This Strange Wilderness

Birds were "the objects of my greatest delight," wrote John James Audubon (1785-1851), founder of modern ornithology and one of the world's greatest bird painters. His masterpiece, The Birds of America depicts almost five hundred North American bird species, each image--lifelike and life size--rendered in vibrant color. Audubon was also an explorer, a woodsman, a hunter, an entertaining and prolific writer, and an energetic self-promoter. Through talent and dogged determination, he rose from backwoods obscurity to international fame. In This Strange Wilderness, award-winning author Nancy Plain brings together the amazing story of this American icon's career and the beautiful images that are his legacy. Before Audubon, no one had seen, drawn, or written so much about the animals of this largely uncharted young country. Aware that the wilderness and its wildlife were changing even as he watched, Audubon remained committed almost to the end of his life "to search out the things which have been hidden since the creation of this wondrous world." This Strange Wilderness details his art and writing, transporting the reader back to the frontiers of early nineteenth-century America.

The international bestselling author of Fermat’s Last Theorem explores the eccentric lives of history’s foremost mathematicians. From Archimedes’s eureka moment to Alexander Grothendieck’s seclusion in the Pyrenees, bestselling author Amir Aczel selects the most compelling stories in the history of mathematics, creating a colorful narrative that explores the quirky personalities behind some of the most groundbreaking, influential, and enduring theorems. Alongside revolutionary innovations are incredible tales of duels, battlefield heroism, flamboyant arrogance, pranks, secret societies, imprisonment, feuds, and theft—as well as some costly errors of judgment that prove genius doesn’t equal street smarts. Aczel’s colorful and enlightening profiles offer readers a newfound appreciation for the tenacity, complexity, eccentricity, and brilliance of our greatest mathematicians.

Stop looking for the Book of Mormon in Mesoamerica and start looking for Mesoamerica in the Book of Mormon! Second Witness, a new six-volume series from Greg Kofford Books, takes a detailed, verse-by-verse look at the Book of Mormon. It marshals the best of modern scholarship and new insights into a consistent picture of the Book of Mormon as a historical document. Taking a faithful but scholarly approach to the text and reading it through the insights of linguistics, anthropology, and ethnohistory, the commentary approaches the text from a variety of perspectives: how it was created, how it relates to history and culture, and what religious insights it provides. The commentary accepts the best modern scholarship, which focuses on a particular region of Mesoamerica as the most plausible location for the Book of Mormon’s setting. For the first time, that location—its peoples, cultures, and historical trends—are used as the backdrop for reading the text. The historical background is not presented as proof, but rather as an explanatory context. The commentary does not forget Mormon’s purpose in writing. It discusses the doctrinal and theological aspects of the text and highlights the way in which Mormon created it to meet his goal of “convincing . . . the Jew and Gentile that Jesus is the Christ, the Eternal God.”

The unexpected collection of my parent’s ashes from the crematorium opened the door to a new adventure in dealing my parents death that I personally found very liberating for my soul. It marked the beginning of a personal pilgrimage of faith I had no intention of taking, I thought I was dealing with my parents remains. As time passed I realized I had no choice but to take this path – this journey was the only way forward for me. Surprisingly for me it actually strengthened my faith in God and his ways as taught in the Christian faith and it’s hard to describe how. Once I committed myself to the task I had to take action. I plunged my hands into their ashes that first day even though for me it was like plunging my hands into my parent’s dead bodies. It was irksome and revolting to me the first time.

Mark T. Waynes The Long Summer is heartfelt adventure story of a fourteen-year-old boy, Cody, entering an awkward age and just beginning to have difficulties relating and communicating with his father. When Cody finds himself lost in the rain forest along Canadas southwestern shoreline, he is saved by a creature not just of another culture but of an entirely different species, a creature of same relative age, having the same problems with his father. It is not until Cody understands the relationship between his savior and his saviors father that he understands his own relationship with his father.

In the Desert of Emptiness, also famously known as Empty Quarters (Arrobo in Arabic), located in the Arabian Gulf countries, there lived one poor man. The poor mans name was Fairuz bin Haddad. He lived with his mother, wife, and son, who was known as Saqr (the meaning of this name in Arabic is a falcon). Saqr had reached adolescence; he was already a young adult. His body was big and well built, and he was very handsome. Even at this age, he was taller than his father. He had the opportunity to study both religious and earthly education. In spite of the hard life they led, his father made sure that Saqr would get all the education he needed. So he worked hard day and night to provide for his family and pay for his sons education. So every morning, Saqr would go to the Quran class before going to his other school, where he learned language and other subjects on human issues and how best to be a better person.

This third volume of The Journal Of Claude Fredericks is his journal for the year 1943, a Wanderjahr that begins with a spring in Cambridge, where Volume Two ended, but with Fredericks, having left studies at Harvard, living now in a room at Maud Bemis’s house on Nutting Road near the Cowley Fathers, seeing various friends from earlier, Brie Taylor, John Simon, Anthony Clark, Paul Doguereau, the George Sartons, and making new friends as well. The summer is spent in a cabin on the shore near Belfast Maine, writing and studying still and coming to know the family that lives on the hill. In September, after spending ten days with Paul Doguereau and Fanny Mason in Walpole New Hampshire on the beautiful Mason estate overlooking the Connecticut and a month in New York living in an apartment on University Place and seeing his friend May Sarton and coming to know Muriel Rukeyser and Julian Beck, he heads with his friend William Quinn to Iowa to live with several friends of theirs who also have left Harvard, in particular Michael Millen and Paul Rail, all of them proclaiming in different ways, as Quinn and Fredericks do in theirs, their objections to America’s part in the war that had begun in December 1941. After two weeks Fredericks leaves to stay with a friend in Chicago, Martha Johnson, and to settle in and write about the troubling events of the previous days and then go on to Missouri, to pay filial pieties to members of his family there and after that go south with his mother to Mexico City for a week and then with her to Acapulco for ten days at Christmas, a spot at that time still undiscovered and with only two small hotels. Finally at the year’s end he heads back east to New York, where he has plans to settle down and live forever, in the city he had always loved the most of any he knew.