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  Tracking Giants - Big Trees Tiny...

  Amanda Lewis, Dr. Diana...

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  Amanda Lewis was an overachieving, burned-out book editor most familiar with trees as dead blocks of paper. A dedicated "indoorswoman," she could barely tell a birch from a beech. But that didn't stop her from pledging to visit all of the biggest trees in British Columbia, a Canadian province known for its rugged terrain and gigantic trees. 
   
   
   
  The "Champion" trees on Lewis's ambitious list ranged from mighty Western red cedars to towering arbutus. The only problem? Well, there were many . . . 
   
   
   
  Climate change and a pandemic aside, Lewis's lack of wilderness experience, the upsetting reality of old-growth logging, the ever-changing nature of trees, and the pressures of her one-year time frame complicated her quest. Burned out again—and realizing that her "checklist" approach to life might be the problem—she reframed her search for trees to something humbler and more meaningful: getting to know forests in an interconnected way. 
   
   
   
  Weaving in insights from writers and artists, Lewis uncovers what we're really after when we pursue the big things—revealing that sometimes it's the smaller joys, the mindsets we have, and the companions we're with that make us feel more connected to the natural world.

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  A Dead Secret - From their pens...

  Lafcadio Hearn

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  Lafcadio Hearn was born on the 27th June 1850 on the Ionian isle of Levkás in Greece to a British Army officer and a Greek Mother. 
  His father, fearing for his career prospects at being married to a Greek Orthodox wife, sent them to Dublin whilst he continued to advance his career with further postings.  Life there was difficult for mother and son.  His father returned, wounded and traumatised, when Lafcadio was three.  He annulled the marriage and she remarried but had to give up care of Lafcadio to her sister-in law.   
  After brief periods for Catholic education in England and France he emigrated to Ohio in the United States when he was 19, taking on a series of casual jobs before embarking on a career as a journalist, publishing poems and essays in Cincinnati.  It was whilst here that he began a side-line in translating, starting with Gautier and Flaubert.  He married in 1874 to a 20 year old African-American woman in violation of Ohio's anti-miscegenation law.  The marriage soon failed. 
  In 1877 he relocated to New Orleans to write on a variety of themes before picking up a two year assignment from Harper’s to write in the West Indies, where he also wrote his first novel. 
  In 1890 Harper’s sent him to Japan.  Here he left journalism and took the remarkable decision to become a schoolteacher in the north of Japan.   Enraptured by the culture he was driven to explain it in various Western publications to those who had little, if any, knowledge of its culture.  Within the year he had fallen in love with, and married, a high-born Japanese lady, together they would have four children.   
  In 1895 he became a Japanese national and took the name Koizumi Yakumo, Koizumi being his wife’s family name. 
  The following few years, whilst a professor of Literature at the Imperial University of Japan, were his most creative and admired period.   
  Lafcadio Hearn died of heart failure on the 26th of September 1904, in Tokyo, Japan shortly before leaving to deliver a series of lectures at Cornell University in New York State.  He was 54.

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  Autobiography of Mother Jones...

  Mother Jones

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  Perhaps the most famous labor activist and union organizer in history, Mary Harris Jones was an Irish emigre who watched her husband and four children die of yellow fever, saw her modest dressmaking shop go up in flames in the Great Chicago Fire and, as a lonely, poor widow in the late 19th century, was facing a bleak future.  Then, as she approached old age and became involved in the labor movement, she reinvented herself as "Mother Jones" - a fierce advocate of unionizing coal minors, textile workers and others - and through her work with disenfranchised and abused laborers became one of the most famous Americans of her age.  Jones was a celebrated orator, a fearless supporter of workers rights and a tireless campaigner for the abolition of child labor.  During her later years - chronicled in this book - Jones became a living legend; celebrated by pro-union workers across the country and demonized (and often jailed) by anti-union forces in industry and government.

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  Establishing the Elizabethan Age

  Editors Charles River

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  Over 450 years after his reign, Henry VIII is still the most famous and recognizable King of England, but it’s for all the wrong reasons. Though well regarded by contemporaries as a learned king and "one of the most charismatic rulers to sit on the English throne", he is best remembered today for his gluttony and multiple marriages, particularly the gruesome way in which he was widowed on more than one occasion. Naturally, that was the focus of the popular Showtime drama series centered around his life, The Tudors. 
  Henry VIII will probably continue to be best known for beheading some of his wives, most notably Anne Boleyn, so it is somewhat fitting that his most decisive act came as a result of a marital mishap. Sharply at odds with the Catholic Church over his attempt to dissolve his marriage with Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII ultimately broke with the Church and established the Church of England, which forever both the religious history of England and the social hierarchy of the nation and its empire. 
  When Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne in 1652, many commentators heralded the beginning of her reign as the second Elizabethan age. The first one was an age when the arts, commerce and trade flourished. It was the epoch of gallantry and great, enduring literature. It was also an age of wars and military conflicts in which men were the primary drivers and women often were pawns. 
  Elizabeth was the last Tudor sovereign, the daughter of Henry VIII and a granddaughter of the Tudor House’s founder, the shrewd Henry VII. Elizabeth, hailed as “Good Queen Bess,” “Gloriana” and “The Virgin Queen” to this day in the public firmament, would improve upon Henry VIII’s successes and mitigate his failures, and despite her own failings would turn out to “have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too”.

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  Ethics and Human Nature -...

  Hector Davidson

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  This book bundle contains these titles: 
  - Baruch Spinoza  
  - Camus  
  - René Descartes  
  - Michel Foucault  
  - Hannah Arendt  
  Learn more about these philosophers now!

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  My Journey Through the Cross

  Ashley D. Wille

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  My Journey Through the Cross is an autobiography about a woman's journey from growing up with fragmented memories of her childhood, not knowing who she was and why she was here, to encountering deep struggles in her marriage which led her desperately to seek closeness with the Lord. Through many gut-wrenching ordeals breaking out of spiritual chains, she comes to find a deep, meaningful and satisfying relationship with Him which gives her the courage she needs to face the issues in her marriage.

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