Teaching in Eden is about a teacher's rebellion against the paradigms of higher education: the standardized lectures and multiple choice exams, the increasingly web-driven, audio-visual environment in multi-media teaching auditoriums and the educational bureaucracy's definitions of success. The idealism that fuels this rebellion is a direct result of John Janovy's experience at the Cedar Point Biological Station, a place called Camelot, in recognition of its isolated beauty, its special instructional qualities and its vulnerability.
This utterly unique book comes out of Janovy's quarter century of teaching science at Cedar Point. Teaching in Eden is intended to provide teachers of any subject with powerful but virtually free tools that they can use to alter the fundamental nature of any educational experience. With insight and candor, Janovy reminds readers that it is essential to back away from the immediate demands of the teaching profession to discover the elements of an ideal instructional environment. Teaching in Eden guides teachers, parents, and even students in their own discovery and encourages us all to engage in the challenge and simplicity of this innovative educational practice.

The answers to life's biggest questions can be found by looking at the little things…

Though you may not be able to see them with the naked eye, parasites—miniscule life forms that live inside other organisms—inhabit our everyday lives. From headlice to bird droppings, litterboxes to unfiltered water, you have brushed up against the most common way of life on our planet.

In this unique book, John Janovy Jr., one of the world's preeminent experts on parasites, reveals what can humans learn from the most reviled yet misunderstood animals on Earth: lice, tapeworms, flukes, and maggots that can eat a lizard from the inside, and how these lessons help us negotiate our own complicated world. Whether we're learning to adapt to adverse conditions, accept our own limitations, or process new information in an ever-changing landscape—we can be sure a parasite did it first.

At once peculiar and profound, Life Lessons from a Parasite makes a case for using knowledge of the natural world, with all its wonderful mysteries and quirks, to tackle our worst problems

Intelligent Designer is a set of twenty answered questions about evolution. The book is intended to help alleviate the rampant scientific illiteracy so typical of today's political climate, an illiteracy that is outright dangerous to any society so dependent on science and technology as is the United States.

TUSKERS takes place on the day of a football game between the University of Nebraska and the University of Oklahoma in the year 2090. Nebraska has not lost a game in ten years, but must win this last one to complete the perfect Winning Decade. Global warming has turned the American central plains into a desert. A brilliant chemical engineer has devised a way to make petroleum products from slime corn, a desert-loving perennial invented by molecular biologists. As a result of his patents, this engineer owns a company named Anti-Environmental Products, Inc. (AEPI), whose raw material-corn slime-is the crude oil of the late 21st Century. Nebraska is now the petroleum source for much of the world, and thus the engineer's wealth. But this guy hates Nebraska and will use everything in his power to make the Tuskers lose The molecular biologists also have succeeded in resurrecting woolly mammoths from DNA in carcasses appearing in the rapidly-melting polar ice cap. The first, and largest, of these mammoths is Archie, the University of Nebraska mascot, and the team is now known as the "Tuskers" instead of the "Cornhuskers" as earlier in the century. TUSKERS not only is science fiction, it also is satire, exploring the American obsession with football as a national sport as the world experiences global climate change, political turmoil, and accelerating technological advance. In the end, the book is not so much about sport as it is about our preoccupation with sport as a displacement behavior in a world that is changing so rapidly we cannot control it.

CONVERSATIONS addresses what God calls The Ultimate Question, namely, why people throughout the universe are killing one another in His name. God arrives on Earth as a male pre-med college student from South Dakota; Satan arrives as a feisty female English major and struggling writer with a love for high calorie cookies, cigarettes, and vodka. They spend two weeks, an hour a day, at The Crescent Moon addressing a wide range of problems that people, and people-like animals, but eventually deal with the issue of wholesale slaughter in the name of God. After reading CONVERSATIONS, you will never look at the sky, or your local church, in the same way again.

Ten Minute Ecologist contains twenty answered questions about life on Earth and the factors that control numbers and distributions of biological resources. The book should be required reading for anyone dealing with natural resources, and it is ideal for classroom use and both the high school and college level.

The Ginkgo is a story about a girl from a western ranch who comes to a large university and writes four papers about a single tree. In the process, she discovers and explores the clash between tradition and creativity, eventually producing a sobering vision of American a thousand years into the future.