The Field By The River

'Surprises, entertains and enchants ... the modern successor to Gilbert White and Henry David Thoreau.’ Indra Sinha, author of Animal’s People, short-listed for the 2007 Man Booker prize ‘A simple walk in the woods becomes a year-long adventure packed with mysteries, insights and wonder, often all on the same page. Ken's 'Field' will make you happy and, possibly, consider investing in rugged new footwear.’ Emma Thompson, Oscar-winning actress and screenwriter Following a chance encounter with a kingfisher whilst walking his dogs in the overgrown field adjoining his Breton home, Ken Burnett is struck by the realisation that despite having lived in a quaint French hamlet for the past thirteen years, encircled by farmland, he knows next to nothing about his surroundings. He resolves to examine nature’s little wonders rather more closely, with surprising and delightfully funny results. Accompanied by his three trusty dogs, and aided by wife Marie and a full complement of endearingly eccentric neighbours, Ken conducts a twelve-month observation of his field, which is, upon further inspection, rich with wonder. From foxes to wild flowers, magical mushrooms to mothering moorhens, Ken discovers that his unassuming patch of land is as bursting with life as any major city. The Field By The River is a thought-provoking and enchanting work; a joyous, charming celebration of the fragile, interconnected ecosystem that can be found if we only take the time to part the leaves, look under the mosses or overturn a stone.

At the age of forty-two, Wayne Fields set upon a sort of pilgrimage when he waded the near twenty-mile stretch of a small river in northern Michigan with fly rod in hand. He emerged with a beautiful and poignant memoir, a meditation on families and aging, and a whimsical response to what time, and streams, and those we care about bring into our lives.

Archaeologists have long associated the development of agriculture with the rise of the state. But the archaeology of the Amazon Basin, revealing traces of agriculture but lacking evidence of statehood, confounds their assumptions. John H. Walker’s innovative study of the Bolivian Amazon addresses this contradiction by examining the agricultural landscape and analyzing the earthworks from an archaeological perspective. The archaeological data is presented in ascending scale throughout the book. Scholars across archaeology and environmental anthropology will find the methodology and theoretical arguments essential for further study.

Emmy Pérez's With the River on Our Face flows through the Southwest and the Texas borderlands to the river's mouth in the Rio Grande Valley/El Valle. The poems celebrate the land, communities, and ecology of the borderlands while merging and diverging like the iconic river in this long-awaited collection.

This volume presents a description of the river (a natural watercourse, usually freshwater, flowing towards an ocean, a lake, a sea, or another river), including its shape, size, organization, and action, along with a consistent theory that explains much of the observed character of channels.

Xiao Hong is considered by many to be China's first feminist novelist.

In this history of the black peasants of Amazonia, Oscar de la Torre focuses on the experience of African-descended people navigating the transition from slavery to freedom. He draws on social and environmental history to connect them intimately to the natural landscape and to Indigenous peoples. Relying on this world as a repository for traditions, discourses, and strategies that they retrieved especially in moments of conflict, Afro-Brazilians fought for autonomous communities and developed a vibrant ethnic identity that supported their struggles over labor, land, and citizenship. Prior to abolition, enslaved and escaped blacks found in the tropical forest a source for tools, weapons, and trade--but it was also a cultural storehouse within which they shaped their stories and records of confrontations with slaveowners and state authorities. After abolition, the black peasants' knowledge of local environments continued to be key to their aspirations, allowing them to maintain relationships with powerful patrons and to participate in the protest cycle that led Getulio Vargas to the presidency of Brazil in 1930. In commonly referring to themselves by such names as "sons of the river," black Amazonians melded their agro-ecological traditions with their emergent identity as political stakeholders.