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A narration of the mutually mortal historical contest between
humans and nature in Latin America. Covering a period that begins
with Amerindian civilizations and concludes in the region's present
urban agglomerations, the work offers an original synthesis of the
current scholarship on Latin America's environmental history and
argues that tropical nature played a central role in shaping the
region's historical development. Human attitudes, populations, and
appetites, from Aztec cannibalism to more contemporary forms of
conspicuous consumption, figure prominently in the story. However,
characters such as hookworms, whales, hurricanes, bananas, dirt,
butterflies, guano, and fungi make more than cameo appearances.
Recent scholarship has overturned many of our egocentric
assumptions about humanity's role in history. Seeing Latin
America's environmental past from the perspective of many centuries
illustrates that human civilizations, ancient and modern, have been
simultaneously more powerful and more vulnerable than previously
thought.
The streets of Rio de Janeiro have long been characterized as
exuberant and exotic places for social commerce, political
expression, and the production and dissemination of culture. The
Street is Ours examines the changing uses and meanings of Rio de
Janeiro's streets and argues that the automobile, by literally
occupying much of the street's space and by introducing death and
injury on a new scale, significantly transformed the public
commons. Once viewed as a natural resource and a place of equitable
access, deep meaning, and diverse functions, the street has changed
into a space of exclusion that prioritizes automotive movement.
Taking an environmental approach, Shawn William Miller surveys the
costs and failures of this spatial transformation and demonstrates
how Rio's citizens have resisted the automobile's intrusions and,
in some cases, even reversed the long trend of closing the street
against its potential utilities.
For the most part, Brazil's forests were not harvested, but
annihilated, and relatively little was extracted for the benefit of
Brazilians, a tragedy perhaps worse than deforestation alone.
"Fruitless Trees" aims to make sense of what at first glance
appears to be the senseless destruction of Brazil's incomparable
timber.
The forests have always been Brazil's most striking natural
resource, and the Portuguese colonists anticipated enormous returns
from its harvest, since Brazilian timber was more abundant and
superior in quality to anything known in Europe, North America, or
even Portugal's East Indian possessions. This work investigates the
relationship between Portugal's colonial forest policies and the
successes of the colonial venture, showing how forest law shaped
the fortunes of the timber sector and promoted or obstructed
colonial development. Timber was the steel, oil, coal, and plastic
of the early modern period, and the effectiveness of its extraction
affected nearly every branch of the colonial economy.
Challenging previous scholarship that simply ascribed the
destruction of Brazil's remarkable forests to the Europeans'
voracious greed and inherent hostility to the forest, the author
argues that we must delineate the extent to which tropical timber
was put to advantageous ends, and explore precisely why so large a
proportion of Brazil's timber was incinerated rather than converted
to colonial wealth.
Although Brazil exported substantial quantities of timber to
Europe, the total amount fell far below expectations. The author
attributes this in part to several ecological and geographical
factors including the lack of common stands, the preponderance of
timbers too dense to be floated inexpensively downstream, and the
dearth of safe ports and navigable rivers. But the most significant
factor in timber's unexpectedly poor showing was the Crown's effort
from 1652 to monopolize Brazil's best timbers. The Portuguese
king's declaration that Brazil's best timbers belonged to him
exclusively resulted in vast tracts of timber being resentfully set
afire by Brazilians who had no incentive to harvest them.
A narration of the mutually mortal historical contest between
humans and nature in Latin America. Covering a period that begins
with Amerindian civilizations and concludes in the region's present
urban agglomerations, the work offers an original synthesis of the
current scholarship on Latin America's environmental history and
argues that tropical nature played a central role in shaping the
region's historical development. Human attitudes, populations, and
appetites, from Aztec cannibalism to more contemporary forms of
conspicuous consumption, figure prominently in the story. However,
characters such as hookworms, whales, hurricanes, bananas, dirt,
butterflies, guano, and fungi make more than cameo appearances.
Recent scholarship has overturned many of our egocentric
assumptions about humanity's role in history. Seeing Latin
America's environmental past from the perspective of many centuries
illustrates that human civilizations, ancient and modern, have been
simultaneously more powerful and more vulnerable than previously
thought.
The streets of Rio de Janeiro have long been characterized as
exuberant and exotic places for social commerce, political
expression, and the production and dissemination of culture. The
Street is Ours examines the changing uses and meanings of Rio de
Janeiro's streets and argues that the automobile, by literally
occupying much of the street's space and by introducing death and
injury on a new scale, significantly transformed the public
commons. Once viewed as a natural resource and a place of equitable
access, deep meaning, and diverse functions, the street has changed
into a space of exclusion that prioritizes automotive movement.
Taking an environmental approach, Shawn William Miller surveys the
costs and failures of this spatial transformation and demonstrates
how Rio's citizens have resisted the automobile's intrusions and,
in some cases, even reversed the long trend of closing the street
against its potential utilities.
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Blood Kiss (Paperback)
Robert Moore; Shawn William Davis
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R298
Discovery Miles 2 980
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Go on, give her a kiss. It won't hurt...much. The beautiful female
students at a New England, All-girls, Catholic College are
disappearing one-by-one. Even worse, they're returning with an
insatiable lust for blood in addition to other dark desires. A
2000-year-old Master Vampire, who has been wandering the earth
since Ancient Rome, is creating an army of gorgeous, undead,
unstoppable female predators bent on dominating the earth. Their
numbers are growing at a geometric rate. Is there any way to escape
the cold embrace of the Blood Kiss? Wade through a sea of hot blood
to find out.
It was very easy finding something the main character of this book
is good at - his ability to get into predicaments. The unlikely
resolutions of these predicaments make the story. He has a way of
falling into a steamy pile of misadventures, but usually ends up
coming out smelling OK. It isn't that big fish that you caught; or
that huge buck - it's the exaggerated memories.
I'm a Bad Man: African American Vernacular Culture and the Making
of Muhammad Ali, examines Muhammad Ali as an Afrocentric culture
hero in the tradition of African American folklore. By exploring
Ali's connection with the archetypes of African and African
American orature, such as the trickster, the bad man, and the
culture hero, this study offers an examination of the heroic
persona of Ali. The book also delineates Ali's utilization of
African American verbal practices to consciously create himself as
an Afrocentric folk hero. In addition, the book offers a comparison
of Ali with his real life folk hero predecessors, Jack Johnson and
Joe Louis.
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