This anthology brings together leading Australian and North American nature writers for the first time. Responding to places that sustain, inspire and sometimes sadden, the pieces are propelled by passion, anger and history.

There is a large and growing need for a textbook that can form the basis for integrated classes that look at minerals, rocks, and other Earth materials. Despite the need, no high-quality book is available for such a course. Earth Materials is a wide-ranging undergraduate textbook that covers all the most important kinds of (inorganic) Earth materials. Besides traditional chapters on minerals and rocks, this book features chapters on sediments and stratigraphy, weathering and soils, water and the hydrosphere, and mineral and energy deposits. Introductions to soil mechanics and rock mechanics are also included. This book steers away from the model of traditional encyclopedic science textbooks, but rather exposes students to the key and most exciting ideas and information, with an emphasis on thinking about Earth as a system. The book is written in such a manner as to support inquiry, discovery and other forms of active learning. All chapters start with a short topical story or vignette, and the plentiful photographs and other graphics are integrated completely with the text. Earth Materials will be interesting and useful for a wide range of learners, including geoscience students, students taking mineralogy and petrology courses, engineers, and anyone interested in learning more about the Earth as a system.

Challenging mainstream architecture’s understandings of place, this book offers an illuminating clarification that allows the idea’s centrality, in all aspects of everyday design thinking, to be rediscovered or considered for the first time. Rigorous but not dense, practical but not trivialising, the book unfolds on three fronts. First, it clearly frames the pertinent aspects of topology—the philosophy of place—importantly differentiating two concepts that architecture regularly conflates: place and space. Second, it rejects the ubiquitous notion that architecture “makes place” and, instead, reasons that place is what makes architecture and the built environment possible; that place “calls” for and to architecture; and that architecture is thus invited to “listen” and respond. Finally, it turns to the matter of designing responses that result not just in more places of architecture (demanding little of design), nor merely in architecture with some “sense of place” (demanding little more), but, rising above those, responses that constitute an architecture of place (demanding the greatest vigilance but offering the utmost freedom). Opening up a term regarded as so common that its meaning is seldom considered, the author reveals the actual depth and richness of place, its innateness to architecture, and its essentiality to practitioners, clients, educators, and students—including those in all spatial disciplines.

Something cannot be created from nothing unless absolute truth first exists with intelligence of infinite wisdom designing things for specific purposes in a physical reality By His Word.

Derak, Shesain, and the time crew are unexpectedly thrust 600 years into Thumar’s past. A planet wide plague is raging that our intrepid time travelers were destined to cure. They return to the future to discover that they’re actions dramatically changed their original timeline. With help from Derak’s brother, Robert, and the mysterious Time Lords of the universe, they set out across time, space, and dimension to fix their time paradox. Can they stop the space-time-continuum from tearing itself apart, and destroying the known universe?