A DAILY MAIL BOOK OF THE WEEK: 'particularly enjoyable' 'Somehow laugh-out-loud funny - passionate, warm and full of fascinating insights into the eccentric world of the field naturalist.' - Isabella Tree, author of Wilding Water voles are small, brownish, bewhiskered and charming. Made famous by 'Ratty' in The Wind in the Willows, once they were a ubiquitous part of our waterways. They were a totem of our rivers. Now, however, they are nearly gone. This is their story, and the story of a conservationist with a wild hope: that he could bring them back. Tom Moorhouse spent eleven years beside rivers, fens, canals, lakes and streams, researching British wildlife. Quite a lot of it tried to bite him. He studied four main species - two native and endangered, two invasive and endangering - beginning with water voles. He wanted to solve their conservation problems. He wanted to put things right. This book is about whether it worked, and what he learnt - and about what those lessons mean, not just for water voles but for all the world's wildlife. It is a book for anyone who has watched ripples spread on lazy waters, and wondered what moves beneath. Or who has waited in quiet hope for a rustle in the reeds, the munch of a stem, or the patter of unseen paws. Praise for Tom Moorhouse: 'The pages of this book are shot through with quicksilver light reflected from wet fur - not a lament for our rivers but a chorus of hope for their future.' - Raynor Winn, author of The Salt Path 'Beautiful and important. Tom's book is extraordinary in its gentle curiosity and sympathy for his subjects. I love this book.' - Sir Tim Smit KBE, Executive Vice-Chairman and Co-founder of the Eden Project 'Terrific. Lightly but beautifully written. Very moving. Water voles are adorable little beasts. They are also tough, randy and stroppy, as Tom Moorhouse makes clear in this wry, amusing account of the often bloody, painful and frustrating business of conservation fieldwork. 'I hold stubbornly to optimism,' he declares, and his Elegy for a River demands that we do the same.' - Christopher Somerville, walking correspondent for The Times and author of The January Man

Neil J. Lehtos Algonquin Elegy: Tom Thomsons Last Spring, is both a labor of love and a labor of gargantuan effort to come to some understanding, nine decades on, of exactly what happened that summer of 1917. Perhaps no one has ever worked as hard to know the unknowable and, in doing so, he has contributed invaluably to the greatest story in all of Canadian art. Neils passion for Tom Thomson shines through as passionately on each page as Thomsons passion for Algonquin Park shines though on each painting he left behind that last Spring. Roy MacGregor, Columnist for the Globe & Mail.

This invaluable book provides a reflective analysis on European civilization through a Chinese cultural perspective, along with the author's diplomatic experiences in Brussels on the Chinese Mission to the European Union.The book has three main focuses: maritime civilization, human civilization, and the relations between Chinese (East) and European (West) civilization. It aims to stimulate discussion to rethink the East-West relations in terms of globalization and its contributions to a new post-maritime human civilization.Hai Shang (海殇) means elegy of the sea.He Shang (河殇) means elegy of the river.

Stephen Lee's grandchildren knew him as a humble grocer. Beneath his humble exterior, however, lay one of the most extraordinary stories of the twentieth century. Lee was born in Canton, China in 1902. As a teenager he was sent to live with relatives in San Francisco. He attended college at Iowa State and later transferred to UC Berkeley where he was one of the first Chinese-Americans to receive a degree. The widespread racism of the time prevented Lee from landing a job in his chosen field of finance, so he burned his papers and returned home to China. With the clouds of war gathering, Lee, an anti-communist, found work in the accounting and logistics office of the Cantonese Air Force where he quickly rose to Colonel and comptroller. In 1929, after securing his position, he married a local beauty named Belle and in 1930, his first child, Amy, was born. When the Japanese pushed south from Manchuria in 1936, the Cantonese Air Force was merged with that of Chiang Kai-shek's and Lee was forced to flee with his wife and four children to Hong Kong. There Lee took a job with the Canton Trust Company. On the eve of the bombings at Pearl Harbor, the board of the Canton Trust made the fateful decision to send Lee to Kwelin to set up a new office. After Hong Kong fell to the Japanese, Belle and the children were force to flee on foot to Kwelin, which became a three hundred mile, six-week ordeal of hunger and hardship. In 1943, Kwelin was evacuated and the Lees were once again on the move. Forced to play the part of refugees, the Lees moved up river, eventually landing in the small village of Foo-Luke outside of Chungking. There Stephen was invited to teach accounting at the local university. But tragedy soon struck again when a sudden flood nearly washed the family down the Yangtze River. After the war, the Lees returned to Canton where they found that their home had been converted into an auto repair shop by the Japanese. Undaunted, Belle set about rebuilding it while Stephen helped return the city to civilian rule. By 1948, however, the Communists were bearing down on Canton and Lees were compelled to relocate again. In 1955, the Lees fled for a final time--to America. Back in San Francisco, Lee found that attitudes towards Chinese immigrants had not changed much since he first left there 30 years before. Canton Elegy is a love story, an adventure, and an intimate portrait of one family's struggle to survive. Stephen Jin-Nom Lee, his beautiful wife, Belle, and their four young children, braved famine, flood, corruption, and the devastation of war, on their journey to America. Written so that his grandchildren might one day understand the quiet man who ran the local grocery store, Canton Elegy has all the action of a Hollywood blockbuster. From the 300-mile journey Belle and the children take on foot, to the night when Stephen stands at his window watching Canton burn, Canton Elegy describes events with an artist's sensibility and a poet's heart.

A sweeping look at the lives and work of two important English Romantic painters, from a Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winning author. Renowned poet Stanley Plumly, who has been praised for his “obsessive, intricate, intimate and brilliant” (Washington Post) nonfiction, explores immortality in art through the work of two impressive landscape artists: John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. How is it that this disparate pair will come to be regarded as Britain’s supreme landscape painters, precursors to Impressionism and Modernism? How did each painter’s life influence his work? Almost exact contemporaries, both legendary artists experience a life-changing tragedy—for Constable it is the long illness and death of his wife; for Turner, the death of his singular parent and supporter, his father. Their work will take on new power thereafter: Constable, his Hampstead cloud studies; Turner, his Venetian watercolors and oils. Seeking the transcendent aesthetic awe of the sublime and reeling from their personal anguish, these talented painters portrayed the terrible beauty of the natural world from an intimate, close-up perspective. Plumly studies the paintings against the pull of the artists’ lives, probing how each finds the sublime in different, though inherently connected, worlds. At once a meditation on the difficulties in achieving truly immortal works of art and an exploration of the relationship between artist and artwork, Elegy Landscapes takes a wide-angle look at the philosophy of the sublime.

National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. "What Hicok's getting at [in Elegy Owed] is both the necessity and the inadequacy of language, the very bluntness of which (talk about a paradox) makes it all the more essential that we engage with it as a precision instrument, a force of clarity, of (at times) awful grace."—Los Angeles Times "[A] fluid, absorbing new collection. . . . Highly recommended."—Library Journal, starred review When asked in an interview "What would Bob Hicok launch from a giant sling shot?" he answered "Bob Hicok." Elegy Owed—Hicok's eighth book—is an existential game of Twister in which the rules of mourning are broken and salvaged, and "you can never step into the same not going home again twice." From "Notes for a time capsule": The twig in. I'll put the twig in I carry in my pocket and my pocket and my eye, my left eye. A cup of the Ganges and the bacteria from shit in the Ganges and the anyway ablutions of rainbow- robed Hindus in the Ganges. The dawnline of the mountain with contrail above like an accent in a language too large for my mouth. A mirror so whoever opens the past will see themselves in the past and fall back from their face speaking to them across centuries or hours or the nearnevers . . . Bob Hicok's worked as an automotive die designer and a computer system administrator before becoming an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Defying critical suggestions that the pastoral elegy is obsolete, Iain Twiddy reveals the popularity of the form in the work of major contemporary poets Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, Douglas Dunn and Peter Reading. As Twiddy outlines the development of the form, he identifies its characteristics and functions. But more importantly his study accounts for the enduring appeal of the pastoral elegy, why poets look to its conventions during times of personal distress and social disharmony, and how it allows them to recover from grief, loss and destruction. Informed by current debates and contemporary theories of mourning, Twiddy discusses themes of war and peace, social pastoral and environmental change, draws on the enduring influence of both Classical and Romantic poetics and explores poets' changing relationships with pastoral elegy throughout their careers. The result is a study that demonstrates why the pastoral elegy is still a flourishing and dynamic form in contemporary British and Irish poetry.

ELEGY FOR A LOST STAR sets the stage for a major turning point in the Symphony of Ages series. The dragon Anwyn - who has lain for three years in deathlike sleep in a grave of rock and black coal is freed by the cataclysm that concluded Requiem For The Sun. Disoriented and confused, she remembers only two things - the person who trapped her in dragon form and locked her in the grave - Rhapsody - and an all-encompassing desire to wreak vengeance. Meanwhile, Achmed, the Firbolg king, resumes rebuilding the his shattered home, while a guild of merciless assassins set about taking revenge on him for the killing of their leader. A horribly deformed but magical being finds its way through a carnival of freaks to the palace of an evil despot, who sees in it the potential to be the instrument by which his plans of conquest and brutal domination of a continent will be realized. With the rise of new leaders, good and evil, the long-awaited birth of the Child of Time, the dark plans of assassins and rulers, a confrontation that shakes the relationship of the Three, and a battle to the death between two dragons of unimaginable elemental power, the seeds of chaos are planted for a war that will, by its end, consume half of the world.

This Festschrift in honour of the classical scholar Stephen Heyworth brings together eleven experts on the genre of Latin elegy. All chapters focus on the close reading of elegiac texts primarily by Ovid and Propertius.

"A glossary of political terms of the People's Republic of China is a collection of 560 important and frequently-used Chinese political terms and phrases that appeared between 1949 and 1990. Each entry begins with an explanation of the term and its origin, a description of how and under what circumstances the term was used, and a discussion of the changes of meaning over the years, as well as the political and social significance of the words."--Jacket.