Succeed in your non-science majors course with this easy-to-understand text that presents the fundamental concepts of the five divisions of physical sciences (physics, chemistry, astronomy, meteorology and geology). This updated fifteenth edition includes timely and relevant applications and a WebAssign course with a mobile-friendly ebook and active-learning modules to enhance your learning experience.

This market-leading manual for the first-year physics laboratory course offers a wide range of class-tested experiments designed specifically for use in small to mid-size lab programs. A series of integrated experiments emphasizes the use of computerized instrumentation and includes a set of "computer-assisted experiments" that allow you to gain experience with modern equipment. By analyzing data through two different methods, learners gain a greater understanding of the concepts behind the experiments. The Eighth Edition is updated with four new economical labs and thirty new Pre-Lab Demonstrations, designed to capture interest prior to the lab and requiring only widely available materials and items.

Dick Swiveller, the wittily named park ranger who is by turns both ill-tempered and kind, Winston 'Franzia' Weatherby, the only wino Swiveller knows who really drinks wine, One-eyed Rita. . . Fern. . . One-Beer Bob. . . these are just some of the memorable characters who inhabit Jerry Wilson's stories. Drawing heavily on personal experience and with keen eyed observation of the human condition, Wilson writes about broken lives, the dispossessed, those who are unwanted, who go unnoticed, and yet somehow manage to survive. This is an America that will be immediately familiar to anyone who has seen the photographs of Dorothea Lange or read Charles Bukowski, John Steinbeck and other chroniclers of the underbelly of America-only the years have moved on. There is anger in these tales. . . humanity, love, humor and compassion too; but what makes them really special is the maturity in Jerry Wilson's writing that marks him as a new and necessary voice in American fiction.
Jerry Wilson was born in 1961 in Boise, Idaho. He dropped out of high school at age 17 and joined the Air Force. He was discharged a sergeant four years later. Wilson has a B.A. degree in Psychology and has worked as a dishwasher, cook, concrete finisher, jackhammer operator, orderly in a psychiatric hospital, scrud in a wastewater treatment plant, janitor, truck driver, grocery checker, day laborer, fine jewelry salesman, and casual postal carrier. He currently works for the Boise parks department. He has two daughters, Amanda and Declynn, and a grandson Max.

Steinbeck could have learned a lot from this book. Its stories bring us American history in living color (real people, in white, black, and red), from Oklahoma land runs of 1889-92 down through the Dust Bowl, World War Two, Viet Nam, and the invasion of Iraq. We meet homesteaders, bootleggers, revival preachers, rich oil men and failing farmers, children of slaves working for freedom, a WW2 veteran who trades his phantom arm for a farm, a dying WWII vet whose son peddles smart bombs that are killing Iraqi children. In the first story, we are there for the much-mourned death of a grandmother who homesteaded; in the last story, which brings us full circle, a man and woman make a new beginning, leaving behind her redneck husband to (as Huck Finn put it), set out for "The Territory." -Carter Revard, author ofHow the Songs Came Down, Winning the Dust Bowl, & Cowboys and Indians Christmas Shopping