Invisible Islands

Invisible Islands is twenty-one beautifully crafted fictions, each illuminating a specific island in the mythic Invisible Islands archipelago. Originally inspired by the genius of Calvino and Borges, these islands are memorable, imaginative and emblematic. The real mixes with the surreal, as you travel from beneath the sea from Armaigh to the Brandenburg Gate and on to the Forbidden City, and from the remote holy island of St Eoinean's to the high ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Steeped in real and mythic history and tradition, the Islands are utterly contemporary and international. These elegantly written fables, both humorous and humane, remind you that life is fabulous in the true sense of the word.

When you're filled with fear, disappointment, and despair, do you shrink down and hide or do you get up and survive? When Emon realizes what her parents have done to her, she rises up and thrives on her own, so she thinks! Island of the Invisible Being depicts the spirit and determination of the people of the Marshall Islands. Beautifully written and illsutrated, Island of the Invisible Being is a legend that will touch the hearts of all.

An exciting follow-up to Lei and the Fire Goddess features a mysterious, invisible island, dangerous spirits, and a newcomer who does not need Lei's help...or does she? It turns out that curses are real. After saving her best friend and ancestral guardian, Kaipo, from Pele the fire goddess’s traps and successfully preventing lava from destroying her tūtū’s house, all Lei wants to do is take a nap. The only problem? Kaipo’s ʻaumakua pendant is missing, and without it, he will soon rot . . . emotionally and physically. So Lei, Kaipo, the shapeshifting bat Ilikea, and newcomer Kaukahi—a fiercely independent fashionista—set off on a journey to an invisible island where they hope to find Kaipo’s pendant. To get there, they’ll have to jump off the edge of their world, contend with sharks, and cross an ocean. And when they arrive? The crew realizes that the missing pendant is the least of their problems. For there are evil spirits gathering, and they’re out for blood. In this exciting follow-up to Lei and the Fire Goddess, Malia Maunakea crafts a tale about friendship, family, culture, and what it means to forgive each other and yourself.

A revolutionary new understanding of the precarious modern human-nature relationship and a path to a healthier, more sustainable world. Amidst all the wondrous luxuries of the modern world—smartphones, fast intercontinental travel, Internet movies, fully stocked refrigerators—lies an unnerving fact that may be even more disturbing than all the environmental and social costs of our lifestyles. The fragmentations of our modern lives, our disconnections from nature and from the consequences of our actions, make it difficult to follow our own values and ethics, so we can no longer be truly ethical beings. When we buy a computer or a hamburger, our impacts ripple across the globe, and, dissociated from them, we can’t quite respond. Our personal and professional choices result in damages ranging from radioactive landscapes to disappearing rainforests, but we can’t quite see how. Environmental scholar Kenneth Worthy traces the broken pathways between consumers and clean-room worker illnesses, superfund sites in Silicon Valley, and massively contaminated landscapes in rural Asian villages. His groundbreaking, psychologically based explanation confirms that our disconnections make us more destructive and that we must bear witness to nature and our consequences. Invisible Nature shows the way forward: how we can create more involvement in our own food production, more education about how goods are produced and waste is disposed, more direct and deliberative democracy, and greater contact with the nature that sustains us.

The Crown is not only Canada’s oldest continuing political institution, but also its most pervasive, affecting the operation of Parliament and the legislatures, the executive, the bureaucracy, the courts, and federalism. However, many consider the Crown to be obscure and anachronistic. David E. Smith’s The Invisible Crown was one of the first books to study the role of the Crown in Canada, and remains a significant resource for the unique perspective it offers on the Crown’s place in politics. The Invisible Crown traces Canada’s distinctive form of federalism, with highly autonomous provinces, to the Crown’s influence. Smith concludes that the Crown has greatly affected the development of Canadian politics due to the country’s societal, geographic, and economic conditions. Praised by the Globe and Mail’s Michael Valpy as “a thoroughly lucid, scholarly explanation of how the Canadian constitutional monarchy works,” it is bolstered by a new foreword by the author speaking to recent events involving the Crown and Canadian politics, notably the prorogation of Parliament in 2008.

Despite Western society's preoccupation with safety and protection, its most vulnerable members still lack access to the level of security that many of us take for granted. In this trailblazing study, Laura Huey illustrates the issue of a 'security gap' faced by increasing homeless populations: while they are among the most likely victims of crime, they are also among the least served by existing forms of state and private security. Invisible Victims presents the first comprehensive, integrated study of the risks faced by homeless people and their attempts to find safety and security in often dangerous environments. Huey draws not only on current debates on security within criminology, but also on a decade's worth of her own field research on the victimization and policing of the homeless. A theoretically and empirically informed examination of the myriad issues affecting the homeless, Invisible Victims makes a compelling case for society to provide necessary services and, above all, a basic level of security for this population.

A beautifully designed guidebook to the unnoticed yet essential elements of our cities, from the creators of the wildly popular 99% Invisible podcast