A sweeping history of our enduring passion for diamonds—and the exploitative industry that fuels it. Blood, Sweat and Earth is a hard-hitting historical exposé of the diamond industry, focusing on the exploitation of workers and the environment, the monopolization of uncut diamonds, and how little this has changed over time. It describes the use of forced labor and political oppression by Indian sultans, Portuguese colonizers in Brazil, and Western industrialists in many parts of Africa—as well as the hoarding of diamonds to maintain high prices, from the English East India Company to De Beers. While recent discoveries of diamond deposits in Siberia, Canada, and Australia have brought an end to monopolization, the book shows that advances in the production of synthetic diamonds have not yet been able to eradicate the exploitation caused by the world’s unquenchable thirst for sparkle.

The history of anatomy has been the subject of much recent scholarship. This volume shifts the focus to the many different ways in which the function of the body and its fluids were understood in pre-modern European thought. Contributors demonstrate how different academic disciplines can contribute to our understanding of ‘physiology’, and investigate the value of this category to pre-modern medicine. The book contains individual essays on the wider issues raised by ‘physiology’, and detailed case studies that explore particular aspects and individuals. It will be useful to those working on medicine and the body in pre-modern cultures, in disciplines including classics, history of medicine and science, philosophy, and literature. Contributors include Barbara Baert, Marlen Bidwell-Steiner, Véronique Boudon-Millot, Rainer Brömer, Elizabeth Craik, Tamás Demeter, Valeria Gavrylenko, Hans L. Haak, Mieneke te Hennepe, Sabine Kalff, Rina Knoeff, Sergius Kodera, Liesbet Kusters, Karine van ‘t Land, Tomas Macsotay, Michael McVaugh, Vivian Nutton, Barbara Orland, Jacomien Prins, Julius Rocca, Catrien Santing, Daniel Schäfer, Emma Sidgwick, Frank W. Stahnisch, Diana Stanciu, Michael Stolberg, Liba Taub, Fabio Tutrone, Katrien Vanagt, and Marion A. Wells.

"This book brings the history of the geosciences and world cosmologies together, exploring many traditions, including Chinese, South and Southeast Asian, Pacific, Islamic, and Indigenous conceptions of earth's origin and makeup. Together the chapters ask: How have different ideas about the sacred, animate, and earthly changed modern environmental science? How have different world traditions understood human and geological origins? How does the inclusion of multiple cosmologies change the meaning of the Anthropocene and the ongoing global climate crisis? By thinking carefully through and with other cosmologies, New Earth Histories sets a new agenda for history. The chapters consider debates about the age and structure of the earth, how humans and earth systems interact, and empire is conceived in multiple traditions. The methods the authors deploy are diverse-from cultural history, visual and material studies, and ethnography, to name a few-and the effect is to highlight how earth knowledge emerged from historically specific situations. New Earth Histories provides both a framework for studying science at a global scale and fascinating examples to educate as well as inspire future work. Essential reading for students and scholars of earth science history, environmental humanities, history of science and religion, and science and empire"--

Prayers, poetry, and Scripture for a life in the garden In A Bit of Earth, Andrea G. Burke looks at the seasonal practice and common grace of gardening through a devotional lens. Part memoir, part prayer book, A Bit of Earth weaves care and intent through moments of ordinary living. This book is a lifelong resource of Scripture, poetry, and prose on the life of faith for contemplatives, gardeners, and believers. God walks in the garden at the cool of the day. The Lord is with us when we dream about what plants to grow and when we drag our feet to pull weeds. He is with us when we preserve the fruit of our hard labors. He is with us even when we weep at the desolate, snowbound landscape of winter. Whether you're new to gardening or already have a green thumb, anyone can learn how to garden and cultivate the soil of their hearts through A Bit of Earth.

During the twentieth century, the southwestern corner of Australia was cleared for intensive agriculture. In the space of several decades, an arc from Esperance to Geraldton, an area of land larger than England, was cleared of native flora for the farming of grain and livestock. Today, satellite maps show a sharp line ringing Perth. Inside that line, tan-coloured land is the most visible sign from space of human impact on the planet. Where once there was a vast mosaic of scrub and forest, there is now the Western Australian wheatbelt. Tony Hughes-d'Aeth examines the creation of the wheatbelt through its creative writing. Some of Australia's most well-known and significant writers - Albert Facey, Peter Cowan, Dorothy Hewett, Jack Davis, Elizabeth Jolley, and John Kinsella - wrote about their experience of the wheatbelt. Each gives insight into the human and environmental effects of this massive-scale agriculture.

The Comparable Body - Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman Medicine explores how analogy and metaphor illuminate and shape conceptions about the human body and disease, through 11 case studies from ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman medicine. Topics address the role of analogy and metaphor as features of medical culture and theory, while questioning their naturalness and inevitability, their limits, their situation between the descriptive and the prescriptive, and complexities in their portrayal as a mutually intelligible medium for communication and consensus among users.

Awakening as the only survivors from an explosion that kills thousands, with strange cybernetic attachments and experiencing premonitions and visions, five teenagers are in a world that thinks they are dead but is also ensuring their survival. While under pursuit from the rest of the nation, they must figure out who is orchestrating their lives, but under the guidance of a force that helps them one minute yet tries to kill them the next, they uncover a secret that will tear the world apart. Why are there so many coincidences? What part does a US Antarctic base play? Why are people so complacent? Who could be controlling the minds of millions of people and how? Someone is trying to start WWIII – and the end of the world as we know it.

The Furies are back. But the rules have changed... Four years have passed since Evelyn Figueroa and Aleksandr Sokolovsky were able to achieve the impossible and escape the clutches of the Furies. Physically and emotionally scarred, the duo has been able to enjoy a peaceful reprieve from the deadly monsters that tormented them. But the Furies have returned, and they’ve changed the rules of the game. Not only are Evelyn and Aleksandr fighting for their own lives, but even their loved ones are being hunted. Determined to secure their freedom, they come up with a dangerous plan – find whoever started the curse and end it by any means necessary. Their plight takes them from the blood-stained sands of their ghost town, into a desolate island off the coast of Australia. But no matter what they do, the Furies are close behind, toying with them, playing with their emotions, and feeding off their fear. Aleksandr and Evelyn realize that even their resolve won’t be enough to fight back the monsters that will stop at nothing to kill them. Death is closing in. And no one is safe.

The aim of Gold-Hall and Earth-Dragon is to re-create as fully as possible for modern readers the original force of the poetic language of Beowulf. Lee makes use of a wide, archetypal literary context for Beowulf to provide illuminating parallels and contrasts with poems and fictions from other times and places. He demonstrates how the poem's symbolic system reveals itself through the metaphorical workings of the Old English words, patterns of imagery, and more general narrative structures, and how the poem might have been experienced and interpreted by the Anglo-Saxons in the light of other Old English poems. The critical tools that Lee uses - combining certain techniques of New Criticism and close reading with postmodern theories of the self-referentiality of language and with Northrop Frye's conceptions of structure and polysemy in literature - make possible a fresh new account of Beowulf as a work that is very much alive in its poetic language, a finely wrought symbolic work of imagining, still resonant with meanings old and new.

Before her expatriation in the United States after the events on Tiananmen Square in June 1989, Ai Bei was recognized in her homeland as one of the outstanding talents of a new generation of young Chinese writers. Red Ivy, Green Earth Mother contains three of her best short stories and a novella and represents the first of her work to be translated into English. Provocative, shocking, and always interesting, her work strikes a universal chord while illuminating a culture and society that for many people seems clouded in mystery and stereotypes. Readers will be surprised and intrigued by the revelatory power and sensual quality of Ai Bei’s writing and its insights into women’s roles in contemporary China. “With these hauntingly dark but beautifully written and translated stories of the defoliation of beauty and sensuality, Chinese fiction takes a great leap forward onto the stage of contemporary world fiction. Through Ai Bei’s searing, honest narrative of a woman’s interior battle to remain human, we become privy to a whole new dimension of China’s heroic efforts to once again ‘liberate’ itself.” —Orville H. Schell