One snowy day in Ushuaia, Argentina, the self-proclaimed `southernmost city in the world, ` at the end of a long trip designed to put as much distance between himself & a frustrating job as possible, writer Eric Simons picked up a copy of Charles Darwin`s Voyage of the Beagle. Simons had just hiked the mountains overlooking Beagle Channel, & found himself engrossed in Darwin`s account. Like Simons, Darwin was in his mid-twenties when he travelled to the continent, having joined a five-year expedition to survey & map the coastline of South America, as the expedition`s naturalist. Simons found himself compelled to follow Darwin further into South America
- to stand where Darwin had, & to explore the landscapes, legends & people that had fascinated Darwin two centuries before. Simons trekked to as many of the locations Darwin wrote about as he could find, to see if he could see these places through Darwin`s eyes, & to see what South Americans know about Darwin. Part travelogue, part insight into one of the greatest scientific minds in history, Darwin Slept Here will fascinate & enthral.
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In these extraordinary poems, using multiple viewpoints
- from Darwin himself, to his beloved wife Emma, & even, at one point,
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Darwin`s Armada tells the stories of Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Joseph Hooker & Alfred Wallace, four young amateur naturalists from Britain who voyaged to the southern hemisphere during the first half of the nineteenth century in search of adventure & scientific fame. It charts their thrilling voyages to the strange & beautiful lands of the southern hemisphere that reshaped the young mariners` scientific ideas & led them, on returning to Britain, to befriend fellow voyager Charles Darwin. All three crucially influenced the publication & reception of his Origin of Species in 1859, one of the formative texts of the modern world. For the first time the Darwinian revolution of ideas is seen as a genuinely collective enterprise & one that had its birth in a series of gripping & human travel adventures. Many of the most urgent ecological & social issues of our times are seen to be prefigured in this compelling story of intellectual discovery. ...

” If you`ve ever fantasized walking & conversing with the great scientist on the subjects that consumed him, & now wish to add the fullness of reality, read this book.” Edward O. Wilson James T. Costa takes readers on a journey from Darwin`s youth & travels on the HMS Beagle to Down House, his bustling home of forty years. To test his insights into evolution, Darwin devised an astonishing array of hands-on experiments using his garden & greenhouse, surrounding meadows & woodlands, even taking over the cellar, study, yard & hallways of his home-turned-field-station. Darwin engaged his children, friends & neighbours as assistants & encouraged fellow naturalists to follow his lead. His inventive experiments yielded universal truths about nature & evidence for his revolutionary arguments in On the Origin of Species & other watershed works. We accompany Darwin in his myriad pursuits against the backdrop of his enduring marriage, chronic illness, grief at the loss of three children, & joy in scientific revelation. At each chapter`s end, Costa shows how we too can investigate the wonders of nature at work, with directions on how to re-create Darwin`s experiments. ...

Soon after publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin received a letter that deeply unsettled him. He had expected outrage & accusations of heresy, but this letter was different: it accused him of taking credit for a theory that wasn`t his. Yet when he tried to trace his intellectual forebears, he found that history had already forgotten them... Rediscovering Aristotle on the shores of Lesbos & Leonardo da Vinci fossil hunting in the Tuscan hills, this is a masterful retelling of the collective daring of a few like-minded men, whose early theories flew in the face of prevailing political & religious orthodoxies & laid the foundations for Darwin`s revolutionary idea. ...

In this remarkable book Adrian Desmond & James Moore, world authorities on Darwin, give a completely new explanation of how Darwin came to his famous view of evolution, which traced all life to an ancient common ancestor. Darwin was committed to the abolition of slavery, in part because of his family`s deeply held beliefs. It was his ` Sacred Cause` & at its core lay a belief in human racial unity. Desmond & Moore show how he extended to all life the idea of human brotherhood held by those who fought to abolish slavery, so developing our modern view of evolution. Desmond & Moore argue that only by understanding Darwin`s Christian abolitionist inheritance can we shed new light on the perplexing mix of personal drive, public hesitancy & scientific radicalism that led him finally in 1871 to publish ” The Descent of Man, & Selection in Relation to Sex”. The result is an epoch-making study of this eminent Victorian. ...

A revelatory collection of letters written by the author of The Broken Road. Handsome, spirited & erudite, Patrick Leigh Fermor was a war hero & one of the greatest travel writers of his generation. He was also a spectacularly gifted friend. The letters in this collection span almost seventy years, the first written ten days before Paddy`s twenty-fifth birthday, the last when he was ninety-four. His correspondents include Deborah Devonshire, Ann Fleming, Nancy Mitford, Lawrence Durrell, Diana Cooper & his lifelong companion, Joan Rayner; he wrote his first letter to her in his cell at the monastery Saint Wandrille, the setting for his reflections on monastic life in A Time to Keep Silence. His letters exhibit many of his most engaging characteristics: his zest for life, his unending curiosity, his lyrical descriptive powers, his love of language, his exuberance & his tendency to get into scrapes
- particularly when drinking &, quite separately, driving. Here are plenty of extraordinary stories: the hunt for Byron`s slippers in one of the remotest regions of Greece; an ignominious dismissal from Somerset Maugham`s Villa Mauresque; hiding behind a bush to dub Dirk Bogarde into Greek during the shooting of Ill Met by Moonlight, the film based on the story of General Kreipe`s abduction; his extensive travels. Some letters contain glimpses of the great & the good, while others are included purely for the joy of the jokes.
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A revelatory collection of letters written by the author of The Broken Road. Handsome, spirited & erudite, Patrick Leigh Fermor was a war hero & one the greatest travel writers of his generation. He was also a spectacularly gifted friend. The letters in this collection span almost seventy years, the first written ten days before Paddy`s twenty-fifth birthday, the last when he was ninety-four. His correspondents include Deborah Devonshire, Ann Fleming, Nancy Mitford, Lawrence Durrell, Diana Cooper & his lifelong companion, Joan Rayner; he wrote his first letter to her in his cell at the monastery Saint Wandrille, the setting for his reflections on monastic life in A Time to Keep Silence. His letters exhibit many of his most engaging characteristics: his zest for life, his unending curiosity, his lyrical descriptive powers, his love of language, his exuberance & his tendency to get into scrapes
- particularly when drinking &, quite separately, driving. Here are plenty of extraordinary stories: the hunt for Byron`s slippers in one of the remotest regions of Greece; an ignominious dismissal from Somerset Maugham`s Villa Mauresque; hiding behind a bush to dub Dirk Bogarde into Greek during the shooting of Ill Met by Moonlight, the film based on the story of General Kreipe`s abduction; his extensive travels. Some letters contain glimpses of the great & the good, while others are included purely for the joy of the jokes.
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Your cell phone provider tracks your location & knows who`s with you. Your online & in-store purchasing patterns are recorded, & reveal if you`re unemployed, sick, or pregnant. Your e-mails & texts expose your intimate & casual friends. Google knows what you`re thinking because it saves your private searches. Facebook can determine your sexual orientation without you ever mentioning it. The powers that surveil us do more than simply store this information. Corporations use surveillance to manipulate not only the news articles & advertisements we each see, but also the prices we`re offered. Governments use surveillance to discriminate, censor, chill free speech, & put people in danger worldwide. & both sides share this information with each other or, even worse, lose it to cybercriminals in huge data breaches. Much of this is voluntary: we cooperate with corporate surveillance because it promises us convenience, & we submit to government surveillance because it promises us protection. The result is a mass surveillance society of our own making. But have we given up more than we`ve gained? In Data & Goliath, security expert Bruce Schneier offers another path, one that values both security & privacy. He shows us exactly what we can do to reform our government surveillance programs & shake up surveillance-based business models, while also providing tips for you to protect your privacy every day. You`ll never look at your phone, your computer, your credit cards, or even your car in the same way again. ...

Samson O` Brien has been dismissed from the police force, & returns to his hometown of Bruncliffe in the Yorkshire Dales to set up the Dales Detective Agency while he fights to clear his name. However, the people of Bruncliffe aren`t that welcoming to a man they see as trouble. Delilah Metcalfe, meanwhile, is struggling to keep her business, the Dales Dating Agency, afloat
- as well as trying to control her wayward Weimaraner dog, Tolpuddle. Then when Samson gets his first case, investigating the supposed suicide of a local man, things take an unexpected turn, & soon he discovers a trail of deaths that lead back to the door of Delilah`s agency. With suspicion hanging over someone they both care for, the two feuding neighbours soon realize that they need to work together to solve the mystery of the dating deaths. But working together is easier said than done...
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