Authors John Copeland and Stan Kunigelis explore a unique but important class of animals that may be unfamiliar to many readers: freshwater sponges. Freshwater Sponges of Tennessee provides comprehensive information about sponges in Tennessee waterways, vastly updating both the scientific community and the reading public on sponge biodiversity and conservation.Copeland and Kunigelis offer compelling reasons for studying freshwater sponges. These animals perform unique and ...

Originally published in 1983, this cross-national study had three aims. First, to examine the cross-national differences among the elderly community in the prevalence of psychiatric problems and their relationship to other health and social problems. Second, to examine the differences in health care of aged people, with a view to providing a framework for improvement of health and support services to those elderly with psychiatric problems who reside in the community. Finally, the differen...

**“I’ve been thinking a lot about Cadillac Desert in the past few weeks, as the rain fell and fell and kept falling over California, much of which, despite the pouring heavens, seems likely to remain in the grip of a severe drought. Reisner anticipated this moment. He worried that the West’s success with irrigation could be a mirage — that it took water for granted and didn’t appreciate the precariousness of our capacity to control it.” – Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times...

AS ALEX PRUD’HOMME and his great-aunt Julia Child were completing their collaboration on her memoir, My Life in France, they began to talk about the French obsession with bottled water, which had finally spread to America. From this spark of interest, Prud’homme began what would become an ambitious quest to understand the evolving story of freshwater. What he found was shocking: as the climate warms and world population grows, demand for water has surged, but supp...

As breathtaking today as the day it was completed, Hoover Dam not only shaped the American West but helped launch the American century. In the depths of the Great Depression it became a symbol of American resilience and ingenuity in the face of crisis, putting thousands of men to work in a remote desert canyon and bringing unruly nature to heel.Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Michael Hiltzik uses the saga of the dam’s conception, design, and construction to tell the broader story of ...

The Hill and Wang Critical Issues Series: concise, affordable works on pivotal topics in American history, society, and politics.In this pioneering study, White explores the relationship between the natural history of the Columbia River and the human history of the Pacific Northwest for both whites and Native Americans. He concentrates on what brings humans and the river together: not only the physical space of the region but also, and primarily, energy and work. For working with t...

Why the Left's anti-hunting propaganda is dead wrong! Nothing is more hated--and more misunderstood--by the trendy Left than hunting. But now intrepid hunter and pro-hunting activist Frank Miniter sets the record straight. In The Politically Incorrect Guide(tm) to Hunting, he details the concrete benefits that hunting provides to all of us--even how it helps the environment. Speaking with wildlife biologists, hunters, farmers, anti-hunters, and victims of animal attacks, Miniter e...

This fascinating and groundbreaking work tells the remarkable story of the relationship between Americans and their trees across the entire span of our nation’s history.Like many of us, historians have long been guilty of taking trees for granted. Yet the history of trees in America is no less remarkable than the history of the United States itself—from the majestic white pines of New England, which were coveted by the British Crown for use as masts in nav...

A tour de force of writing and analysis, Down to Earth offers a sweeping history of our nation, one that for the first time places the environment at the very center of our story. Writing with marvelous clarity, historian Ted Steinberg sweeps across the centuries, re-envisioning the story of America as he recounts how the environment has played a key role in virtually every social, economic, and political development. Ranging from the colonists' attempts to impose order on the lan...

"Superbly reported and written with clarity, insight, and great skill." —Washington Post Book WorldAfter two decades, Washington Post journalist Blaine Harden returned to his small-town birthplace in the Pacific Northwest to follow the rise and fall of the West’s most thoroughly conquered river. To explore the Columbia River and befriend those who collaborated in its destruction, he traveled on a monstrous freight barge sailing west from Idaho to the Grand Coulee ...

From “a first-rate writer in the fascinating tradition of Junger and Krakauer” (Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall), a sweeping account of civilization’s complete dependence on copper and what it all means for people, nature, and the global economy.A SWEEPING ACCOUNT OF CIVILIZATION’S COMPLETE DEPENDENCE ON COPPER AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR PEOPLE, NATURE, AND OUR GLOBAL ECONOMYCOPPER is a miraculous and contra...