Rafael Swell, geologic forces have tilted and exposed the strata so that over 250 million years of geologic history can be observed simply by traveling across the rocky landscape, with its dramatic variety of colors and forms. Largely neglected by visitors to the state’s national parks and monuments and overlooked by many nature writers of the Colorado Plateau, the exceptional “Swell” offers a unique opportunity to think about people’s connections to the layers of earth beneath our feet. 

Thinking with Stone takes readers on an intellectual journey across the Swell, moving from the youngest rocks at its edges to the oldest near its center and guiding readers through the features and histories of each geological layer. Drawing on personal experience and scientific research, Brian Rajski explores how creatively engaging with geology by using rocks as the foundation for thinking can generate new ideas about art, ethics, and the environment. Ultimately, the book reimagines the relationships between history and deep time, humanity and geology, and the individual and the stories told by stone.

Christophe Galfard, acclaimed author of the international bestseller The Universe in Your Hand, takes readers on an extraordinary journey across time and space—from the origins of Earth’s life to the search for extraterrestrials.

What is life? In this majestic book, Christophe Galfard, celebrated author and former graduate student of Stephen Hawking, takes us on a wonder-filled voyage to answer this question. He guides us from our planet’s birth and the mysterious bacteria that lived billions of years ago, through the extreme evolutionary turns that saw dog-sized sea scorpions and trees covered in scales, to the visionary discoveries of the past two centuries that have allowed us to understand human bodies and imagine alien ones.

With Galfard as our guide, readers go back in time to Earth’s origins, swim inside our bloodstream, and sail in space beyond the safety of our terrestrial haven. We experience the birth of Earth, the demise of the dinosaurs, and the possible creation of life in outer space. This Is Life offers a glimpse of other worlds detected only in recent years, beyond the Solar System, where life could be thriving. The end of the book’s journey signals new beginnings, and we are left with the overwhelming sense that, as members of a long line of living creatures, we belong to a reality far greater and more complex than we ever imagined.

Through brilliant storytelling and delightful humor, Galfard connects the latest scientific discoveries and makes the secrets of the living world accessible to all. This Is Life will transform the way you see the world and your place in it.

Christophe Galfard, acclaimed author of the international bestseller The Universe in Your Hand, takes readers on an extraordinary journey across time and space—from the origins of Earth’s life to the search for extraterrestrials.

What is life? In this majestic book, Christophe Galfard, celebrated author and former graduate student of Stephen Hawking, takes us on a wonder-filled voyage to answer this question. He guides us from our planet’s birth and the mysterious bacteria that lived billions of years ago, through the extreme evolutionary turns that saw dog-sized sea scorpions and trees covered in scales, to the visionary discoveries of the past two centuries that have allowed us to understand human bodies and imagine alien ones.

With Galfard as our guide, readers go back in time to Earth’s origins, swim inside our bloodstream, and sail in space beyond the safety of our terrestrial haven. We experience the birth of Earth, the demise of the dinosaurs, and the possible creation of life in outer space. This Is Life offers a glimpse of other worlds detected only in recent years, beyond the Solar System, where life could be thriving. The end of the book’s journey signals new beginnings, and we are left with the overwhelming sense that, as members of a long line of living creatures, we belong to a reality far greater and more complex than we ever imagined.

Through brilliant storytelling and delightful humor, Galfard connects the latest scientific discoveries and makes the secrets of the living world accessible to all. This Is Life will transform the way you see the world and your place in it.

Combines current data and taxonomic classifications for tiger beetles in the Southeast with stunning close-up photographs, flight season charts, and distribution maps

Tiger beetles are brightly colored and metallic beetles, often with ivory or cream-colored markings. They are most abundant and diverse in habitats near bodies of water with sandy or clay soils and can be found along rivers, on sea and lake shores, on sand dunes, around dry lakebeds, on clay banks, or on woodland paths. Conservatively estimated, the group comprises more than 2,600 species worldwide.

Tiger Beetles of the Southeastern United States identifies and describes 52 taxa (42 species and 10 additional subspecies) of tiger beetles that occur in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Stunning close-up photographs accompany current taxonomic and biological information in a volume designed for a growing audience of enthusiastic amateurs and professionals alike.

The authors provide an in-depth description of the anatomy, life cycle, and behavior of tiger beetles; an overview of the various southeastern habitats in which they occur; instructions for finding, identifying, and photographing them in the wild; and the conservation status of various species. The individual species accounts include stunning, detailed images, flight season charts, county-level regional distribution maps, and discussion of identifying features, habitat, similar species, and subspecies when applicable. The appendix includes two species previously found in Florida but no longer known to exist there.

The result is the most complete field guide to date on tiger beetles in the region. With more than 230 images of beetles and their habitats, as well as life history and distribution data, this book is essential for tiger beetle enthusiasts, naturalists of all kinds, photographers, biologists, and teachers throughout the region.
 

A ranging, erudite, and intimate examination of the nature of knowledge, by a thinker and creator who defies categorization.

Attention is in short supply and high demand. But when we bring our minds and time and senses to something—an idea, an object, another person—we tap into a human capacity for observation, patience, candor, and presence. Look long enough, and we can reliably catch a bright flash, a shift in the light, even a dawning.

In Till the Light Leaps, historian of science D. Graham Burnett explores the questions that have been major drivers of his intellectual life: How do we know what we know? And how are we changed by that effort? Written during a period of radical, collective, and creative experimentation with attention, the twenty-six essays collected here span topics like technology, science, art, and religion. Together, they comprise a sustained reflection on the relationship between empirical matters and the shiver-work of the human spirit. A brief history of spectroscopy offers an occasion to consider the solemn power of fire, as well as the righteous lessons of a childhood science experiment gone wrong. Skywriting invokes military might, but also the expressionistic bravura of a solo aeronaut, Art Smith. The Greek ritual of throwing plant matter in celebration is a thread connecting animal sacrifice, confetti production, and capitalist excess. In the final, previously unpublished essay, Galway Kinnell’s 1980 poem “Saint Francis and the Sow” becomes a heroic call to love and an allegory of attention in its richest sense.

Till the Light Leaps, a reference to the writings of Simone Weil, advises us to look at something “until the light leaps,” whether it yields a wink or an illumination. Burnett models the work—and the pleasure—of staying present with the world, and his essays test what science can offer, even as they feel for what it cannot.

An archaeologically rich region, in advance of impending disturbance

This volume stands as a key general resource for archaeologists working in the region extending from Louisiana through Mississippi north to Missouri and Kentucky, and it represents an opportunity to influence for decades a large part of the archaeological work to take place in the Southeast.

The book responds to a need for a comprehensive archaeological overview of the Lower Mississippi Valley that forms a portion of an interstate corridor spanning nine states that will run from southern Michigan to the Texas-Mexico border. The culturally sensitive Mississippi Delta is one of the richest archaeological areas in North America, and it is crucial that research designs be comprehensive, coordinated, and meet current preservation and future research needs. The authors are well-respected researchers from both within and outside the region with expertise in the full range of topics that comprise American archaeology. They examine matters of method and theory, the application of materials science, geophysics, and other high-tech tools in archaeology that provide for optimum data-recovery.

 

A multidisciplinary account showing how ancient notions of sympathy changed ways of thinking about interconnectedness.

When we hear the word sympathy today, we tend to imagine the emotional bond between people. But for centuries, sympathy just as commonly brought to mind interdependencies between plants, rocks, and celestial bodies. It explained why magnets attract iron, how the stars influence human destiny, and why one trembles when one is afraid. It implicated human beings in a complex network of loves (sympathies) and hates (antipathies). The ancient notion of sympathy led to ways of thinking about community even beyond the boundaries of the human that continue to influence how we think about life, society, and Nature today.

This book offers the first comprehensive account of ancient sympathy, spanning the fifth century BCE to the third century CE. Tracing connections across works of philosophy, natural history, cosmology, medicine, and literature, Brooke Holmes argues that how people thought about sympathetic communities played a crucial role in shaping the idea of Nature as a webbed, well-ordered whole in the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial Mediterranean. From the scale of the organism to that of the cosmos, this book interrogates the ancient history of a protoecological, antimechanistic conception of Nature, proposing the richly textured thought-world of sympathy as a resource for rethinking and reimagining human and nonhuman communities, the stories we tell about the classical world, and the political and theoretical stakes of vital materialisms.

To Life explores the Jewish relationship with nature by illuminating significant Jewish thinkers who increased in important ways our understanding of various aspects of natural history. In eight compelling chapter-long biographies, naturalist Joel Greenberg demonstrates the diversity of both Jewish identity and the natural sciences.

Greenberg’s rich biographical sketches spotlight great Jewish scientists who not only made major contributions to the study of the natural world but also led rich and colorful lives: botanist and spy Aaron Aaronsohn, zoologist Libbie Henrietta Hyman, infamous ornithologist Nathan Leopold, mammalogist Philip Hershkovitz, arachnologist Herbert Levi, herpetologist Hymen Marx, public health entomologist Andrew Spielman, and ecologist Joan Ehrenfeld. These individuals manifested different aspects of Jewish identity—some observant, some secular—but all were affected in one way or another by their being Jewish. 

By exploring the relationship between Jews and nature through the lives of these figures, Greenberg shares new and underrecognized aspects of Jewish and environmental history and opens new portals into the fields they studied.

From boreal Alaska to subtropical Florida, from the chaparral of California to the pitch pine of New Jersey, America boasts nearly a billion burnable acres. In nine previous volumes, Stephen J. Pyne has explored the fascinating variety of flame region by region. In To the Last Smoke: An Anthology, he selects a sampling of the best from each.

To the Last Smoke offers a unique and sweeping view of the nation’s fire scene by distilling observations on Florida, California, the Northern Rockies, the Great Plains, the Southwest, the Interior West, the Northeast, Alaska, the oak woodlands, and the Pacific Northwest into a single, readable volume. The anthology functions as a color-commentary companion to the play-by-play narrative offered in Pyne’s Between Two Fires: A Fire History of Contemporary America. The series is Pyne’s way of “keeping with it to the end,” encompassing the directive from his rookie season to stay with every fire “to the last smoke.”

In 2001, the National Science Foundation's ADVANCE Institutional Transformation program began awarding five-year grants to colleges and universities to address a common problem: how to improve the work environment for women faculty in science and engineering. Drawing on the expertise of scientists, engineers, social scientists, specialists in organizational behavior, and university administrators, this collection is the first to describe the variety of innovative efforts academic institutions around the country have undertaken.

Focusing on a wide range of topics, from how to foster women's academic success in small teaching institutions, to how to use interactive theater to promote faculty reflection about departmental culture, to how a particular department created and maintained a healthy climate for women's scientific success, the contributors discuss both the theoretical and empirical aspects of the initiatives, with emphasis on the practical issues involved in creating these approaches. The resulting evidence shows that these initiatives have the desired effects. The cases represented in this collection depict the many issues women faculty in science and engineering face, and the solutions that are presented can be widely accepted at academic institutions around the United States. The essays in Transforming Science and Engineering illustrate that creating work environments that sustain and advance women scientists and engineers benefits women, men, and underrepresented minorities.

Abigail J. Stewart is Sandra Schwartz Tangri Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan.

Janet E. Malley is a psychologist and Associate Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan.

Danielle LaVaque-Manty, former Research Associate at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan, teaches composition at U-M's Sweetland Writing Center.

Cover photo: Joanne Leonard