RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

Author: Philip Hoare
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022656066X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 409

Book Description
“Every day is an anxiety in my ways of getting to the water. . . . I’ve become so attuned to it, so scared of it, so in love with it that sometimes I can only think by the sea. It is the only place I feel at home.” Many of us visit the sea. Admire it. Even profess to love it. But very few of us live it. Philip Hoare does. He swims in the sea every day, either off the coast of his native Southampton or his adopted Cape Cod. He watches its daily and seasonal changes. He collects and communes with the wrack—both dead and never living—that it throws up on the shingle. He thinks with, at, through the sea. All of which should prepare readers: RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR is no ordinary book. It mounts no straight-ahead argument. It hews to no single genre. Instead, like the sea itself, it moves, flows, absorbs, transforms. In its pages we find passages of beautiful nature and travel writing, lyrical memoir, seams of American and English history and much more. We find Thoreau and Melville, Bowie and Byron, John Waters and Virginia Woolf, all linked through a certain refusal to be contained, to be strictly defined—an openness to discovery and change. Running throughout is an air of elegy, a reminder that the sea is an ending, a repository of lost ships, lost people, lost ways of being. It is where we came from; for Hoare, it is where he is going. “Every swim is a little death,” Hoare writes, “but it is also a reminder that you are alive.” Few books have ever made that knife’s edge so palpable. Read RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR. Let it settle into the seabed of your soul. You’ll never forget it.

RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

Author: Philip Hoare
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0008133697
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 366

Book Description
Rich and strange from the tip of its title to its deep-sunk bones’ Robert Macfarlane From the author of Leviathan, or, The Whale, comes a composite portrait of the subtle, beautiful, inspired and demented ways in which we have come to terms with our watery planet.

The Sea Inside

Author: Philip Hoare
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612193595
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Book Description
Originally published: London: Fourth Estate, 2013.

Haunts of the Black Masseur

Author: Charles Sprawson
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0307823644
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
In a masterful work of cultural history, Charles Sprawson, himself an obsessional swimmer and fluent diver, explores the meaning that different cultures have attached to water, and the search for the springs of classical antiquity. In nineteenth-century England bathing was thought to be an instrument of social and moral reform, while in Germany and America swimming came to signify escape. For the Japanese the swimmer became an expression of samurai pride and nationalism. Sprawson gives is fascinating glimpses of the great swimming heroes: Byron leaping dramatically into the surf at Shelley’s beach funeral; Rupert Brooke swimming naked with Virginia Woolf, the dark water “smelling of mint and mud”; Hart Crane swallow-diving to his death in the Bay of Mexico; Edgar Allan Poe’s lone and mysterious river-swims; Leander, Webb, Weissmuller, and a host of others. Informed by the literature of Swinburne, Goethe, Scott Fitzgerald, and Yukio Mishima; the films of Riefenstahl and Vigo; the Hollywood “swimming musicals” of the 1930s; and delving in and out of Olympic history, Haunts of the Black Masseur is an enthralling assessment of man—body submerged, self-absorbed. It is quite simply the best celebration of swimming ever written, even as it explores aspects of culture in a heretofore unimagined way.

Wild Sea

Author: Joy McCann
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022662241X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
“This bracing history charts the myths, the exploration, and the inhabitants of the all-too-real and wild circumpolar ocean to our south.” —The Sydney Morning Herald, Pick of the Week Unlike the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic Oceans with their long maritime histories, little is known about the Southern Ocean. This book takes readers beyond the familiar heroic narratives of polar exploration to explore the nature of this stormy circumpolar ocean and its place in Western and Indigenous histories. Drawing from a vast archive of charts and maps, sea captains’ journals, whalers’ log books, missionaries’ correspondence, voyagers’ letters, scientific reports, stories, myths, and her own experiences, Joy McCann embarks on a voyage of discovery across its surfaces and into its depths, revealing its distinctive physical and biological processes as well as the people, species, events, and ideas that have shaped our perceptions of it. The result is both a global story of changing scientific knowledge about oceans and their vulnerability to human actions and a local one, showing how the Southern Ocean has defined and sustained southern environments and people over time. Beautifully and powerfully written, Wild Sea will raise a broader awareness and appreciation of the natural and cultural history of this little-known ocean and its emerging importance as a barometer of planetary climate change. “A sensitive portrait of a complex ecosystem, from krill to blue whales, and of the ice, winds, and currents that are critical to the circulation of the world’s oceans.” —Harper’s “Wilderness seekers will rejoice in this stirring portrait . . . McCann deftly navigates both natural glories and archival complexities.” —Nature

Science on a Mission

Author: Naomi Oreskes
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022673241X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 749

Book Description
A vivid portrait of how Naval oversight shaped American oceanography, revealing what difference it makes who pays for science. What difference does it make who pays for science? Some might say none. If scientists seek to discover fundamental truths about the world, and they do so in an objective manner using well-established methods, then how could it matter who’s footing the bill? History, however, suggests otherwise. In science, as elsewhere, money is power. Tracing the recent history of oceanography, Naomi Oreskes discloses dramatic changes in American ocean science since the Cold War, uncovering how and why it changed. Much of it has to do with who pays. After World War II, the US military turned to a new, uncharted theater of warfare: the deep sea. The earth sciences—particularly physical oceanography and marine geophysics—became essential to the US Navy, which poured unprecedented money and logistical support into their study. Science on a Mission brings to light how this influx of military funding was both enabling and constricting: it resulted in the creation of important domains of knowledge but also significant, lasting, and consequential domains of ignorance. As Oreskes delves into the role of patronage in the history of science, what emerges is a vivid portrait of how naval oversight transformed what we know about the sea. It is a detailed, sweeping history that illuminates the ways funding shapes the subject, scope, and tenor of scientific work, and it raises profound questions about the purpose and character of American science. What difference does it make who pays? The short answer is: a lot.

Leviathan, Or, The Whale

Author: Philip Hoare
Publisher: HarperCollins Australia
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 472

Book Description
All his life, Philip Hoare has been obsessed by whales, from the gigantic skeletons in London's Natural History Museum to adult encounters with the wild animals themselves. Whales have a mythical quality - they seem to elide with dark fantasies of sea-serpents and antediluvian monsters that swim in our collective unconscious. This book is an investigation into what we know little about -- dark, shadowy creatures who swim below the depths, only to surface in a spray of spume. More than the story of the whale, it is also the story of our own obsessions.

Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

Author: Olivia Laing
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324005734
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
“One of the finest writers of the new nonfiction” (Harper’s Bazaar) explores the role of art in our tumultuous modern era. In this remarkable, inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century. Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, examining their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keeffe, reads Maggie Nelson and Sally Rooney, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, she celebrates art as a force of resistance and repair, an antidote to a frightening political time. We’re often told that art can’t change anything. Laing argues that it can. Art changes how we see the world. It makes plain inequalities and it offers fertile new ways of living.

Abc's of Reloading, 10th Edition

Author: Philip Massaro
Publisher: Gun Digest Books
ISBN: 9781951115272
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
Make Your Own Ammo and Save Money Too! Now in its 10th edition, The ABCs of Reloading has taught countless firearms owners safe, reliable methods of creating their own ammunition. This long overdue new edition brings detailed reloading instruction to shooters who want to improve accuracy, save money and ensure themselves a constant supply of ammo regardless of supply and demand on retail shelves. Reloading expert and frequent Gun Digest contributor Phil Massaro lays out the basics of reloading and then digs further into the details in a fresh approach that introduces beginners to this valuable hobby while helping those already familiar with reloading take their skills and knowledge to the next level. As a bonus, long-range shooters searching for tips on making ultra-consistent ammo using high B.C. bullets and fine-tuning for precision accuracy will greatly benefit from Massaro's insight into that topic as well. Massaro's coverage of the vast array of reloading gear and components that have been introduced during the past decade alone makes this edition invaluable for the enthusiast who might be overwhelmed with questions. From the very basic questions of "How does a cartridge work?" and "What components do I need to get started?" to more advanced information on understanding cartridge pressure, headspace and using a chronograph to check your work, this is THE book to help shooters sort it all out.

Leviathan

Author: Philip Hoare
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0007340915
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Book Description
This edition does not include illustrations. The story of a man’s obsession with whales, which takes him on a personal, historical and biographical journey – from his childhood to his fascination with Moby-Dick and his excursions whale-watching.