Humans love dolphins, and dolphins, it seems, love us: they have been known to encircle swimmers under attack by sharks. Yet although we think we know dolphins well, in fact most people are quite ill-informed about how they evolved, how they function as organisms and how they have interacted with humans for millennia. Dolphin offers a comprehensive view of the animal, describing both its remarkable zoology and its social and cultural history.For centuries dolphins were bel...

Nineteenth-century England witnessed an unprecedented increase in the number of publications and institutions devoted to the creation and the dissemination of knowledge: encyclopedias, scientific periodicals, instruction manuals, scientific societies, children’s literature, mechanics’ institutes, museums of natural history, and lending libraries. In Useful Knowledge Alan Rauch presents a social, cultural, and literary history of this new knowledge industry and traces its relations...

Sloths are perhaps the most recognized and loved Central and South American animals, but despite their renown and popularity as cartoon characters, toys and memes, they are not well understood. This book offers a colourful, richly illustrated and wide-ranging account of the biological and cultural history of these fascinating mammals.Alan Rauch explores sloths’ gigantic prehistoric ancestors and their evolution into the lethargic, green-hued creatures that live and survive in forest...

In this characteristically concise, witty, and lucid book, Terry Eagleton turns his attention to the questions we should ask about literature, but rarely do. What is literature? Can we even speak of "literature" at all? What do different literary theories tell us about what texts mean and do? In throwing new light on these and other questions he has raised in previous best-sellers, Eagleton offers a new theory of what we mean by literature. He also shows what it is that a great ...

Many have believed that Atlantis was a fiction created by Plato. Well Plato was not the first to write about it.We have found a very much earlier document. It was written in 9619 BC, about 9,250 years before Plato's writing.This ancient document is believed to be the oldest document that has survived almost intact down through the ages.Further, archeological finds and scientific evidence provide convincing proof that Atlantis really did exist; Atlantis was real....

Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer cul...

From the renowned author of the New York Times best seller The Sibley Guide to Birds, a comprehensive, beautifully illustrated guide to identifying birds in the field. Sibley's Birding Basics is an essential companion for birders of all skill and experience levels.With Sibley as your guide, learn how to interpret what the feathers, the anatomical structure, the sounds of a bird tell you. When you know the clues that show you why there’s n...

When it was published in 1979, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imaginationwas hailed as a pathbreaking work of criticism, changing the way future scholars would read Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson. This thirtieth-anniversary collection adds both valuable reassessments and new readings and analyses inspired by Gilbert and Gubar’s approach. It includes work ...

Dolphins are mammals that live in the ocean. They have smooth, gray skin. Their skin feels like rubber.The dolphin's mouth is filled with rows and rows of sharp teeth. They are made for tearing off pieces of meat.Dolphins come in different colors. Most of them are gray, but there are also dolphins that are black and white. There are even some that are all white.Find out what a dolphin looks like, where it lives, what it eats, what eats it, how babies are born, and som...

The New York Times–bestselling "exploration of the world from a piscine perspective . . . makes a persuasive case that what fish know is quite a lot" (Elizabeth Kolbert, The New York Review of Books).Do fishes think? Do they really have three-second memories? And can they recognize the humans who peer back at them from above the surface of the water? In What a Fish Knows, ethologist Jonathan Balcombe addresses these questions and more, revealing th...

First published in 1985, Between Men was a decisive intervention in gender studies, a book that all but singlehandedly dislodged a tradition of literary critique that suppressed queer subjects and subjectivities. With stunning foresight and conceptual power, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work opened not only literature but also politics, society, and culture to broader investigations of power, sex, and desire, and to new possibilities of critical agency.Illuminating with uncanny...

This Periplus Nature Guide provides an excellent introduction to 68 of the most commonly encountered tropical reef fishes. Written by Dr. Gerald Allen, international authority on reef fishes, it features stunning color shots by some of the world's best underwater photographers.