The Empty Sea

The “Blue Economy” is used to describe all of the economic activities related to the sea, with a special emphasis on sustainability. Traditional activities such as fisheries, but also undersea mining, tourism, and scientific research are included, as well as the phenomenal growth of aquaculture during the past decade. All of these activities, and the irresistible prospect of another new frontier, has led to enthusiastic and, most likely, overenthusiastic assessments of the possibilities to exploit the sea to feed the world, provide low-cost energy, become a new source of minerals, and other future miracles. This book makes sense of these trends and of the future of the blue economy by following our remote ancestors who gradually discovered the sea and its resources, describing the so-called fisherman’s curse – or why fishermen have always been poor, explaining why humans tend to destroy the resources on which we depend, and assessing the realistic expectations for extracting resources from the sea. Although the sea is not so badly overexploited as the land, our demands on ecosystem services are already above the oceans’ sustainability limits. Some new ideas, including “fishing down” for untapped resources such as plankton, could lead to the collapse of the entire marine ecosystem. How Neanderthals crossed the sea in canoes, how it was possible for five men on a small boat to kill a giant whale, what kind of oil the virgins of the Gospel put into their lamps, how a professor of mathematics, Vito Volterra, discovered the “equations of fishing,” why it has become so easy to be stung by a jellyfish while swimming in the sea, and how to play “Moby Dick,” a simple board game that simulates the overexploitation of natural resources are just some of the questions that you will be able to answer after reading this engaging and insightful book about the rapidly expanding relationship between humanity and the sea.

In The Empty Ocean, acclaimed author and artist Richard Ellis tells the story of our continued plunder of life in the sea and weighs the chances for its recovery. Through fascinating portraits of a wide array of creatures, he introduces us to the many forms of sea life that humans have fished, hunted, and collected over the centuries, from charismatic whales and dolphins to the lowly menhaden, from sea turtles to cod, tuna, and coral. Rich in history, anecdote, and surprising fact, Richard Ellis’s descriptions bring to life the natural history of the various species, the threats they face, and the losses they have suffered. Killing has occurred on a truly stunning scale, with extinction all too often the result, leaving a once-teeming ocean greatly depleted. But the author also finds instances of hope and resilience, of species that have begun to make remarkable comebacks when given the opportunity. Written with passion and grace, and illustrated with Richard Ellis’s own drawings, The Empty Ocean brings to a wide audience a compelling view of the damage we have caused to life in the sea and what we can do about it. "

In the second installment in the Into The Realms series, Daniel, Eleanor and their friends have spent nearly two years surviving the perils of The Labyrinth, only to face heartbreak and betrayal when they finally reach the oceanic Sixth Realm. Navigating their way through the Ocean of Storms by sea and air, our heroes are met with danger, hardship, and intrigue, only to learn a terrible secret - something is hunting them. In their perilous travels, Daniel and Eleanor are faced with innumerable perils, yet perhaps the most dangerous battles are the ones they must fight within. After endless terrors and heartbreak, Eleanor finds herself questioning her most cherished beliefs, while Daniel fears that he is slowly losing his connection to this world and the people within it who he cares for so deeply. Though bound by the heart, these two wayward souls become separated across the span of an empty sea.

Mary Fulton and her father are trying to save their failing family tugboat business. Captained by Kevin Patrick, The Bowery Queen, their ageing tugboat, is towing a barge to Nova Scotia. There they lose the barge contract, but hear of an abandoned freighter adrift in the high seas. They sail towards the vessel in a desperate hope of salvaging it. But unknown to Kevin, Mary, and her crew, the freighter is not completely deserted--aboard is a psychopathic German fugitive and his deadly cargo. With a setting of turbulent Atlantic tides, this sea-faring odyssey is a thrilling portrayal of man's fight for survival and supremacy over love and death.

Merlin the magician investigates foul play in the deaths of Tristram and Isolde in this Arthurian mystery novel by the author of The Knight of the Cart. A disturbing report has just come to Camelot: Sir Tristram has died after a skirmish in Brittany, and his longtime mistress, La Belle Isolde, Queen of Cornwall, subsequently died of a broken heart. Hearing this news, Queen Guinevere and her trusted lady Rosemounde suspect that there is more to the story than they are being told. Now, it is up to Merlin and his faithful assistant, Gildas of Cornwall, to find the truth behind these untimely deaths. Taking a ship to Brittany to investigate, Merlin and Gildas are met with an unexpected reception. Tristram’s close friend Kaherdin, lord of the city; his sister and Tristram’s wife Isolde of the White Hands; and Brangwen, La Belle Isolde’s faithful lady-in-waiting, are all surprisingly uncooperative. Entering a world of conflicting alliances and murderous gossip, Merlin and Gildas must work fast—or the next untimely deaths may be their own.

The Empty Seashell explores what it is like to live in a world where cannibal witches are undeniably real, yet too ephemeral and contradictory to be an object of belief. In a book based on more than three years of fieldwork between 1991 and 2011, Nils Bubandt argues that cannibal witches for people in the coastal, and predominantly Christian, community of Buli in the Indonesian province of North Maluku are both corporeally real and fundamentally unknowable.Witches (known as gua in the Buli language or as suanggi in regional Malay) appear to be ordinary humans but sometimes, especially at night, they take other forms and attack people in order to kill them and eat their livers. They are seemingly everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The reality of gua, therefore, can never be pinned down. The title of the book comes from the empty nautilus shells that regularly drift ashore around Buli village. Convention has it that if you find a live nautilus, you are a gua. Like the empty shells, witchcraft always seems to recede from experience.Bubandt begins the book by recounting his own confusion and frustration in coming to terms with the contradictory and inaccessible nature of witchcraft realities in Buli. A detailed ethnography of the encompassing inaccessibility of Buli witchcraft leads him to the conclusion that much of the anthropological literature, which views witchcraft as a system of beliefs with genuine explanatory power, is off the mark. Witchcraft for the Buli people doesn't explain anything. In fact, it does the opposite: it confuses, obfuscates, and frustrates. Drawing upon Jacques Derrida's concept of aporia—an interminable experience that remains continuously in doubt—Bubandt suggests the need to take seriously people's experiential and epistemological doubts about witchcraft, and outlines, by extension, a novel way of thinking about witchcraft and its relation to modernity.

If scholars no longer necessarily find the essence and origins of what came to be known as Christianity in the personality of a historical figure known as Jesus of Nazareth, it nevertheless remains the case that the study of early Christianity is dominated by an assumption of the force of Jesus's personality on divergent communities. In The Godman and the Sea, Michael J. Thate shifts the terms of this study by focusing on the Gospel of Mark, which ends when Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome discover a few days after the crucifixion that Jesus's tomb has been opened but the corpse is not there. Unlike the other gospels, Mark does not include the resurrection, portraying instead loss, puzzlement, and despair in the face of the empty tomb. Reading Mark's Gospel as an exemplary text, Thate examines what he considers to be retellings of other traumatic experiences—the stories of Jesus's exorcising demons out of a man and into a herd of swine, his stilling of the storm, and his walking on the water. Drawing widely on a diverse set of resources that include the canon of western fiction, classical literature, the psychological study of trauma, phenomenological philosophy, the new materialism, psychoanalytic theory, poststructural philosophy, and Hebrew Bible scholarship, as well as the expected catalog of New Testament tools of biblical criticism in general and Markan scholarship in particular, The Godman and the Sea is an experimental reading of the Gospel of Mark and the social force of the sea within its traumatized world. More fundamentally, however, it attempts to position this reading as a story of trauma, ecstasy, and what has become through the ruins of past pain.

A NEW YORK TIMES, USA TODAY, and WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER! A 2021 Alex Award winner! The 2021 RUSA Reading List: Fantasy Winner! An Indie Next Pick! One of Publishers Weekly's "Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2020" One of Book Riot’s “20 Must-Read Feel-Good Fantasies” Lambda Literary Award-winning author TJ Klune’s bestselling, breakout contemporary fantasy that's "1984 meets The Umbrella Academy with a pinch of Douglas Adams thrown in." (Gail Carriger) Linus Baker is a by-the-book case worker in the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. He's tasked with determining whether six dangerous magical children are likely to bring about the end of the world. Arthur Parnassus is the master of the orphanage. He would do anything to keep the children safe, even if it means the world will burn. And his secrets will come to light. The House in the Cerulean Sea is an enchanting love story, masterfully told, about the profound experience of discovering an unlikely family in an unexpected place—and realizing that family is yours. "1984 meets The Umbrella Academy with a pinch of Douglas Adams thrown in." —Gail Carriger, New York Times bestselling author of Soulless At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.