Can we ever go home again? This question lies at the heart of Homecomings by Wong Yoon Wah, a veteran Singaporean poet and a prominent voice in global Chinese literature.In these poems, Wong delves into his country’s precolonial and colonial history, the natural heritage of the rainforest, his memories of his kampung hometown, his heartbreak at the closure of Nanyang University, and the global traumas of European colonisation and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.He expresses the loneliness and dislocation of the Chinese diaspora, as well as the sorrow of his generation as so many of their cultural touchstones are destroyed in the name of progress. At the same time, he embraces a planetary mode of thinking, sensing rapport with fellow humans from distant cultures and geographies, identifying even with the plants and animals that compose our ecosystem.Filled with nostalgia, bitter irony and strange beauty, Homecomings is a love letter to the past, revisiting its glories, making peace with t
This is the first global history of natural catastrophes. It brings together some of the best scholars from different continents and different disciplines to discuss human responses to natural catastr
The array of bottles is impressive, their contents finely tuned to varied tastes. But they all share the same roots in Mesoamerica's natural bounty and human culture. The drink is tequila?more pr
Rain is elemental, mysterious, precious, destructive. It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of the world's water. Yet this is the first book to tell the story of rain.Cynthia Barnett's Rain begins four billion years ago with the torrents that filled the oceans, and builds to the storms of climate change. It weaves together science—the true shape of a raindrop, the mysteries of frog and fish rains—with the human story of our ambition to control rain, from ancient rain dances to the 2,203 miles of levees that attempt to straitjacket the Mississippi River. It offers a glimpse of our "founding forecaster," Thomas Jefferson, who measured every drizzle long before modern meteorology. Two centuries later, rainy skies would help inspire Morrissey’s mopes and Kurt Cobain’s grunge. Rain is also a travelogue, taking readers to Scotland to tell the surprising story of the mackintosh raincoat, and to India, w
Rain is elemental, mysterious, precious, destructive.It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of the world's water. Yet this is the first book to t
The ‘mighty totara’ is one of New Zealand's most extraordinary trees. Among the biggest and oldest trees in the New Zealand forest, the heart of Maori carving and culture, trailing no.
In a series of linked personal essays, biologist Kimmerer (SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry) describes the lives of mosses and how they are intertwined with the lives of humans and o
For millennia, corals were a marine enigma, organisms that confounded scientific classification and occupied a space between the animal and plant kingdoms. Our cultural relationships with coral have b
In this second edition of their classic text, Klyza and Trombulak use the lens of interconnectedness to examine the geological, ecological, and cultural forces that came together to produce contempora
