Biocompatibility of Dental Biomaterials details and examines the fundamentals of biocompatibililty, also including strategies to combat it. As biomaterials used in the mouth are subject to different problems than those associated with the general in vivo environment, this book examines these challenges, presenting the latest research and forward-thinking strategies.

Combining natural history with beguiling autobiographical and historical narrative, To Sea and Back is a dazzling portrait of a fish whose story is closely intertwined with our own. 'Indispensable and powerful... To Sea and Back mingles history with biography and science... Shelton writes with a poet's ear... A writer to be prized.'-- Tom Adair, Scotsman The Atlantic salmon is an extraordinary and mysterious fish. In To Sea and Back, Richard Shelton combines memoir and deep scientific knowledge to reveal, from the salmon's point of view, both the riverine and marine worlds in which it lives. He explores this iconic fish's journey to reach its feeding grounds in the northern oceans before making the return over thousands of miles to the burns of its birth to reproduce. Along the way, Shelton describes the feats of exploration that gave us our first real understanding of the oceans, and shows how this iconic fish is a vital indicator of the health of our rivers and oceans. Above all, To Sea and Back is the story of Richard Shelton's lifelong passion for the sea and his attempt to solve the perennial enigmas of the salmon's secret life.

While Shelton has been known primarily for his poems dealing with the landscape of the Southwest and the destruction of that landscape, the poems in this book are much more far-ranging, including many poems dealing with soocial issues (the issue of illegal immigration on our southern border, homelessness), historical events (the war in Iraq, the events of 9/11) and attitudes concerning politics and the environment. The poems are filled with sensory images, engaged in the real world, often ironic or simply off-the-wall, and their tone ranges from deeply sad, as in a requiem for Glen Canyon on the Colorado River, to the wildly funny, as in "Brief Communications from My widowed Mother."

In Shelton’s fourth collection of poems, he writes of the desert Southwest, and through it gives his unique view of the world. The poems speak of landscape, marriage, freedom, and death.

Shelton says of his work: "I consider myself a regionalist and a surrealist. I have lived in the desert for ten years and hope that my work reflects that fact." In the forty-seven poems in this collection the poet moves backward and forward through time but always in the same landscape, the desert-mountains of southern Arizona, which foster his surrealistic view of his interior conflict. He is followed by peculiarly insistent voices from the past.

Once in a while, a book comes along that redefines the concept of family. Frank McCourt did it with Angela's Ashes ; Annie Dillard did it with An American Childhood . In Nobody Rich or Famous , author Richard Shelton (b. 1933) immerses us in the hardscrabble lives of his Boise, Idaho, clan during the 1930s and '40s. Using a framework of journals, road trips, and artful storytelling, Shelton traces three generations of women. We meet his mother, Hazel, a model of western respectability, who carefully dresses in her finest clothes before walking into a bar and emptying a loaded handgun in the general direction of her husband. We meet his great-grandmother, Josephine, who homesteads a sod shanty and dies too young on the Kansas prairie. We follow his grandmother, Charlotte, as she grows from a live-in servant girl to a fiddle-playing schoolteacher who burns through two marriages before taking up with the iceman." Known for his storytelling, Shelton crafts a tale of poverty and its attendant sorrows: alcoholism, neglect, and abuse. But the tenacity of the human spirit shines through. This is an epic tale of Steinbeckian proportions, but it is not fiction. This is memoir in its finest tradition, illuminating today's cultural chasm between the haves and have-nots. In the author's words, Nobody Rich or Famous is "the story of a family and how it got that way."

Ever since he was asked to critique the poetry of a convicted murderer, he has lived in two worlds. Richard Shelton was a young English professor in 1970 when a convict named Charles Schmid--a serial killer dubbed the "Pied Piper of Tucson" in national magazines--shared his brooding verse. But for Shelton, the novelty of meeting a death-row monster became a thirty-year commitment to helping prisoners express themselves. Shelton began organizing creative writing workshops behind bars, and in this gritty memoir he offers up a chronicle of reaching out to forgotten men and women--and of creativity blossoming in a repressive environment. He tells of published students such as Paul Ashley, Greg Forker, Ken Lamberton, and Jimmy Santiago Baca who have made names for themselves through their writing instead of their crimes. Shelton also recounts the bittersweet triumph of seeing work published by men who later met with agonizing deaths, and the despair of seeing the creative strides of inmates broken by politically motivated transfers to private prisons. And his memoir bristles with hard-edged experiences, ranging from inside knowledge of prison breaks to a workshop conducted while a riot raged outside a barricaded door. Reflecting on his decision to tutor Schmid, Shelton sees that the choice "has led me through bloody tragedies and terrible disappointments to a better understanding of what it means to be human." Crossing the Yard is a rare story of professional fulfillment--and a testament to the transformative power of writing.