Life Wonders Of The World

The idea of choosing the Wonders of the World can be traced all the way back to the 5th century, B.C., when the Greek historian Herodotus of the Halicarnassus listed seven must-sees, the Great Pyramid of Khufu in Egypt and six other constructions that long ago vanished from the earth. In this deluxe new LIFE book, Wonders of the World, the editors return to the sites of the original Seven Wonders and then keep right on traveling around the globe--eventually visiting in words and pictures seven-times-seven Wonders, plus one more. There are old Wonders here and a new list offered by the New7Wonders Foundation, a Switzerland-based organization that conducted an online poll that saw more than a million votes cast for the world's greatest Wonders. There are man-made Wonders and natural Wonders. There are obscure Wonders and famous Wonders. The amazing stories behind your favorites are recounted as LIFE goes to the Colosseum, to Stonehenge, to the Great Wall, to Machu Picchu, to the Taj Mahal, to Easter Island, to The Acropolis and the Vatican and back to the Great Pyramid. We travel into outer space for a close-up look at the International Space Station, and into the sea for a sensational vantage on Australia's Great Barrier Reef. We go to the summit of Mount Everest and down into the mile-deep Grand Canyon in Arizona. We could not choose between the world's tallest waterfall, 3,212-foot-high Angel Falls in Venezuela, or that which is arguably the world's most awesome, Victoria Falls on the Zimbabwe-Zambia border--so we went with both. Fifty Wonders in all, each more wondrous than the last. A reader cannot help being amazed and inspired by what man's industry has built through time, and what sublime Wonders nature has graced us with. This a book Herodotus would have loved! And then comes the big bonus: The 7 LIFE Wonders. We were sure that some of these fabulous sites were suitable for framing, and so we went to the vast LIFE archives and picked pictures of some of the most wonderful Wonders taken by famous LIFE photographers. Using a technique we developed in our 2009 book The Classic Collection, we inserted prints of these places in the last section of our book. Better yet: When you remove the prints to frame them, the image stays on the page, sp your lovely coffee-table book remains intact. For these wonders, a wondrous book.

What is Life? Where did it come from? Why does it end?

Poetry. A PAGE FROM THE WONDERS OF LIFE ON EARTH is a book with a coherent vision of nature--constructed or framed, both in the present and in the recent past--through zoos, aviaries, formal gardens, menageries, and books like the Time Life one named in the title. Informed by the author's grand tour of these zoos and gardens, these poems provide a strong lens for considering the many paradoxes of inter-species relations; they open up the possibility of honest, unsentimental elegy. The book is also a model of what might be called investigative poetry, taking the poet's combination of perceptual acuity, craft, music and sensibility into these richly troubled places (prisons of, monuments to, museums for the lost natural world) where "arcades sell postcards of old photographs of the arcades," and where questions of what it means to be human, to be animal, to be other and to be art are tangibly in the air. "Bolster's work demonstrates a surety of vision supported by an insider's eye for the telling aberrant detail everywhere matched by her impeccable ear"--Judith Fitzgerald, The Globe and Mail.

Here we have an endless stream of exotica-exotic living things growing from the ground and exotic critters of all shapes and sizes, crawling, bounding and flying around. As LIFE's editors put it in their introduction: "This is a wild book. In its pages we have animals as big as trucks and plants as big as small towns. We have flowers that dance for our pleasure and flowers that shyly hide underground, flowers that can kill animals and flowers that can heal animals. We have a teeny tiny bird that is directly descended from T Rex and a truly enormous bird that can't fly but can run 45 miles an hour. We have a lizard king that could rip you apart and a lizard princeling that walks on water. This is a wild, wild book." It is indeed. It is a book that is focused on life at the far fringes-the biggest, toughest, gentlest, rarest and weirdest species. It ultimately creates an astonishing image of the world around us, a world more diverse and sometimes strange than even the most imaginative reader might have expected. Accompanying the remarkable photography, which is always LIFE's hallmark, are descriptions of each subject that will fairly boggle the mind. Did you know that a carnivorous plant's trapping mechanism often doubles as its stomach, or that an elephant seal can hold its breath for up to two hours when diving in the sea? There are as many amazing facts in these pages as there are sensational pictures. And as with earlier volumes in LIFE's Classic Collection series, Wonders of Life comes with a bonus feature: Five photographic prints from the famed LIFE archive that can be extracted, framed and hung on your wall. When the print is removed, the exact picture is still there on the page beneath, so your deluxe coffee-table book remains intact. It is, as the editors write, "an elegant trick worthy of the dancing flower, and one that our readers have come to expect-and greatly enjoy." Travel along then, around the globe and to the depths of the oceans, as LIFE celebrates the wonders of life-each of them wondrous almost beyond belief.

From sunset at Stonehenge to the steps of the Forbidden City, see the wonders of the world and the people who built and used them brought back to life in stunning detail. Discover humanity's greatest monuments restored to their former glory in this guide to the wonders of the world. Incredible History: Wonders of the World turns back time to reveal realistic reconstructions of the most incredible monuments humankind has ever constructed. Imagine if you could travel back in time and visit the wonders of the world. Where would you go first? You’ll feel the roar of the crowd in the Roman Colosseum, observe an eclipse at Chichen Itza and stride along the walls of Great Zimbabwe. Children aged 9+ will learn when and how it was constructed, and what it teaches us about how the people who lived at the site might have spent their days. Each story begins by showing you the wonder as it is today and you can marvel at the location recreated in jaw-dropping 3D detail. This fascinating guide to the wonders of the world contains: - Information that goes beyond the curriculum to give a truly international view of the past, from the Palace of Versailles in France to the largest Buddhist temple in the world: Borobudur, Indonesia. - Pages packed with fascinating facts, data, and detail. - The wonders of the world are restored to their former glory with 3D computer artworks, going into incredible detail and depth. - Story boxes that put the discovery in context and go behind the scenes showing how archaeologists unearth the past. With each page packed with fantastic facts and extraordinary pictures, Incredible History: Wonders of the World brings together the best bits of history and archaeology to recreate our wondrous past. Combining archaeological evidence and computer technology, the book brings the people and places of the past back to life before your very eyes.

“A poet celebrates the wonders of nature in a collection of essays that could almost serve as a coming-of-age memoir.” —Kirkus Reviews As a child, Nezhukumatathil called many places home: the grounds of a Kansas mental institution, where her Filipina mother was a doctor; the open skies and tall mountains of Arizona, where she hiked with her Indian father; and the chillier climes of western New York and Ohio. But no matter where she was transplanted—no matter how awkward the fit or forbidding the landscape—she was able to turn to our world’s fierce and funny creatures for guidance. “What the peacock can do,” she tells us, “is remind you of a home you will run away from and run back to all your life.” The axolotl teaches us to smile, even in the face of unkindness; the touch-me-not plant shows us how to shake off unwanted advances; the narwhal demonstrates how to survive in hostile environments. Even in the strange and the unlovely, Nezhukumatathil finds beauty and kinship. For it is this way with wonder: it requires that we are curious enough to look past the distractions in order to fully appreciate the world’s gifts. Warm, lyrical, and gorgeously illustrated by Fumi Nakamura, World of Wonders is a book of sustenance and joy. Praise for World of Wonders Barnes & Noble 2020 Book of the Year An NPR Best Book of 2020 An Esquire Best Book of 2020 A Publishers Weekly “Big Indie Book of Fall 2020” A BuzzFeed Best Book of Fall 2020 “Hands-down one of the most beautiful books of the year.” —NPR “A timely story about love, identity and belonging.” —New York Times Book Review “A truly wonderous essay collection.” —Roxane Gay, The Audacity

Thomas the Tank Engine started life as a character in a bedtime story created by the Reverend Wilbert Awdry for his yound son, Christopher. This edition is a collection of 56 stories from Reverend Awdry's hughely popular Railway Series, beautifully illustrated with restored colour artwork.

Attractive illustrations invite coloring book fans of all ages to visit 27 man-made wonders. Included are India's Taj Mahal, the hanging gardens in ancient Babylon, the Mayan temples of Tikal in Guatemala, the Abu Simbel in Egypt, England's Stonehenge, the colossus of Rhodes, the pyramids, the great wall of China, the leaning tower of Pisa, and more.