Recherche

Titre:
The Ethnobotanical: A world tour of indigenous plant knowledge

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$50.00
(disponible en magasin)

Résumé:
Since the beginning of humanity's existence, plants have provided us with everything we need for our survival - they sustain us with air to breathe, food to eat, materials to make clothes and shelter with, and medicine to treat and prevent disease. Their beauty can also enhance our mood and provide spiritual and emotional nourishment. Western science has 'discovered' and named innumerable plant species over the course of its colonial history. To many Indigenous peoples, however, plants have been recognised for centuries as sentient beings, imbued with spirit and agency to help humanity. Publishing in partnership with the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, ''The Ethnobotanical'' offers a unique and beautiful perspective on plants and their roles in the lives of peoples from across the planet.

Titre:
Les forêts nourricières

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$42.00
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
Dans la recherche de nouveaux aménagements agroécologiques dans les communautés, les forêts nourricières apparaissent comme une alternative porteuse. Dans ce guide qui vise à favoriser et accompagner les projets de cette nature, Caroline Dufour-L’Arrivée explique le concept et son importance, valorise et partage l’expérience acquise par treize initiatives modèles et pionnières du Québec sous la forme de fiches techniques détaillées et illustrées, et propose une méthode de travail étape par étape pour aider à structurer les démarches d’implantation de ce type de projet et leur évolution, tout en offrant plusieurs conseils en matière de choix de végétaux et de techniques d’aménagement.

Titre:
L'univers des arbres

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$49.95
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
Synthèse de l'ensemble des connaissances sur les arbres et les forêts. Au travers d'informations scientifiques, culturelles, historiques et mythologiques, l'auteur explore les caractéristiques, la structure ainsi que le rôle des arbres, notamment dans la lutte contre le réchauffement climatique. L'exploitation abusive des hommes est évoquée, comme le bûcheronnage et l'extraction d'ambre.

Titre:
What the trees see: A wander through millennia of natural history in Australia

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$39.95
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
The trees around us – some we may walk past every day – tell a story. The mallee box by the twelfth hole of North Adelaide Golf Course evokes a time when Adelaide was clothed in mallee scrub and desert senna. Brisbane’s remnant blue gum, growing by the botanic gardens, indicates a time when the city was once jungle. The river red gums of Melbourne bear the scars of Aboriginal craftmanship. Mangroves, Leichhardt trees, acacias, eucalypts, foxtails … together, they inspire a narrative that jumps from Burke and Wills to sugar slaves, Empress Josephine to Johnny Flinders. Eucalypts reveal lost cultures and lost children. Cabbage palms tell of incomparable migrations. In the spirit of Bob Gilbert’s Ghost Trees and Don Watson’s The Bush, this book explores how our trees hold our history and reveal it to us.

Titre:
Bodypedia: A brief compendium of human anatomical curiosities

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$24.99
(disponible en magasin)

Résumé:
"Bodypedia" is a lively, fact-filled romp through your body, from A to Z. Featuring almost 100 stories on topics ranging from the beastly origins of goosebumps to the definitive answer to the Motown classic "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted," these fascinating tales from your entrails explore the wonders of anatomy, one body part at a time. With a keen scalpel, Adam Taor peels away the layers to bring your underappreciated insides to light. What distinguishes crocodile tears from yours? What possessed Isaac Newton to stick a needle into his eye socket? How does brain glue thwart self-improvement gurus? Why did one of the world’s most influential surgeons steal a giant? Providing insights into these and other curiosities, Taor illuminates the ingenuity, mystery, and eccentric history of your anatomy like never before. Along the way, you will meet the geniuses, mavericks, and monsters (sometimes all the above) who got their hands bloody discovering, dissecting, and naming your parts.

Titre:
Corbeaux

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$35.95
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
Le corbeau semble un signe inscrit à l'encre noire sur nos paysages. Un signe élégant, marchant posément au sol, s'envolant sans effort et glissant sur le monde. Signe de malheur, parfois, puisqu'il est à l'occasion charognard et a toujours suivi les hommes sur les champs de bataille, à travers les catastrophes. Mais aussi signe de vie. Dans de nombreuses traditions, des Chinois aux Indiens Hopi, la présence du corbeau est interprétée comme un présage heureux. Chez les anciens Grecs, sa parade nuptiale et ses mœurs fidèles lui valaient d'être invoqué comme gage d'amour conjugal. Et partout, son intelligence remarquable a intrigué, exaspéré, étonné ou charmé les humains. Ce livre explore les traces des corvidés (corneilles, corbeaux et pies) dans la mémoire et les cultures du monde, dévoilant les multiples formes du lien entre les hommes et ces oiseaux si fascinants.

Titre:
Rat

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$25.00
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
The rat has been described as the shadow of the human. From ancient times it spread via the routes of commerce and conquest to eventually inhabit almost every part of the world. Its impact on history has been enormous in terms of the damage done through plague and disease, the destruction of agricultural produce, and the infestations of cities. At the same time the rat has provided science with a huge resource for experimentation. This highly adaptable, fertile and intelligent creature is almost universally loathed, but there are cultures in which it is revered, even deified. This book traces the history of the human relationship with rats from the first archaeological finds to the genetically engineered rats of the present day, describing its role in the arts and sciences, religion and myth, psychoanalysis and medicine. The author includes wide-ranging examples of the rat’s appearance: in literature – 'The Pied Piper'; Beatrix Potter stories, 'The Wind in the Willows'; in culture – Victorian rat-and-dog baiting pits, its popularity as a pet, even the subject of a ’70s pop song; folklore – it was a good luck symbol in ancient Rome, symbol of cunning in Chinese mythology; and psychoanalysis – Freud’s Rat Man, for example. The book also seeks to answer two problems raised by the complexity of human attitudes to the rat. The first concerns how it was that the rat came to be seen not just as verminous, but also as being particularly despised for being so – more so, in fact, than other parasitic animals. The second concerns the manner in which human attitudes to the rat can be so contradictory, when admiration for its abilities are set against this idea of hatred. The rat can be found at the heart of human preoccupations with hygiene, sexuality and appetite, and exists as a perverse totem for the worst excesses of human behaviour. In 'Rat', Jonathan Burt provides a fascinating account of this animal in history, myth and culture.

Titre:
Crow

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$24.95
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
Though people generally do not think of them in such terms, crows are remarkably graceful: from the tip of a crow’s beak to the end of its tail is a single curve, which changes rhythmically as the crow turns its head or bends toward the ground. Foraging on their long, powerful legs, crows appear to glide over the earth; they take flight almost without effort, flapping their wings easily, ascending into the air like spirits. Nevertheless, the whiskers around their beaks and an apparent smile make crows, in a scruffy sort of way, endearingly ‘human’. In a vast range of cultures from the Chinese to the Hopi Indians, crows are bearers of prophecy. Because of their courtship dances and monogamous unions, the Greeks invoked crows at weddings as symbols of conjugal love. Crows are among the most ubiquitous of birds, yet, without being in the least exotic, they remain mysterious. This book is a survey of crows, ravens, magpies and their relatives in myth, literature and life. It ranges from the raven sent out by Noah to the corvid deities of the Eskimo, to Taoist legends, Victorian novels and contemporary films. It will be of interest to all people who have ever been intrigued, puzzled, annoyed or charmed by these wonderfully intelligent birds.

Titre:
Cockroach

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$25.00
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
The cockroach could not have scuttled along, almost unchanged, for two hundred and fifty million years – some two hundred and forty-nine before man evolved – unless it was doing something right. It would be fascinating as well as instructive to have access to the cockroach’s own record of its life on earth, to know its point of view on evolution and species domination over the millennia. Such chronicles would perhaps radically alter our perceptions of the dinosaur’s span and importance – and that of our own development and significance. We might learn that throughout all these aeons, the dominant life form has been, if not the cockroach itself, then certainly the insect. Attempts to chronicle the cockroach’s intellectual and emotional life have been made only within the last century when a scientist titled his essay on the cockroach ‘The Intellectual and Emotional World of the Cockroach’, and artists as radically different as Franz Kafka and Don Marquis created equally memorable cockroach protagonists. At least since Classical Greece, authors have brought cockroach characters into the foreground to speak for the weak and downtrodden, the outsiders, those forced to survive on the underside of dominant human cultures. Cockroaches have become the subjects of songs (La Cucaracha), have competed in ‘roachraces’ and have even ended up in recipes. In this accessible, sympathetic and often humorous book, Marion Copeland examines the natural history, symbolism and cultural significance of this poorly understood and much-maligned insect.

Titre:
Ant

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$25.00
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
Ants are legion: at present there are 11,006 species of ant known; they live everywhere in the world except the polar icecaps; and the combined weight of the ant population has been estimated to make up half the mass of all insects alive today. When we encounter them outdoors, ants fascinate us; discovered in our kitchen cupboards, they elicit horror and disgust. Charlotte Sleigh’s 'Ant' elucidates the cultural reasons behind our varied reactions to these extraordinary insects, and considers the variety of responses that humans have expressed at different times and in different places to their intricate, miniature societies. Ants have figured as fantasy miniature armies, as models of good behaviour, as infiltrating communists and as creatures on the borderline between the realms of the organic and the machine: in 1977 British Telecom hired ant experts to help solve problems with their massive information network. This is the first book to examine ants in these and many other such guises, and in so doing opens up broader issues about the history of science and humans’ relations with the natural world. It will be of interest to anyone who likes natural history or cultural studies, or who has ever rushed out and bought a can of Raid™.