We all have our heroes. While growing up we try to emulate them, and they are beacons we strive to follow, hoping that someday we can shine as brightly as they did.As time passes, the veil of illusion falls slowly from our eyes and, as happens to the characters in these stories, our admiration for them gradually fades as we learn of their faults and frailties, and find that in many ways they are just like ourselves; frail beings struggling to make their own way.In our disap...

Wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, Jack Larner retaliates violently against a sadistic prison guard and is cast into solitary confinement. In the darkness and isolation of his tiny cell, he undergoes a bizarre and inexplicable transformation. When he emerges he appears quite normal, but with one exception: when in Larner's presence, no one can tell him a lie.Larner considers this transformation to be a curse, but when the prison authorities learn of it the...

Peter Mitchell, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for chemistry for his chemiosmotic theory, was a highly original scientist who revolutionized our understanding of cellular metabolism and bioenergetics. This is the only full biography of Mitchell, and it should be of considerable interest to biophysicists, biochemists, and physicians and researchers focusing on metabolism, as well as historians of medicine and biology.

Most land in the United States is in rural areas, as are the sources of most of its fresh water and almost all its other natural resources. One of the first books to approach resource economics and rural studies as fundamentally interconnected areas of study, Frontiers in Resource and Rural Economics integrates the work of 18 leading scholars in resource economics, rural economics, rural sociology and political science in order to focus on two complex interdependencies-one pertaining to na...

Millions of American baseball fans know, with absolute certainty, that umpires are simply overpaid galoots who are doing an easy job badly. Millions of American baseball fans are wrong. As They See 'Em is an insider's look at the largely unknown world of professional umpires, the small group of men (and the very occasional woman) who make sure America's favorite pastime is conducted in a manner that is clean, crisp, and true. Bruce Weber not only interviewed dozens of professional...

Degrowth is a rejection of the illusion of growth and a call to repoliticize the public debate colonized by the idiom of economism. It is a project advocating the democratically-led shrinking of production and consumption with the aim of achieving social justice and ecological sustainability.This overview of degrowth offers a comprehensive coverage of the main topics and major challenges of degrowth in a succinct, simple and accessible manner. In addition, it offers a set of keywor...

Stock market booms are cause for celebration. But when oil prices soar because supplies are failing to keep up with demand, the response is nearly always apocalyptic. Predictions of the end of oil can create anxiety on Wall Street and in Washington, stoking fears that production has hit a ceiling and prices will rise in perpetuity. Yet these dire visions have always proven wrong. Market Madness is the story of four waves of American anxiety over the last 100 years about a looming ...

Environmental life cycle assessment is often thought of as cradle to grave and therefore as the most complete accounting of the environmental costs and benefits of a product or service. However, as anyone who has done an environmental life cycle assessment knows, existing tools have many problems: data is difficult to assemble and life cycle studies take months of effort. A truly comprehensive analysis is prohibitive, so analysts are often forced to simply ignore many facets of life cycle ...

US Energy Policy and the Pursuit of Failure is an analytic history of American energy policy. For the past forty years, the US government has tried to develop comprehensive policies on energy, yet these efforts have failed repeatedly. These failures have not resulted from a lack of will or funds but rather from an inability to differentiate between what could be undertaken and what could actually be accomplished. This book explains how and why various policy efforts have come about, shows ...

Drawing on their extensive knowledge of the oil industry, Roberto F. Aguilera and Marian Radetzki provide an in-depth examination of the price of the world's most important commodity. They argue that although oil has experienced an extraordinary price increase over the past few decades, we have now reached a turning point where scarcity, uncertain supply and high prices will be replaced by abundance, undisturbed availability and suppressed price levels. They look at the potential of new gl...

What light does nearly twenty-five years of scientific study of the Exxon Valdez oil spill shed on the fate and effects of a spill? How can the results help in assessing future spills? How can ecological risks be assessed and quantified? In this, the first book on the effects of Exxon Valdez in fifteen years, scientists directly involved in studying the spill provide a comprehensive perspective on, and synthesis of, scientific information on long-term spill effects. The coverage is multidi...

Ocean and coastal management regimes are increasingly subject to competing demands from stakeholders. Regulations must not only address fishing, recreation, and shipping, but also sand and gravel mining, gas pipelines, harbor/port development, offshore wind and tidal energy facilities, liquefied natural gas terminals, offshore aquaculture, and desalinization plants. The growing variety and intensity of ocean and coastal uses increases the call for a more holistic, comprehensive, and coordi...