Stories surrounding the legendary King Arthur have been told since time immemorial, and every generation has a new take on the tale. The Fragile Land approaches the legend from a radical angle, setting it firmly in the post-Roman world of late fifth-century Europe, when the language of Britannia was still Brythonic and the Saxons had not yet superimposed their own place names. The Fragile Land chronicles the crucial years of Arthur’s life, from the age of fifteen into his early thirties, as he comes to the fore as elected Overlord, empowered to confront the Barbarian threat and to keep the factious leaders of the island’s kingdoms in some sort of political alliance. Enhanced by a beautifully illustrated map by the artist Kate Milsom, Simon Mundy’s cunningly woven tale of an island in unrest draws subtle parallels with contemporary cultural disputes and casts the legend in a whole new light.

The Nebraska Sandhills is the largest area of sand dunes in the western hemisphere, covering an area about as large as Vermont, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island combined. Unlike most dunes, the Sandhills region supports an astonishing variety of wildlife. Sixty million years ago the area lay submerged in a vast inland sea. As the land lifted and the waters receded, the sandhills were formed, built upon a sandy floor above a sandy basement. Paul A. Johnsgard's appreciation for the region includes its evolution, a process that continues today making a very special place, patiently shaped by water, wind, and time. Sometimes 450 feet higher than their sloping valleys, the hills themselves are almost entirely covered with plants that manage to survive on an unstable substrate and in a climate of merciless heat and cold. They provide homes and resting places for rare species and sustain the livelihoods of a remarkable variety of people. Though firmly established in science, this book is an extended love letter to the Sandhills region and its people, plants, and animals. Johnsgard is now in his third decade of research in the Sandhills. This Fragile Land lets others see what he sees, a land with a fascinating range of geological, biological, and ecological vistas. Paul A. Johnsgard is Foundation Professor of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Widely published throughout the English-speaking world, he has become a foremost authority on ornithology and bird behavior. His thirty-three books include Birds of the Great Plains, The Platte, Birds of the Rocky Mountains, Those of the Gray Wind, and Diving Birds of North America, all available from the University ofNebraska Press.

This book of selected research papers, originally presented at the "Symposium of Fragile Lands of Latin America—The Search for Sustainable Uses," presents some fresh evidence of the viability of a few "non-conventional" strategies for natural resource development and management.

A mini-encyclopaedia of environmental facts and figures with case studies from leading scientists and academics, describing the environment as it exists today, and offering solutions to pressing problems from air pollution to the loss of plants and animals.

Whether loving or hating it, many visualize capitalism as an unstoppable juggernaut. For those of us who would defeat it, we must identify its weaknesses. Fortunately, Marx and Engels’ writings on “crisis” reveal them. They show how its endless imposition of exploitative and alienating work creates such antagonistic conflicts everywhere as to make it, ultimately, a far more fragile monster than it first appears. Each of its efforts to shape social relationships, subordinating them to the work of commodity production and its control over society, has been and can be thrown into crisis by those of us resisting its way of life and seeking to create more appealing alternatives.

Winner, 2010 Bennett H. Wall Award, Southern Historical Association In this fresh study Brian Schoen views the Deep South and its cotton industry from a global perspective, revisiting old assumptions and providing new insights into the region, the political history of the United States, and the causes of the Civil War. Schoen takes a unique and broad approach. Rather than seeing the Deep South and its planters as isolated from larger intellectual, economic, and political developments, he places the region firmly within them. In doing so, he demonstrates that the region’s prominence within the modern world—and not its opposition to it—indelibly shaped Southern history. The place of “King Cotton” in the sectional thinking and budding nationalism of the Lower South seems obvious enough, but Schoen reexamines the ever-shifting landscape of international trade from the 1780s through the eve of the Civil War. He argues that the Southern cotton trade was essential to the European economy, seemingly worth any price for Europeans to protect and maintain, and something to defend aggressively in the halls of Congress. This powerful association gave the Deep South the confidence to ultimately secede from the Union. By integrating the history of the region with global events, Schoen reveals how white farmers, planters, and merchants created a “Cotton South,” preserved its profitability for many years, and ensured its dominance in the international raw cotton markets. The story he tells reveals the opportunities and costs of cotton production for the Lower South and the United States.

A New York Times New & Noteworthy Book One of the Daily Beast’s 5 Essential Books to Read Before the Election A collection of the New Yorker’s groundbreaking reporting from the front lines of climate change—including writing from Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert, Ian Frazier, Kathryn Schulz, and more Just one year after climatologist James Hansen first came before a Senate committee and testified that the Earth was now warmer than it had ever been in recorded history, thanks to humankind’s heedless consumption of fossil fuels, New Yorker writer Bill McKibben published a deeply reported and considered piece on climate change and what it could mean for the planet. At the time, the piece was to some speculative to the point of alarmist; read now, McKibben’s work is heroically prescient. Since then, the New Yorker has devoted enormous attention to climate change, describing the causes of the crisis, the political and ecological conditions we now find ourselves in, and the scenarios and solutions we face. The Fragile Earth tells the story of climate change—its past, present, and future—taking readers from Greenland to the Great Plains, and into both laboratories and rain forests. It features some of the best writing on global warming from the last three decades, including Bill McKibben’s seminal essay “The End of Nature,” the first piece to popularize both the science and politics of climate change for a general audience, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning work of Elizabeth Kolbert, as well as Kathryn Schulz, Dexter Filkins, Jonathan Franzen, Ian Frazier, Eric Klinenberg, and others. The result, in its range, depth, and passion, promises to bring light, and sometimes heat, to the great emergency of our age.