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Golden Wings & Hairy Toes: Encounters with New England's Most Imperiled Wildlife
This book profiles fourteen of New England's most rare and endangered flora and fauna--mammals, birds, insects, plants, and fish--by following the biologists who are researching, monitoring, and protecting them. Each chapter includes a first-person account of the author's experience with these experts, as well as details about the species' life history, threats, and conservation strategies. McLeish traps bats in Vermont and lynx in Maine, gets attacked by marauding birds in Massachusetts, and observes the metamorphosis of dragonflies in Rhode Island. He visits historical cemeteries to see New England's rarest plant, tracks sturgeon in the Connecticut River, and observes a parade of what may be the rarest mammal on earth, the North Atlantic right whale, in Cape Cod Bay. The book's title comes from the name of one of the birds in the book, the golden-winged warbler, and the unusual characteristic used to distinguish the rare Indiana bat from its common cousins, its hairy toes. McLeish, a longtime wildlife advocate and essayist, has a gift for communicating scientific information in an interesting and accessible way. His goal in this book--to make an emotional connection to a variety of fascinating animals and plants--is successfully conveyed to the reader, who comes away amazed by the complexity of individual species and the ecosystems necessary for their survival. Sometimes there are surprises: how lynx benefit from the clear cutting of forests or how utility companies --often blamed for environmental degradation--have accidentally succeeded in creating excellent habitat for golden-winged warblers along their power line corridors. Such examples support McLeish's assertion that we can meet the immense challenges to species preservation, such as global warming, acid rain, and mercury poisoning, as well as the difficulty of adding new species to the 1973 Endangered Species Act. As McLeish's book shows, each rare species has an important story to tell about the causes of its population decline, the obstacles each face in rebuilding a sustainable population, and the people who go to extraordinary lengths to give these species a chance to thrive..
Price: $13.89
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The King Imperiled
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Imperiled Innocents
"Not only is Imperiled Innocents good sociology and good history, it also addresses timely public issues and is a pleasure to read. This is an exemplary work of historical sociology."--William H. Sewell, Jr., University of Chicago Moral reform movements claiming to protect children began to emerge in the United States over a century ago, most notably when Anthony Comstock and his supporters crusaded to restrict the circulation of contraception, information on the sexual rights of women, and "obscene" art and literature. Much of their rhetoric influences debates on issues surrounding children and sexuality today. Drawing on Victorian accounts of pregnant girls, prostitutes, Free Lovers, and others deemed "immoral," Nicola Beisel argues that rhetoric about the moral corruption of children speaks to an ongoing parental concern: that children will fail to replicate or exceed their parents' social position. The rhetoric of morality, she maintains, is more than symbolic and goes beyond efforts to control mass behavior. For the Victorians, it tapped into the fear that their own children could fall prey to vice and ultimately live in disgrace. In a rare analysis of Anthony Comstock's crusade with the New York and New England Societies for the Suppression of Vice, Beisel examines how the reformer worked on the anxieties of the upper classes. One tactic was to link moral corruption with the flood of immigrants, which succeeded in New York and Boston, where minorities posed a political threat to the upper classes. Showing how a moral crusade can bring a society's diffuse anxieties to focus on specific sources, Beisel offers a fresh theoretical approach to moral reform movements..
Price: $14.95
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In the Rainforest: Report from a Strange, Beautiful, Imperiled World
In the Rainforest takes us to Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, revealing a colorful and bizarre world where fish live on fruit, spiders prey on birds, and violets grow to the size of apple trees. "I recommend In the Rainforest as scientific journalism at its best, and [Caufield's] book as the one to read to become informed about the tropical crisis. Caufield traveled the world, went to the difficult places, sometimes beautiful and often dispiriting, mastered the important ideas, and talked to an impressive number of people on all sides of the issues. . . . There are villains in abundance: corrupt government agents who aid in the destruction of native tribes, greedy caballero landowners, and even the governmental planners who with the best of intentions rush heedlessly toward the environmental degradation of their own countries."—E. O. Wilson, Science"The whole book is filled with amazing facts. . . . Moving and informative."—Ellen W. Chu, New York Times Book Review .
Price: $2.95
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Academic Freedom Imperiled: The McCarthy Era at the University of Nevada (Wilbur S. Shepperson Series in Nevada History) (Wilber S. Shepperson Series in Nevada History)
The "Red scare" of the 1950s created a national crisis that challenged concepts of loyalty and freedom of speech in every corner of American society. The crisis was especially problematic in American universities, where traditions of academic freedom found themselves at odds with political issues stemming from the cold war. The University of Nevada in Reno was no exception. The university before and during World War II was a small (fewer than 2,000 students) school offering basic programs to a largely Nevada-based student body in the nation’s least-populated state. The campus was quiet, secure, traditional, and generally conservative. The postwar years brought booming enrollments and new faculty members, many from outside Nevada, imbued with a sense of the importance of research and of shared academic governance. Soon, the university found itself embroiled in an intense controversy that threatened its academic integrity and even raised concerns about its future as a viable institution. The 1952 appointment of Minard W. Stout as president triggered the crisis. Mandated by a conservative Board of Regents to "clean up" the university, Stout brought to his new job a keen sense of mission and a strident commitment to an authoritarian, top-down chain of command. His subsequent battles with faculty and students over their role in university governance and over the very nature of higher education soon degenerated into angry accusations of faculty Communist sympathies and bitter confrontations over academic free speech, academic freedom, and loyalty. The storm brought the university national notoriety and made the administration of higher education a major issue within Nevada, ultimately involving the state legislature and the courts in an effort to resolve the conflict. J. Dee Kille’s lively and insightful account of the crisis "on the hill" rests on a wide range of archival sources, interviews and oral histories, university records, and published sources. Of vital interest to readers interested in 1950s Nevada, the book also serves as a powerful case study of the devastating impact of McCarthyism, suspicion, and repression on an American university during this turbulent era in the nation’s history..
Price: $7.45
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