Author: Webb ChilesPublisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393032680
Category : Pacific Ocean
Languages : en
Pages : 204
Book Description
Author: Louise BordenCitizens, Democracy, and Markets Around the Pacific Rim
Author: Doh Chull ShinPublisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191516376
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 332
Book Description
East Asia is one of the most dynamic areas of political change in the world today-what role do citizens play in these processes of change? Drawing upon a unique set of coordinated public opinion surveys conducted by the World Values Survey, this book provides a dramatically new image of the political cultures of East Asia. Most East Asian citizens have strong democratic aspirations, even in still autocratic nations. Most East Asians support liberal market reforms, even in nations where state socialism has been dominant. The books findings thus provide a new perspective on the political values of Asian publics. We demonstrate that the dramatic socioeconomic changes of the past several decades have transformed public opinion, altering many of the social norms traditionally identified with Asian values, and creating public support for further political and economic modernization of the region. Political culture in East Asia is not an impediment to change, but creates the potential for even greater democratization and marketization. Comparative Politics is a series for students and teachers of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. The General Editors are Max Kaase, Professor of Political Science, Vice President and Dean, School of Humanities and Social Science, International University Bremen, Germany; and Kenneth Newton, Professor of Comparative Politics, University of Southampton. The series is produced in association with the European Consortium for Political Research.
Sailing the Pacific
Author: Miles HordernPublisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466871962
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 263
Book Description
Solo sailors are widely known to be a breed apart, and here's an unforgettable book that shows just how wide a berth they give themselves from the crowds. Several years ago, Miles Hordern, a schoolteacher by training---though he had run away to sea a few times before---set sail on a twenty-eight-foot boat from New Zealand to South America, the largest uninterrupted stretch of water on earth, and into the dominion of icebergs, cyclones, and swells of monumental proportions. The trip would take him through the fjords of Patagonia, one of the last uncharted areas in the world, then north on the Peru Current before he began his homeward voyage. Sailing the Pacific recounts that trip in prose so vivid you can almost feel the spray sting your face and the deck heave beneath your feet. Here is prose so hawser-taut that it takes you back to Conrad, Melville, and Poe, indeed all those writers whose works about the bounding main have launched countless imaginations. Hordern pauses to consider those who have gone before him, recounting the stories that have given life to this lonely and magisterial part of the world. Writers, adventurers, fictional characters, cartographers, doomed voyages from history's pages—from the Whaleship S.S. Essex to the HMS Bounty: the South Pacific drew them all, and in their way they left mark on its vast surface. Part sailing yarn, part adventure story, part homage to an unending but beckoning horizon, Sailing the Pacific will appeal to the sailor in each one of us, whatever the way we choose to answer the ocean's call.
Author: William DampierPacific
Author: Simon WinchesterPublisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062315439
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338
Book Description
One of Library Journal’s 10 Best Books of 2015 Following his acclaimed Atlantic and The Men Who United the States, New York Times bestselling author Simon Winchester offers an enthralling biography of the Pacific Ocean and its role in the modern world, exploring our relationship with this imposing force of nature. As the Mediterranean shaped the classical world, and the Atlantic connected Europe to the New World, the Pacific Ocean defines our tomorrow. With China on the rise, so, too, are the American cities of the West coast, including Seattle, San Francisco, and the long cluster of towns down the Silicon Valley. Today, the Pacific is ascendant. Its geological history has long transformed us—tremendous earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis—but its human history, from a Western perspective, is quite young, beginning with Magellan’s sixteenth-century circumnavigation. It is a natural wonder whose most fascinating history is currently being made. In telling the story of the Pacific, Simon Winchester takes us from the Bering Strait to Cape Horn, the Yangtze River to the Panama Canal, and to the many small islands and archipelagos that lie in between. He observes the fall of a dictator in Manila, visits aboriginals in northern Queensland, and is jailed in Tierra del Fuego, the land at the end of the world. His journey encompasses a trip down the Alaska Highway, a stop at the isolated Pitcairn Islands, a trek across South Korea and a glimpse of its mysterious northern neighbor. Winchester’s personal experience is vast and his storytelling second to none. And his historical understanding of the region is formidable, making Pacific a paean to this magnificent sea of beauty, myth, and imagination that is transforming our lives.
South Pacific
Author: Celeste BrashPublisher:
ISBN: 9781741797749
Category : Islands of the Pacific
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
The South Pacific isn't just a homogenous spread of palm trees and warm ocean escape your resort and you'll find cultures and experiences as rich as coconut cream. Celeste Brash, Lonely Planet Writer.
Author: Matt K. MatsudaParadise of the Pacific
Author: Susanna MoorePublisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374298777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319
Book Description
The history of Hawaii may be said to be the story of arrivals -- from the eruption of volcanoes on the ocean floor 18,000 feet below to the first hardy seeds that over millennia found their way to the islands, and the confused birds blown from their migratory routes. Early Polynesian adventurers sailed across the Pacific in double canoes. Spanish galleons en route to the Philippines and British navigators in search of a Northwest Passage were soon followed by pious Protestant missionaries, shipwrecked sailors, and rowdy Irish poachers escaped from Botany Bay -- all wanderers washed ashore. This is true of many cultures, but in Hawaii, no one seems to have left. And in Hawaii, a set of myths accompanied each of these migrants -- legends that shape our understanding of this mysterious place. Susanna Moore pieces together the story of late-eighteenth-century Hawaii -- its kings and queens, gods and goddesses, missionaries, migrants, and explorers -- a not-so-distant time of abrupt transition, in which an isolated pagan world of human sacrifice and strict taboo, without a currency or a written language, was confronted with the equally ritualized world of capitalism, Western education, and Christian values.
Environmental Change in the Pacific Basin
Author: Patrick D. NunnPublisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Book Description
Talk of the human-enhanced greenhouse effect and the ways in which it may affect our lives has made many people more aware of environmental change. We have come to realize that the environment is and has always bean in a state of continuous change, and that we and other organisms have had to adjust our lifestyles accordingly. This book focuses on the Pacific Basin, a vast region which can be considered a microcosm of the entire surface of the Earth and which has suffered from being marginalized in most accounts of Earth-surface processes and phenomena. In this book, the Pacific Basin includes the Pacific Ocean and Islands and also the Pacific Rim which is divided into the subregions of Antarctica, South America, Central America, North America, Beringia, East Asia and Australasia. Professor Nunn begins by outlining the distant origins of the modern Pacific Basin more than 1000 million years ago, then traces its development through the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic into the Cenozoic Era. For this time the last 66 million years - the history of environmental change becomes progressively better known. For the last 1.8 million years (the Quaternary period), the Earth s climate has oscillated between warm and cool, producing synchronous environmental changes throughout most of the Pacific Basin. The importance of volcanism and tectonics (land-level movements) for which the Pacific Basin is well known as causes of environmental change is explained in detail. The effects of human activities on most Pacific Basin environments began to be registered only during the Holocene the last 12 000 years culminating in the environmental crisis which currently afflicts many parts of this region. While the role of humans in altering Pacific Basin environments is discussed in detail, considerable attention is also given to the ways in which environmental change caused changes to human lifestyles which had far-reaching consequences.
