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My Son Wears Heels: One Mom's Journey from Clueless to Kickass
Par Diane Ehrensaft, Julie Tarney. 2016
In 1992, Julie Tarney's only child, Harry, told her, "Inside my head I'm a girl." He was two years old.…
Julie had no idea what that meant. She felt disoriented. Wasn't it her role to encourage and support her child? Surely she had to set some limits to his self-expression--or did she? Would he be bullied? Could she do the right thing? What was the right thing? The internet was no help, because there was no internet. And there were zero books for a mom scrambling to understand a toddler who had definite ideas about his gender, regardless of how Nature had endowed him. Terms such as transgender,gender nonconforming, and gender creative were rare or nonexistent. There were, however, mainstream experts who theorized that a "sissy" boy was the result of a domineering mother. Julie couldn't believe it. She didn't want to care what her neighbors thought, but she did care. "Domineering mother" meant controlling mother. It meant bad mother. It meant her mother. Lacking a positive role model of her own, and fearful of being judged as a mom who was making her son "too feminine," Julie embarked on an unexpected parenting path. Despite some missteps, and with no map to guide her, she learned to rely on her instincts. She listened carefully, kept an open mind, and as long as Harry was happy, she let him lead the way. Julie eventually realized that Harry knew who he was all along. Her job was simply to love and support him unconditionally, allowing him to be his authentic self. This story of a mother embracing her child's uniqueness and her own will resonate with all families.After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America
Par Pielou, E C. 60637
The fascinating story of how a harsh terrain that resembled modern Antarctica has been transformed gradually into the forests, grasslands,…
and wetlands we know today. "One of the best scientific books published in the last ten years. "-Ottowa Journal "A valuable new synthesis of facts and ideas about climate, geography, and life during the past 20,000 years. More important, the book conveys an intimate appreciation of the rich variety of nature through time. "-S. David Webb,ScienceIce Age Forensics: Reconstructing the Death of a Wooly Bison
Par R. Dale Guthrie. 1990
Frozen mammals of the Ice Age, preserved for millennia in the tundra, have been a source of fascination and mystery…
since their first discovery over two centuries ago. The 1979 find of a frozen, extinct steppe bison in an Alaskan gold mine allowed paleontologist Dale Guthrie to undertake the first scientific excavation of an Ice Age mummy in North America and to test theories about these enigmatic frozen fauna. In this brilliant remaking of the death of a wooly bison over 36,000 years ago, we're given a glimpse of what life was like during the Pleistocene Epoch. From torn fragments and patches of deep-frozen skin and insights gleaned from studies of Montana bison, African lions, and Iberian cave art, Ice Age Forensics presents the story of the huge carcass Guthrie calls "Blue Babe"--and the excitement surrounding its reconstruction.Conservation Paleobiology: Science and Practice
Par Karl W Flessa, Gregory P Dietl. 2017
In conservation, perhaps no better example exists of the past informing the present than the return of the California condor…
to the Vermilion Cliffs of Arizona. Extinct in the region for nearly one hundred years, condors were successfully reintroduced starting in the 1990s in an effort informed by the fossil record—condor skeletal remains had been found in the area’s late-Pleistocene cave deposits. The potential benefits of applying such data to conservation initiatives are unquestionably great, yet integrating the relevant disciplines has proven challenging. Conservation Paleobiology gathers a remarkable array of scientists—from Jeremy B. C. Jackson to Geerat J. Vermeij—to provide an authoritative overview of how paleobiology can inform both the management of threatened species and larger conservation decisions. Studying endangered species is difficult. They are by definition rare, some exist only in captivity, and for those still in their native habitats any experimentation can potentially have a negative effect on survival. Moreover, a lack of long-term data makes it challenging to anticipate biotic responses to environmental conditions that are outside of our immediate experience. But in the fossil and prefossil records—from natural accumulations such as reefs, shell beds, and caves to human-made deposits like kitchen middens and archaeological sites—enlightening parallels to the Anthropocene can be found that might serve as a primer for present-day predicaments. Offering both deep-time and near-time perspectives and exploring a range of ecological and evolutionary dynamics and taxa from terrestrial as well as aquatic habitats, Conservation Paleobiology is a sterling demonstration of how the past can be used to manage for the future, giving new hope for the creation and implementation of successful conservation programs.Gaining Ground, Second Edition
Par Jennifer A. Clack. 2012
Around 370 million years ago, a distant relative of a modern lungfish began a most extraordinary adventure--emerging from the water…
and laying claim to the land. Over the next 70 million years, this tentative beachhead had developed into a worldwide colonization by ever-increasing varieties of four-limbed creatures known as tetrapods, the ancestors of all vertebrate life on land. This new edition of Jennifer A. Clack's groundbreaking book tells the complex story of their emergence and evolution. Beginning with their closest relatives, the lobe-fin fishes such as lungfishes and coelacanths, Clack defines what a tetrapod is, describes their anatomy, and explains how they are related to other vertebrates. She looks at the Devonian environment in which they evolved, describes the known and newly discovered species, and explores the order and timing of anatomical changes that occurred during the fish-to-tetrapod transition.Chuckwalla Land
Par David Rains Wallace. 2011
Described as "a writer in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and other self-educated seers" by the San…
Francisco Chronicle, David Rains Wallace turns his attention in this new book to another distinctive corner of California--its desert, the driest and hottest environment in North America. Drawing from his frequent forays to Death Valley, Red Rock Canyon, Kelso Dunes, and other locales, Wallace illuminates the desert's intriguing flora and fauna as he explores a controversial, unresolved scientific debate about the origin and evolution of its unusual ecosystems. Eminent scientists and scholars appear throughout these pages, including maverick paleobiologist Daniel Axelrod, botanist Ledyard Stebbins, and naturalists Edmund Jaeger and Joseph Wood Krutch. Weaving together ecology, geology, natural history, and mythology in his characteristically eloquent voice, Wallace reveals that there is more to this starkly beautiful landscape than meets the eye.Gay Lives
Par Robert Aldrich. 2012
A comprehensive biographical survey from ancient Chinese courtiers to pioneers of gay liberation in the twenty-first century, from the unknowable…
relationships of the distant past to the frankest affirmations of modern sexual identity. The exploits of the famous never cease to captivate our imaginations--rulers, artists, explorers, and all the great personalities of history. Yet many quieter lives also have the ability to impress, to teach us something about the remarkable qualities of human nature. In this book, Robert Aldrich presents a fascinating portrait of gay men and women throughout history that reveals the full diversity of gay lives as lived in their times. He gives a voice to more than seventy people from around the world and all walks of life, from poets, philosophers, and artists to radicals and activists. Along with celebrated names such as Michelangelo, Frederick the Great, and Harvey Milk are lesser-known but no less inspiring individuals: two men of ancient Egypt whose lives were closely linked over four thousand years ago; a Renaissance nun who blurred the boundaries between spiritual and physical love; and "Aimée" and "Jaguar," whose love defied the death camps of wartime Germany. Often colorful, occasionally tragic, but all in some way extraordinary, these life stories reflect--and have sometimes helped to shape--contemporary attitudes toward same-sex intimacy.Lucy's Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins
Par Kate Wong, Donald Johanson. 2009
"Lucy is a 3.2-million-year-old skeleton who has become the spokeswoman for human evolution. She is perhaps the best known and…
most studied fossil hominid of the twentieth century, the benchmark by which other discoveries of human ancestors are judged."-From Lucy's LegacyIn his New York Times bestseller, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind, renowned paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson told the incredible story of his discovery of a partial female skeleton that revolutionized the study of human origins. Lucy literally changed our understanding of our world and who we come from. Since that dramatic find in 1974, there has been heated debate and-most important-more groundbreaking discoveries that have further transformed our understanding of when and how humans evolved. In Lucy's Legacy, Johanson takes readers on a fascinating tour of the last three decades of study-the most exciting period of paleoanthropologic investigation thus far. In that time, Johanson and his colleagues have uncovered a total of 363 specimens of Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy's species, a transitional creature between apes and humans), spanning 400,000 years. As a result, we now have a unique fossil record of one branch of our family tree-that family being humanity-a tree that is believed to date back a staggering 7 million years.Focusing on dramatic new fossil finds and breakthrough advances in DNA research, Johanson provides the latest answers that post-Lucy paleoanthropologists are finding to questions such as: How did Homo sapiens evolve? When and where did our species originate? What separates hominids from the apes? What was the nature of Neandertal and modern human encounters? What mysteries about human evolution remain to be solved?Donald Johanson is a passionate guide on an extraordinary journey from the ancient landscape of Hadar, Ethiopia-where Lucy was unearthed and where many other exciting fossil discoveries have since been made-to a seaside cave in South Africa that once sheltered early members of our own species, and many other significant sites. Thirty-five years after Lucy, Johanson continues to enthusiastically probe the origins of our species and what it means to be human.From the Hardcover edition.Discrete Biochronological Time Scales
Par Jean Guex, Federico Galster, Øyvind Hammer. 2015
The object of this book is to explain how to create a synthesis of complex biostratigraphic data, and how to…
extract from such a synthesis a relative time scale based exclusively on the fossil content of sedimentary rocks. Such a time scale can be used to attribute relative ages to isolated fossil-bearing samples. The book is composed of 10 chapters together with several appendices. It is a totally revised version of "Biochronological Correlations" published in 1991 and includes various new chapters. The book offers a solution for the theoretical problem of how fossils can be used to make reliable quantitative stratigraphic correlations in sedimentary geology. It also describes the use of highly efficient software along with several examples. The authors compare their theoretical model with 2 other relevant studies: probabilistic stratigraphy and constrained optimization (CONOP).Origins of Life: The Primal Self-Organization
Par Dirk-Henner Lankenau, Richard Egel, Armen Y Mulkidjanian. 2010
If theoretical physicists can seriously entertain canonical "standard models" even for the big-bang generation of the entire universe, why cannot…
life scientists reach a consensus on how life has emerged and settled on this planet? Scientists are hindered by conceptual gaps between bottom-up inferences (from early Earth geological conditions) and top-down extrapolations (from modern life forms to common ancestral states). This book challenges several widely held assumptions and argues for alternative approaches instead. Primal syntheses (literally or figuratively speaking) are called for in at least five major areas. (1) The first RNA-like molecules may have been selected by solar light as being exceptionally photostable. (2) Photosynthetically active minerals and reduced phosphorus compounds could have efficiently coupled the persistent natural energy flows to the primordial metabolism. (3) Stochastic, uncoded peptides may have kick-started an ever-tightening co-evolution of proteins and nucleic acids. (4) The living fossils from the primeval RNA World thrive within modern cells. (5) From the inherently complex protocellular associations preceding the consolidation of integral genomes, eukaryotic cell organization may have evolved more naturally than simple prokaryote-like life forms. - If this book can motivate dedicated researchers to further explore the alternative mechanisms presented, it will have served its purpose well.The Nearness of Others
Par David Caron. 2014
"Funny how a gay man's hand resting heavily on your shoulder used to say let's fuck but now means let's…
not. Funny how ostensible nearness really betrays distance sometimes." --from The Nearness of OthersIn this radical, genre-bending narrative, David Caron tells the story of his 2006 HIV diagnosis and its aftermath. On one level, The Nearness of Others is a personal account of his struggle as a gay, HIV-positive man with the constant issue of if, how, and when to disclose his status. But searching for various forms of contact eventually leads to a profound reassessment of tact as a way to live and a way to think, with our bodies and with the bodies of others.In a series of brief, compulsively readable sections that are by turns moving and witty, Caron recounts his wary yet curious exploration of an unfamiliar medical universe at once hostile and protective as he embarks on a new life of treatment without end. He describes what it is like to live with a disease that is no longer a death sentence but continues to terrify many people as if it were. In particular, living with HIV provides an unexpected opportunity to reflect on an age of terror and war, when fear and suspicion have become the order of the day. Most of all, Caron reminds us that disclosing HIV-positive status is still far from easy, least of all in one of the many states--such as his own--that have criminalized nondisclosure and/or exposure.Going well beyond Caron's personal experience, The Nearness of Others examines popular culture and politics as well as literary memoirs and film to ask deeper philosophical questions about our relationships with others. Ultimately, Caron eloquently demonstrates a form of disclosure, sharing, and contact that stands against the forces working to separate us.Wishbone
Par Julie Marie Wade. 2003
"For a long time, everything only happened to other people," Julie Wade writes. Or so she thought. She records her…
falls. The "stunned body, the purloined speech" she experiences after crashing to the ground from a swing. The sensation of slipping from the platform saddle atop a circus elephant, sliding "flat as a penny against his wrinkled skin, rattling the bones of my ribs." The shame and uncertainty of being spilled from the security of parental love. And, finally, triumphantly, the felix culpa, the fortunate fall, of love.Juxtaposed against the fragmentary structure of the memoir, this fall comprises both the energy source, the burning center of the book, and its thematic vantage point. Falling in love is an explosion in Julie's mind as well as her body, an epiphany that remakes the map of her world, slicing the knot of her parents' shame, unmasking the visceral truths of her body. In love she is in motion, reimagining the past, striking out on road trips. Suddenly, she is living, grabbing, tasting, writing, her mouth full of "honey and moonlight," her mind afire. And we are reminded yes, this is what love does, this is how it saves us.Julie Wade has received the Oscar Wilde Poetry Prize (2005), the Literal Latte Nonfiction Award (2006), the AWP Intro Journals Award for Nonfiction (2009), the American Literary Review Nonfiction Prize (2010), the Arts & Letters Nonfiction Prize (2010), the Thomas J. Hruska Nonfiction Prize (2011), the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir (2011), and seven Pushcart Prize nominations.Born This Way
Par Paul Vitagliano. 2012
Based on the hugely popular blog of the same name, Born This Way shares 100 different memories of growing up…
LGBTQ. Childhood photographs are accompanied by sweet, funny, and at times heartbreaking personal stories. Collected from around the world and dating from the 1940s to today, these memories speak to the hardships of an unaccepting world and the triumph of pride, self-love, and self-acceptance. This intimate little book is a wonderful gift for all members of the LGBTQ community as well as their friends and families. Like Dan Savage's It Gets Better Project, Born This Way gives young people everywhere the courage to say, "Yes, I'm gay. And I was born this way. I've known it since I was very young, and this is my story."The Inventors: A Memoir
Par Peter Selgin, Lidia Yuknavitch. 2016
In the Fall of 1970, at the start of eighth grade, Peter Selgin fell in love with the young teacher…
who'd arrived from Oxford wearing Frye boots, with long blond hair, and a passion for his students that was as intense as it was rebellious. The son of an emotionally remote inventor, Peter was also a twin competing for the attention and affection of his parents. He had a burning need to feel special.The new teacher supplied that need. Together they spent hours in the teacher's carriage house, discussing books, playing chess, drinking tea, and wrestling. They were inseparable, until the teacher "resigned" from his job and left. Over the next ten years Peter and the teacher corresponded copiously and met occasionally, their last meeting ending in disaster. Only after the teacher died did Peter learn that he'd done all he could to evade his past, identifying himself first as an orphaned Rhodes Scholar, and later as a Native American.As for Peter's father, the genius with the English accent who invented the first dollar-bill changing machine, he was the child of Italian Jews-something else Peter discovered only after his death. Paul Selgin and the teacher were both self-inventors, creatures of their own mythology, inscrutable men whose denials and deceptions betrayed the trust of the boy who looked up to them.The Inventors is the story of a man's search for his father and a boy's passionate relationship with his teacher, of how these two enigmas shaped that boy's journey into manhood, filling him with a sense of his own unique destiny. It is a story of promises kept and broken as the author uncovers the truth-about both men, and about himself. For like them-like all of us-Peter Selgin, too, is his own inventor.All the Rage: A Quest
Par Martin Moran. 2016
A moving and surprisingly funny memoir about finding the right balance between anger and compassion"Why aren't you angry?" people often…
asked Martin Moran after he told his story of how he came to forgive the man who sexually abused him as a boy. At first, the question pissed him off. Then, it began to haunt him. Why didn't he have more anger? Why had he never sought redress for the crime committed against him? Was his fury hidden, buried? Was he not man enough? Here he was, an adult in mid-life, with an established acting career, a husband. A life. And yet the question of rage began to obsess him.As the narrative jumps from dream to memory to theory, from Colorado to New York to Johannesburg, Moran takes us along on his quest to understand the role of rage in our lives. Translating for an asylum seeker and survivor of torture, he wonders how the man is not consumed with the wrong done him, only to shortly thereafter find himself in a wild confrontation with his fuming stepmother at his father's funeral. He admires a pedestrian's furious put-down of a careless driver, and then, observing with a group of sex therapists at an S&M dungeon, he finds himself unexpectedly moved by the intimacy of the interchanges. Hiking the Rockies with his troubled younger brother, he's confronted by the anger and the love that seem to exist simultaneously and in equal measure between them.With each encounter, we move more deeply into the human complexities at the heart of this book: into how we wrong and are wronged, how we seek redress but also forgiveness, how we yearn to mend what we think broken in us and liberate ourselves from what's past. It is in this landscape of old wounds and complicated loves that Moran shows us how rage may meet compassion and our traumas unexpectedly open us to the humanity of others.Avian Ancestors: A Review of the Phylogenetic Relationships of the Theropods Unenlagiidae, Microraptoria, Anchiornis and Scansoriopterygidae (SpringerBriefs in Earth System Sciences)
Par Fernando E. Novas, Federico Agnolin. 2012
Although consensus exists among researchers that birds evolved from coelurosaurian theropods paleontologists still debate the identification of the group…
of coelurosaurians that most closely approaches the common ancestor of birds The last 20 years witnessed the discovery of a wide array of avian-like theropods that has considerably amplified the anatomical disparity among deinonychosaurians some of which resemble Archaeopteryx more than Deinonychus Among these newly discovered theropods that show remarkable bird-like characteristics are the four-winged theropods Microraptor and Anchiornis and the unenlagiids Unenlagia Buitreraptor and Rahonavis A bizarre group of minute-sized coelurosaurs the Scansoriopterygidae also exhibits some avian similarities that lead some authors to interpret them as more closely related to birds than other dinosaurs With the aim to explore the phylogenetic relationships of these coelurosaurians and birds we merged recently published integrative databases resulting in significant changes in the topological distribution of taxa within Paraves We present evidence that Dromaeosauridae Microraptoria Unenlagiidae and Anchiornis Xiaotingia form successive sister taxa of Aves and that the Scansoriopterygidae are basal coelurosaurians not closely related to birds The implications in the evolutionary sequence of anatomical characters leading to birds including the origin of flight are also considered in light of this new phylogenetic hypothesisTrans
Par Sheila Heti, Juliet Jacques. 2015
Moving memoir and insightful examination of transgender politics "Six weeks before sex reassignment surgery (SRS), I am obliged to stop…
taking my hormones. I suddenly feel very differently about my forthcoming operation."In July 2012, aged thirty, Juliet Jacques underwent sex reassignment surgery--a process she chronicled with unflinching honesty in a serialised national newspaper column. Trans tells of her life to the present moment: a story of growing up, of defining yourself, and of the rapidly changing world of gender politics.Fresh from university, eager to escape a dead-end job, she launches a career as a writer in a publishing culture dominated by London cliques and still figuring out the impact of the Internet. She navigates the treacherous waters of a world where, even in the liberal and feminist media, transgender identities go unacknowledged, misunderstood or worse. Yet through art, film, music, politics and football, Jacques starts to become the person she had only imagined, and begins the process of transition. Interweaving the personal with the political, her memoir is a powerful exploration of debates that comprise trans politics, issues which promise to redefine our understanding of what it means to be alive.Revealing, honest, humorous, and self-deprecating, Trans includes an epilogue with Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?, in which Jacques and Heti discuss the cruxes of writing and identity.From the Hardcover edition.Stratigraphic Paleobiology: Understanding the Distribution of Fossil Taxa in Time and Space
Par Mark E., Patzkowsky, Steven M. Holland. 2012
Whether the fossil record should be read at face value or whether it presents a distorted view of the history…
of life is an argument seemingly as old as many fossils themselves. In the late 1700s, Georges Cuvier argued for a literal interpretation, but in the early 1800s, Charles Lyell's gradualist view of the earth's history required a more nuanced interpretation of that same record. To this day, the tension between literal and interpretive readings lies at the heart of paleontological research, influencing the way scientists view extinction patterns and their causes, ecosystem persistence and turnover, and the pattern of morphologic change and mode of speciation. With Stratigraphic Paleobiology, Mark E. Patzkowsky and Steven M. Holland present a critical framework for assessing the fossil record, one based on a modern understanding of the principles of sediment accumulation. Patzkowsky and Holland argue that the distribution of fossil taxa in time and space is controlled not only by processes of ecology, evolution, and environmental change, but also by the stratigraphic processes that govern where and when sediment that might contain fossils is deposited and preserved. The authors explore the exciting possibilities of stratigraphic paleobiology, and along the way demonstrate its great potential to answer some of the most critical questions about the history of life: How and why do environmental niches change over time? What is the tempo and mode of evolutionary change and what processes drive this change? How has the diversity of life changed through time, and what processes control this change? And, finally, what is the tempo and mode of change in ecosystems over time?Michel and Ti-Jean
Par George Rideout. 2014
In this probing character study, Rideout fashions a hypothetical 1969 meeting in a bar in St. Petersburg, Florida, between Quebec…
playwright Michel Tremblay and an individual whom he believes to be a truly great writer - beat generation author Jack Kerouac, whose Francophone mother affectionately called him Ti-Jean. At the time of their meeting, Kerouac is forty-seven years old and only months away from death, destroyed by drink in an attempt to live up to the wild image of the "beatnik" stereotype he coined in his novel On the Road. Michel Tremblay is twenty-seven and his first widely produced play, Les Belles Soeurs, has premiered a year before.As he encounters his writing idol, the younger man must break through the older man's emotional barriers to establish common ground. Ultimately, Kerouac's Québécois background helps Tremblay understand his work, recognize the role religion takes, and the place women play in his psyche, as stated metaphorically in the various female characters who populate Les Belles Soeurs.The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Palaeontology, Second Edition
Par Martin J. S. Rudwick. 1976
"It is not often that a work can literally rewrite a person's view of a subject. And this is exactly…
what Rudwick's book should do for many paleontologists' view of the history of their own field. "—Stephen J. Gould, Paleobotany and Palynology "Rudwick has not merely written the first book-length history of palaeontology in the English language; he has written a very intelligent one. . . . His accounts of sources are rounded and organic: he treats the structure of arguments as Cuvier handled fossil bones. "—Roy S. Porter, History of Science