The double-crested cormorant, found only in North America, is an iridescent black waterbird superbly adapted to catch fish. It belongs to a family of birds vilified since biblical times and persecuted around the world. Thus it was perhaps to be expec...

For James Barilla and his family, the dream of transforming their Columbia, South Carolina backyard into a haven for wildlife evoked images of kids catching grasshoppers by day and fireflies at night, of digging up potatoes and picking strawberries....

A search for a radio-tagged Indiana bat roosting in the woods behind her house in New York's Hudson Valley led Akiko Busch to assorted other encounters with the natural world – local ecological monitoring projects, community-organized cleanup efforts...

In Carlos Rojas' imaginative novel, the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, murdered by Francoist rebels in August 1936, finds himself in an inferno that somehow resembles Breughel's Tower of Babel. He sits alone in a small theatre in this private he...

This important book delivers a critical wake-up call: a fierce global race for innovation advantage is under way, and while other nations are making support for technology and innovation a central tenet of their economic strategies and policies, Amer...

When National Socialism arrived in Germany in 1933, Jews were dominating music more than virtually any other sector, making it the most important cultural front in the Nazi fight for German identity. The party's policy on music brought about a cultur...

The acclaimed French painter Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) strove to renew history painting by creating epic art in a nonacademic manner. In this thought-provoking book, Peter Cooke explains how Moreau essentially created pictorial Symbolism through his...

Set in the darkest years of the Pinochet dictatorship, "La Vida Doble" is the story of Lorena, a leftist militant who arrives at a merciless turning point when every choice she confronts is impossible. Captured by agents of the Chilean repression, wi...

This book, the first in decades to closely examine Thomas Jefferson's foreign policy, offers a compelling reinterpretation of his attitudes and accomplishments as a statesman during America's early nationhood. Beginning with Jefferson's disastrous st...

Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first President of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, was the most celebrated and innovative British portraitist of the eighteenth century. He was acclaimed for transforming portraiture into an art form that had all the amb...