The baseball expert famously known as PitchingNinja explores the revolution that has given pitchers an unprecedented advantage in today’s game.Can Tarik Skubal three-peat as AL Cy Young? After winning Rookie of the Year and his first Cy Young, how does Paul Skenes get even nastier? Can Jacob deGrom crack 200 strikeouts again? How will Spencer Strider approach his return to dominance? Which pitchers stand to gain the most from an automated strike zone? And what sepa...

Scholarship of literature and the environment demonstrates myriad understandings of nature and culture. While some work in the field results in approaches that belong in the realm of cultural studies, other scholars have expanded the boundaries of ecocriticism to connect the practice more explicitly to disciplines such as the biological sciences, human geography, or philosophy. Even so, the field of ecocriticism has yet to clearly articulate its interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary natu...

The baseball expert famously known as PitchingNinja explores the revolution that has given pitchers an unprecedented advantage in today’s game.Can Tarik Skubal three-peat as AL Cy Young? After winning Rookie of the Year and his first Cy Young, how does Paul Skenes get even nastier? Can Jacob deGrom crack 200 strikeouts again? How will Spencer Strider approach his return to dominance? Which pitchers stand to gain the most from an automated strike zone? And what sepa...

With 18 Full Color Photos! 'Walden' is one of the best-known non-fiction books ever written by an American. It details Thoreau's sojourn in a cabin near Walden Pond, amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. Walden was written with expressed seasonal divisions. Thoreau hoped to isolate himself from society in order to gain a more objective understanding of it. Simplicity and self-reliance were Thoreau's other goals, and the whole project was inspired by Transcendenta...

A protégé of Michael Pollan shares the story of a little known group of renegade farmers who defied corporate agribusiness by launching a unique sustainable farm-to-table food movement.The story of the Lentil Underground begins on a 280-acre homestead rooted in America’s Great Plains: the Oien family farm. Forty years ago, corporate agribusiness told small farmers like the Oiens to “get big or get out.” But twenty-seven-year-old David Oien decided to take ...

Writing was the central passion of Emerson’s life. While his thoughts on the craft are well developed in “The Poet,” “The American Scholar,” Nature, “Goethe,” and “Persian Poetry,” less well known are the many pages in his private journals devoted to the relationship between writing and reading. Here, for the first time, is the Concord Sage’s energetic, exuberant, and unconventional advice on the idea of writing, focused and distilled by the preeminent Emerson biographer at work t...

As human activity and environmental change come to be increasingly recognized as intertwined phenomena on a rapidly urbanizing planet, the field of urban ecology has risen to offer useful ways of thinking about coupled human and natural systems.On the forefront of this discipline is Marina Alberti, whose innovative work offers a conceptual framework for uncovering fundamental laws that govern the complexity and resilience of cities, which she sees as key to understanding and respon...

Through virtuoso readings of significant works of American film, television, and fiction, Phillip E. Wegner demonstrates that the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 fostered a unique consciousness and represented a moment of immense historical possibilities now at risk of being forgotten in the midst of the “war on terror.” Wegner argues that 9/11 should be understood as a form of what Jacques Lacan called the “second...

Anglo-American writers in the revolutionary era used pastoral images to place themselves as native to the continent, argues Thomas Hallock in From the Fallen Tree. Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, as territorial expansion got under way in earnest, and ending with the era of Indian dispossession, the author demonstrates how authors explored the idea of wilderness and political identities in fully populated frontiers.Hallock provides an alternative to the myth of a v...

The global economy threatens the uniqueness of places, people, and experiences. In Here and There, Bill Conlogue tests the assumption that literature and local places matter less and less in a world that economists describe as “flat,” politicians believe has “globalized,” and social scientists imagine as a “global village.” Each chapter begins at home, journeys elsewhere, and returns to the author’s native and chosen region, northeastern Pennsylvania. Through the prisms of literat...

Fishes of the Last Frontier answers many of your fish questions and others you haven't even thought of yet in a nontechnical, plain talk voice. Learn about the fishes that are of value or special interest to Alaskans: how fish are able to survive and grow, how they get along with each other--or not--and what they eat, where and how our Alaska fishes spawn, the difference between a red and a redd, and the difference between anadromous and catadromous and why that is important. The author, a...

An unconventional history of Philadelphia that operates at the threshold of cultural and environmental studies, A Greene Country Towne expands the meaning of community beyond people to encompass nonhuman beings, things, and forces.By examining a diverse range of cultural acts and material objects created in Philadelphia—from Native American artifacts, early stoves, and literary works to public parks, photographs, and paintings—through the lens of new materialism, the essay...