No Birds Sing Here

The search for the literary life. Satire at its Best! In this indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time, two young people, Beckman and Malany set out on an odyssey to find meaning and reality in the artistic life, and in doing so unleash a barrage of humorous, unintended consequences. Beckman and Malany's journey reflects the allegorical evolution of humanity from its primal state, represented by Beckman's dismal life as a dishwasher to the crude, medieval development of mankind in a pool hall, and then to the false but erudite veneer of sophistication of the academic world. The world these protagonists live in is a world without love. It has every other variety of drive and emotion, but not love. Do they know it? Not yet. And they won't until they figure out why no birds sing here. Meier's writing is precise and detailed, whether the situation he describes is clear or ambiguous. Fans of Franzen and Salinger will find Meier to be another sharp, provocative writer of our time.

LIVE BAIT The canal town of Castlemere is the kind of hard-luck place that provides constant challenge to its crack team of detectives. But the skills of Superintendent Frank Shapiro, Inspector Liz Graham and the volatile Sergeant Cal Donovan are put to the test in very personal ways. A string of violent crime—train robberies, a dog-fighting ring and a rapist stalking the area—forces both Graham and Donovan to go undercover. The rapist is attacking blond, fortyish, successful women. Liz fits the profile and acts as a decoy, unprepared for the shattering repercussions in the department, her marriage and herself. As Donovan joins the vicious ranks of the pit bull circles, both cases take shocking and deadly turns.... "Bannister depicts her force coping with several major crimes at once. She does so brilliantly."—Publishers Weekly "This is more than genre fiction, it's art."—Mystery News

This is a reissue of a memoir published in 1931, featuring a new scholarly introduction.

Craig Waddell presents essays investigating Rachel Carson's influential 1962 book, Silent Spring. In his foreword, Paul Brooks, Carson's editor at Houghton Mifflin, describes the process that resulted in Silent Spring. In an afterword, Linda Lear, Carson's recent biographer, recalls the end of Carson's life and outlines the attention that Carson's book and Carson herself received from scholars and biographers, attention that focused so minutely on her life that it detracted from a focus on her work. The foreword by Brooks and the afterword by Lear frame this exploration within the context of Carson's life and work. Contributors are Edward P. J. Corbett, Carol B, Gartner, Cheryll Glotfelty, Randy Harris, M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Linda Lear, Ralph H. Lutts, Christine Oravec, Jacqueline S. Palmer, Markus J. Peterson, Tarla Rai Peterson, and Craig Waddell. Together, these essays explore Silent Spring'seffectiveness in conveying its disturbing message and the rhetorical strategies that helped create its wide influence.

The story of the search for the reason behind the decimation of Guam's bird population, and the efforts to combat the cause, a snake that had accidentily been introduced to the island.

Liberia’s oligarchy: The beginning of the end. 2019 Grand Prize Winner - Red City Review Based on the remarkable true account of a young American who landed in Liberia in 1961. *****The story weaves drama, dark comedy, and romance throughout a rich tapestry of narration - The San Francisco Book Review KEN VERRIER IS NOT HAPPY, NOR AT PEACE. He is experiencing the turbulence of Ishmael and the guilt of his brother's death. His sudden decision to drop out of college and del with his demons shocks his family, his friends, and especially his girlfriend, soon to have been his fiancee. His destination: Liberia - The richest country in Africa both in monetary wealth and in natural resources. NOTHING COULD HAVE PREPARED HIM FOR THE EXPERIENCES HE WAS ABOUT TO LIVE THORUGH. Ken quickly realizes that he has arrived in a place where he understands very little of what is considered normal, where the dignity of life has little meaning, and where he can trust no one. Flying into the interior bush as a transport piolot, Ken learns quickly. He witnesses, first-hand, the disparate lives of the Liberian "Country People? and the "Congo People" also known as Americo-Liberians. These descendants of President Monroe's American Colonization Policy that sent freed slaves back to Africa in the 1800's have set up a strict hierarchical society not unlike the antebellum South. Author Dan Meier describes Ken's many escapades, spanning from horrifying to whimical, with engaging and fast-moving narrative that ultimately describes a society upon which the wealthy are feeding and in which the poor are being buried. It's a novel that will stay with you long after the last word has been read.

A classic account of the villa—from ancient Rome to the twentieth century—by “the preeminent American scholar of Italian Renaissance architecture” (Architect’s Newspaper) In The Villa, James Ackerman explores villa building in the West from ancient Rome to twentieth-century France and America. In this wide-ranging book, he illuminates such topics as the early villas of the Medici, the rise of the Palladian villa in England, and the modern villas of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. Ackerman uses the phenomenon of the “country place” as a focus for examining the relationships between urban and rural life, between building and the natural environment, and between architectural design and social, cultural, economic, and political forces. “The villa,” he reminds us, “accommodates a fantasy which is impervious to reality.” As city dwellers idealized country life, the villa, unlike the farmhouse, became associated with pleasure and asserted its modernity and status as a product of the architect’s imagination.

In the first book devoted exclusively to the ecopoetics of the twenty-first century, Lynn Keller examines poetry of what she terms the "self-conscious Anthropocene," a period in which there is widespread awareness of the scale and severity of human effects on the planet. Recomposing Ecopoetics analyzes work written since the year 2000 by thirteen North American poets--including Evelyn Reilly, Juliana Spahr, Ed Roberson, and Jena Osman--all of whom push the bounds of literary convention as they seek forms and language adequate to complex environmental problems. Drawing as often on linguistic experimentalism as on traditional literary resources, these poets respond to environments transformed by people and take "nature" to be a far more inclusive and culturally imbricated category than conventional nature poetry does. This interdisciplinary study not only brings cutting-edge work in ecocriticism to bear on a diverse archive of contemporary environmental poetry; it also offers the environmental humanities new ways to understand the cultural and affective dimensions of the Anthropocene.