Iguanas On My Roof

Did you ever wonder what was foreign about the Foreign Service? Neither did Iuntil I began to live it. This is my story as a Foreign Service wife and mother of five. My husband's job with USAID was to improve conditions in underdeveloped countries where there was war or disaster during the Vietnam War Era. My job was to follow him to the Philippines, Vietnam, Nigeria, Washington DC, and Nicaragua. We touched another thirteen countries. There is humor in the cultural challenges and danger where guerillas terrorized the highways. It is also a peek into the world of diplomacy and embassy life. My Spanish caused the cook to serve sandwiches of lettuce, tomatoes, and roast beef nestled in gooey peanut butter and jelly at my spur-of-the-moment lunch for the government Ministers. Our school bus was an Embassy station wagon with a driver, a guard, and a loaded M2 carbine rifle. The kitchen stove on our vacation was a circle of rocks on the beach. Managua was over six-hundred square blocks of rubble, ashes, and barbed wire when we arrived.

Two species come to mind when one thinks of the Galapagos Islands—the giant tortoises and Darwin’s fabled finches. While not as immediately captivating as the tortoises, these little brown songbirds and their beaks have become one of the most familiar and charismatic research systems in biology, providing generations of natural historians and scientists a lens through which to view the evolutionary process and its role in morphological differentiation. In Darwin’s Finches, Kathleen Donohue excerpts and collects the most illuminating and scientifically significant writings on the finches of the Galapagos to teach the fundamental principles of evolutionary theory and to provide a historical record of scientific debate. Beginning with fragments of Darwin’s Galapagos field notes and subsequent correspondence, and moving through the writings of such famed field biologists as David Lack and Peter and Rosemary Grant, the collection demonstrates how scientific processes have changed over time, how different branches of biology relate to one another, and how they all relate to evolution. As Donohue notes, practicing science today is like entering a conversation that has been in progress for a long, long time. Her book provides the history of that conversation and an invitation to join in. Students of both evolutionary biology and history of science will appreciate this compilation of historical and contemporary readings and will especially value Donohue’s enlightening commentary.

Five hundred miles from mainland Colombia, grassroots resistance, sloppy vacationers, and a muddy history of conquest converge for Verónica, returning after living in Mexico City, ready to understand herself and the place she came from. San Andrés rises gently from the Caribbean, part of Colombia but closer to Nicaragua, the largest island in an archipelago claimed by the Spanish, colonized by the Puritans, worked by slaves, and home to Arab traders, migrants from the mainland, and the descendants of everyone who came before. For Victoria – whose origins on the island go back generations, but whose identity is contested by her accent, her skin colour, her years far away – the sunburnt tourists, sewage blooms, sudden storms, and ‘thinking rundowns’ where liberation is plotted and dinner served from a giant communal pot, bring her into vivid, intimate contact with the island she thought she knew, her own history, and the possibility for a real future for herself and San Andrés.

Giant Green Iguanas have become a very popular pet in recent years. Unfortunately, too many people who own iguanas either donât have the right care information or are given the wrong information, and many of these iguanas do not make it to adulthood. The Iguana Denâs Care and Keeping of Giant Green Iguanas provides tested, true, and up to date methods of iguana husbandry that have been developed from years of rescuing and rehabbing iguanas. This book is a must-have for both new and experienced iguana keepers. The book is based on the original Iguana Den website: www.iguanaden.com, and all proceeds from the sale benefit the shelter animals at Scales and Tails Rescue, Inc., a non-profit organization.

In this latest, completely revised Women Travel anthology, Rough Guides present a whole new crew of writers, journalists, travellers, dreamers and escapists, each with a journey to share and a tale to inspire. Featuring more than 80 adventures around the world, Women Travel tells you what it's like to: backpack around India with your mother in tow; hitch up with a shepherd in Spain; set up the ultimate writers' retreat on the icefields of Antarctica; hang out with hippies in the Australian rainforest; be crowned Queen Mother of an African village; have a girls' night out in the Kalahari Desert; and sweat behind the scenes at a Caribbean carnival.

In the face of our receding connection to nature and the loss of our direct experience of the world, this book proposes a different kind of environmentalism. It argues that we must restore our link with the 'more-than-human' world, bringing wilderness, animals, and the Earth closer to individuals and into daily life.