Capturing The Vanishing

Louisiana is in a desperate battle to save what remains of its coastal wetlands, which are disappearing at the rate of a football field--size area every 38 minutes. Most people are unaware of the devastating transformation of this remote region, though the effects are detrimental for the entire country economically, culturally, and environmentally. Hoping that art will inspire concern where statistics have not, and focusing on the marshlands' beauty rather than their destruction, nature photographer C. C. Lockwood and painter Rhea Gary have joined together in Marsh Mission to show that a picture is worth at least a thousand words. Their rapturous thirty photographs and thirty paintings may well leave one speechless. For an entire year, C.C. immersed himself in the wetlands, living on a houseboat -- the Wetland Wanderer -- with his wife, Sue, a schoolteacher, who created an interactive classroom from the boat via the Internet. They covered more than 5,000 miles, taking the pulse of their environs and documenting everything from oil rigs to egrets and vivid setting suns. Rhea sometimes joined the Lockwoods and other times ventured out in her own bateau, designed to hold an easel for making oil-on-paper sketches. She produced the final oil paintings on canvas in her studio. In his photographs, C.C. captures the quiet, hidden activity of the wetlands in all their paradisaical aspects. Breathtaking detail -- the reward of day-in and day-out vigilance. Rhea conveys her emotional response to the light, color, and mood of the landscape with bold impressionistic strokes in raspberry, tangerine, lime, fuchsia, azure, and yellow. Hot -- like the culture and the climate of south Louisiana. Together, the two impart an aesthetic experience that explains better than any map or scientific data the irreplaceable treasure being lost. A narrative by each artist enhances their visual testimony and gives a rare glimpse into the creative process. Formed by silt deposits from the Mississippi River, Louisiana's coastal region constitutes 40 percent of all U.S. marshlands, but it is sinking at an alarming rate because the river's leveed banks -- while essential for flood control and ship navigation -- obstruct silt replenishment. With Marsh Mission, C. C. Lockwood and Rhea Gary offer a visionary tribute to this endangered, national natural resource. Their images should arouse awareness, appreciation, and, especially, action.

This is a 3-volume set of oversize books that span the continent of Asia. Ancient and beautiful traditions in Asia that are rapidly disappearing are recorded here in 9,000 images on 1,000 pages. The author has visited 35 countries in Asia and has travelled to the end of the road in its most remote places to capture the costumes, architecture, festivals, and lifestyles that are vanishing. The diverse cultures range from Turkey in the west to Japan in the east, from Siberia in the north to Indonesia in the south, and everything in between. Volume 1 covers West Asia, Volume 2 Central Asia, and Volume 3 East Asia. Every one of its 1,000 pages is uniquely designed, and every one of its 9,000 images is captioned. This is an ambitious and extreme passion project that the author/photographer has worked on for 49 years. Many of the scenes depicted in the book are now gone from the world, and others are becoming rarer by the day. There is no other book like it.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2020 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES * THE WASHINGTON POST * NPR * PEOPLE * TIME MAGAZINE* VANITY FAIR * GLAMOUR 2021 WOMEN'S PRIZE FINALIST “Bennett’s tone and style recalls James Baldwin and Jacqueline Woodson, but it’s especially reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s 1970 debut novel, The Bluest Eye.” —Kiley Reid, Wall Street Journal “A story of absolute, universal timelessness …For any era, it's an accomplished, affecting novel. For this moment, it's piercing, subtly wending its way toward questions about who we are and who we want to be….” – Entertainment Weekly From The New York Times-bestselling author of The Mothers, a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white. The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect? Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins. As with her New York Times-bestselling debut The Mothers, Brit Bennett offers an engrossing page-turner about family and relationships that is immersive and provocative, compassionate and wise.

A never-before-seen look into the forbidding environment of glaciers, this book celebrates a realm of magnificent endangered beauty. Since 2005, renowned nature photographer James Balog has devoted himself to capturing glaciers and documenting their daily changes. These stunning images are a celebration of some of the most extraordinary natural formations on earth, as well as a dramatic and timely demonstration of the stark consequences resulting from global warming—from Alaska to Iceland to the Alps. As glaciologists for the Extreme Ice Survey, Balog and his team are conducting the most extensive glacier study ever, covering France, Switzerland, Iceland, Greenland, the United States (Alaska and Montana), Nepal, Bolivia, and Antarctica. Their high-resolution cameras capture approximately 4,000 images per year. From this collection of nearly half a million photos, Balog presents the most stunning panoramic photography of glaciers ever published.

'A thrilling, original, evocative and eerie tale - I adored it!’ Michelle Harrison, author of A Pinch of Magic 'A thrilling page-turner. Madame Pinchbeck is a gloriously Dickensian villain’ Abi Elphinstone, author of Sky Song 'Ghosts, gadgets, likeable villains and unlikely heroes: The Vanishing Trick is a dark and dazzling adventure’ Emma Carroll, author of Letters from the Lighthouse 'A completely enthralling tale, oozing with atmosphere and originality’ Catherine Doyle, author of The Storm Keeper's Island 'Jenni Spangler is the next big voice in children’s magical history novels’ Lucy Powrie, author of The Paper & Hearts Society 'Deliciously dark and atmospheric … I couldn’t get enough' Nizrana Farook, author of The Girl Who Stole An Elephant 'A spectacular heart-stopping adventure in a dark and dangerous Victorian world' Tamsin Winter, author of Jemima Small Versus the Universe 'An eventful gothic adventure full of secrets and surprises' Sunday Times Book of The Week? Step into a world of secrets, folklore and illusions, where nothing is as it seems and magic is at play… Madame Augustina Pinchbeck, travels the country conjuring the spirits of dearly departed loved ones... for a price. Whilst her ability to contact ghosts is a game of smoke and mirrors, there is real magic behind her tricks too - if you know where to look. Through a magical trade, she persuades children to part with precious objects, promising to use her powers to help them. But Pinchbeck is a deceiver, instead turning their items into enchanted Cabinets that bind the children to her and into which she can vanish and summon them at will. When Pinchbeck captures orphan Leander, events are set into motion that see him and his new friends Charlotte and Felix, in a race against time to break Pinchbeck’s spell, before one of them vanishes forever… #TheVanishingTrick A historical adventure with a magical twist from an outstanding debut talent. Perfect for fans of Michelle Harrison, Sophie Anderson and Emma Carroll.

This spirited history of public television offers an insider's account of its topsy-turvy forty-year odyssey. James Day, a founder of San Francisco's KQED and a past president of New York's WNET, provides a vivid and often amusing behind-the-screens history. Day tells how a program producer, desperate to locate a family willing to live with television cameras for seven months, borrowed a dime—and a suggestion—from a blind date and telephoned the Louds of Santa Barbara. The result was the mesmerizing twelve-hour documentary An American Family. Day relates how Big Bird and his friends were created to spice up Sesame Street when test runs showed a flagging interest in the program's "live-action" segments. And he describes how Frieda Hennock, the first woman appointed to the FCC, overpowered the resistance of her male colleagues to lay the foundation for public television. Day identifies the particular forces that have shaped public television and produced a Byzantine bureaucracy kept on a leash by an untrusting Congress, with a fragmented leadership that lacks a clearly defined mission in today's multimedia environment. Day calls for a bold rethinking of public television's mission, advocating a system that is adequately funded, independent of government, and capable of countering commercial television's "lowest-common-denominator" approach with a full range of substantive programs, comedy as well as culture, entertainment as well as information. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.

Is image everything? For many people in our culture, image and images are everything. Americans spend hours watching television but rarely finish a good book. Words are quickly losing their appeal. Arthur Hunt sees this trend as a direct assault on Christianity. He warns that by exalting imagery we risk becoming mindless pagans. Our thirst for images has dulled our minds so that we lack the biblical and mental defenses we need to resist pagan influences. What about paganism? Hunt contends that it never died in modern Western culture; image-based media just brought it to the surface again. Sex, violence, and celebrity worship abound in our culture, driving a mass media frenzy reminiscent of pagan idolatry. This book is a clear warning that the church is being cut off from its word-based heritage, and that we are open to abuse by those who exploit the image but neglect the Word. Thoughtful readers will find this a challenging call to be critical about the images bombarding our sense and to affirm that the Word is everything.

Widely regarded as the authentic voice of English-speaking farmers in Quebec, Robert Sellar, editor of the Huntingdon Gleaner, was the most-quoted rural newspaperman in Canada. Voice of the Vanishing Minority recounts Sellar's crusade against the tide of Frenchification that would displace English-speaking people from the townships they had pioneered. As a result of his outspokenness Sellar endured character assassination, physical violence, legal harassment, arson, clerical condemnation, disappointment, and the apathy of the dwindling communities he was defending. His provocative beliefs about Quebec's first "English exodus" - shared by the grass roots but dismissed by politically correct politicians, journalists, and academics as Anglo-Protestant bigotry - cut to the core of the unity crisis already developing in Canada. Book jacket.