Urban Nature: Poems About Wildlife in the City

Book Description

Deep in the concrete canyons of even the largest cities, nature lurks. Its unpredictable energies animate not only squirrels and microorganisms, not only ginkgoes, roots, and rivers, but also the engines of human desire. Urban Nature captures the many faces of wildness in the city with poems by more than 130 emerging and recognized poets. Rather than just lamenting the loss of paradise, these poems celebrate nature's resiliency. They memorialize a salamander's last stand in a parking lot, link the cosmos to the consumer ethos ("The Pleiades / you could probably get downtown"), evoke horses galloping between skyscrapers, and track geological time in a pothole.

Customer Reviews:

Urban Nature: An Oxymoron?.......2001-02-03

Have you ever had the urge, while waiting for a traffic signal, to get out of your car for a better look at a flock of starlings veering and banking in tandem against an early evening pink November sky? If so, you might enjoy this collection of poems. Nature exists even in our cities, and this anthology is for the most part a celebration of that fact. Although many of the poems lament our failure to better accommodate nature in our urban environments, a larger number seem inspired by the natural beauty that can still be found there if we only pause to notice. There are over 150 selections all together, some from new poets, others from known poets, all reflecting upon some aspect of urban nature, from geraniums in the office (they smell like shovels) to a salamander in the video store parking lot.

My approach to this anthology was to slowly peruse the pages, searching not for a whole poem that I immediately love - those are always rare - but for an evocative phrase, an image, sound or metaphor that stirred me enough to beg my return. With apologies for not mentioning any names, let me splice together a few examples to capture the flavor. Here's an earthmover parked across a vacant field from a sycamore whose bark curls like site maps and blueprints unrolled in a distant room, a million frogs shrieking like background music for the big bang, falling magnolia petals, the smell of road kill or fresh baked bread and beer brewing as the morning swells with promise.

The second time through I recognized some places where I'd been before but realized that I had overlooked some good ones such as the horse with the colossal nostrils, squirrels embracing their way up a tree, a national convention of republican cockroaches in the kitchen at night, azaleas confused by the bright lights installed after a burglary. There are poems about seasons: a snow plow shoves aside the early morning quiet, people laughing and shoveling together, butts of mother nature's joke; spring grass is what the earth sang; summer nights sleeping on the porch, crickets; fallen leaves flat-plastered on a wet sidewalk, bring in the houseplants - nature is most seductive when about to die.

There is a pleasing sparsity of poems about dogs and cats but birds are frequently featured, bad birds, uninvited, that swarm in and unpack right on private property, and good birds - a brave sparrow whose heart is smaller than a heart should be, a cardinal, its throat abounding with information, swans eating out of hands, an egret fishing in the feculent marsh, a thrush, its song a small aggression taken for joy. A whirlwind of chittering chimney swifts funnels down to roost, a pileated woodpecker ratchets around tree trunks, the scream of a redtail hawk strips varnish from the heart.

As might be expected pigeons are popular, waddling cheek by jowl among the bag ladies, their low voltage moans, their necks scarved with liquid green rainbows, beaks evolved for gutter cracks and handouts, investigating the wonders of gum. This book is not just about literary cities like NY, SF and LA but also about Chicago, Detroit, Phoenix, St Louis, Duluth and others - how they are and how they used to be. Its about animals and dreams, childhood memories of growing-up places in a time when urban nature was less of an oxymoron, before so much of it had been squeezed out. Its about pollution (even the snowflakes stink), empty lots and potholes (earth breathing through the streets), about escaping to the park, the zoo, the botanical garden, the college campus or the outskirts of town, or merely looking out the window like that couple that made love in the afternoon thirty stories up, then watched a peregrine swoop past their room as if delivering a message from the gods.

After several readings I had connected on a personal level with many of the poems, discovered some poets that I want to read more of, and learned that in some ways, nature is even more poignant when projected against a cityscape.

Note: this review also appeared in the Autubon Naturalist News, Feb 2001

Book Description

A love story in the form of letters to the author's young wife, who died soon after the bombing of Hiroshima.

More than fifty years after the Second World War, the scars left by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima refuse to heal. This compelling account of one man's experience gives a human face to the events of August 6, 1945.

For a week after the bombing, the author, who was an assistant professor at Hiroshima University, wandered the decimated streets of the city, searching for his wife and his youngest son. He finally located them, but his wife died just days later. Grief-stricken, the author wrote her a series of
letters over the next year outlining the things he had seen and heard during her last days on earth. In 1948, the letters became the first eyewitness account of an atomic bombing ever published.

This powerful record shows how one family's future was altered in an instant. Comprised of correspondence, diary entries and drawings, Letters from the End of the World presents the events surrounding the close of World War II in terms so personal they will not soon be forgotten.

"By the time we reach the account of Fumiyo's horrifying death on Aug. 20, which we see from both Ogura's perspective and that of his 11-year-old daugther, Kazuko, who kept a diary, the sadness and anger that have been building up through the whole book are almost unbearable. . . . The
uncompromising anger toward Japan's military leaders that is expressed throughout is striking and unusual."
Elizabeth Ward, The Japan Times

Customer Reviews:

PLEASE I ask you to read this book: A father from HIroshima mourns his family which we incinerated sight unseen.......2007-01-23

Please read this book, and think Fallujah.

First published in Japanese a few years after we dropped a nuclear bomb upon Hiroshima, a previously secluded and untouched shelter for families and children, this book remains a prophetic and instructive text for us today of the necessity to do everything we can for peace and the end to all killing and warfare.

Thou shalt not kill.

This first hand account was written by a father whose family was destroyed by our bomb, including small children, home, etc.

His wife died from radiation sickness a few weeks after we bombed their small city. To confront and control his radical and permanent loss, her husband, an historian at Hiroshima University, wrote to her letters regarding all that he knew about the event and its aftermath, using all of his formal academic skill as historian and first person victim of our bombing. These are his letters to her.

For another historical source, you might also read Hiroshima by Takaki, an academic historian working in the United States. For another primary source, you might find the eyewitness chronicle entitled Barefoot Gen by an artist who as a small boy survived our nuclear atack on Hiroshima while losing his entire family as does Professor Ogura here. Barefoot Gen may be the most accessible to the American reader for its graphic nature; Professor Ogura may be the more poignant though no less powerful first person account to the mainly literate reader. It all depends upon your personal learning style; the truth is one and the same.

Please study carefully and prayerfully this work of a grieving father and husband, so dispassionately and professionally presented as letters to his dead and dying wife, and fight with all that you can for peace, that our present carnage against civilian populations may forever cease and we may live in permanent and abiding peace free of this murderous sin and the national psychosis which drives us into unjust though materially profitable warfare, which provides us permanently only the continual guilt of the suffering and death here so clearly and truthfully and painfully portrayed.

Thou shalt not kill.

evidence given: very good.......2006-08-11

there are evidences to show everything the author wants to tell. i can understand the whole project of the bombing of Hiroshima. a truely fantastic book!

Very Powerful and Haunting.......2004-05-07

This is one of the most powerful first hand accounts of the bombing of Hiroshima that I have ever read. My copy was quickly passed around from friend to friend and it impacted everyone who read it.

A very powerful Book.......2000-12-07

The book is a collection of letters written by the author to his wife who died from radiation sickness after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The letters detail the author's experiences as he wandered the city and pieced together what happened to family and friends. It is a very powerful book.

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Enola Gay: The Bombing of Hiroshima
Gordon Thomas & Max Morgan Witts
Manufacturer: Konecky & Konecky
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Military | History | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 1568525974
Release Date: 2006-06-15

Product Description

It was quite probably the most important event of World War II. Its consequences were greater than those of any other event of the war. Yet the story of the bombing of Hiroshima, the momentous flight into the future of the B29 Enola Gay, has never before been revealed from firsthand sources. Award winning writers Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts separate myth from reality as they retrace the steps that led the world into the atomic age. The authors talked to each surviving crew member and to the scientists and soldiers whose war effort pointed in one direction, toward August 6, 1945, when the first aerial drop of a uranium bomb wiped out most of a city but, ironically, did not stop the war. In addition to their extensive interviews with participants, both American and Japanese, the authors have had access to private diaries and memoirs and government documents until recently classified "top secret." From these, they have reconstructed the unmatched drama of men racing to perfect and others learning to safely drop the untested and most feared bomb in the world; while in Japan, the Imperial Army planned a defense, centered in Hiroshima, that would take an estimated million Allied lives.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The physical, medical and social effects of the atomic bombing

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Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The physical, medical and social effects of the atomic bombing
Hiroshima-shi Nagasaki-shi Gembaku Saigaishi Hensho Iinkai
Manufacturer: Hutchinson
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima & Nagasaki

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The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima & Nagasaki

Manufacturer: BookSurge Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Classics | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 1594560838
Release Date: 2004-02-20

Nine Who Survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Personal experiences of nine men who lived through both atomic bombings

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Nine Who Survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Personal experiences of nine men who lived through both atomic bombings

Manufacturer: E. P. Dutton & Co.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000HDL7ZM

Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings

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Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings
Hiroshima-Shi Nagasaki-Shi Gembaku Saigaishi Hensh-U Iinkai
Manufacturer: Basic Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Japan | Asia | History | Subjects | Books

General | Europe | History | Subjects | Books

General | World | History | Subjects | Books

Nuclear Medicine | Specialties | Medicine | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 046502985X

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Deterrence before Hiroshima
George H. Quester
Manufacturer: Transaction Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Military Science | History | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0887380875

Miracle of Deliverance: The Case for the Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

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Miracle of Deliverance: The Case for the Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Stephen Harper
Manufacturer: Stein and Day
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Japan | Asia | History | Subjects | Books

General | Europe | History | Subjects | Books

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A Bombing Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki
The Manhattan Engineer District
Manufacturer: Kessinger Publishing, LLC
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Military | History | Subjects | Books

Book Description

The bomb exploded over Hiroshima at 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945. About an hour previously, the Japanese early warning radar net had detected the approach of some American aircraft headed for the southern part of Japan. The alert had been given and radio broadcasting stopped in many cities, among them Hiroshima. The planes approached the coast at a very high altitude.

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The Bombing of Hiroshima: August 6, 1945 (Dates With History)

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The Bombing of Hiroshima: August 6, 1945 (Dates With History)
John Malam
Manufacturer: Smart Apple Media
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Library Binding

Military & Wars | History & Historical Fiction | Children's Books | Subjects | Books

General | Ages 4-8 | Children's Books | Subjects | Books

General | Europe | History | Subjects | Books

Book Description

Hans Kruuk, a life-long naturalist, tells the fascinating story of carnivores and humans' intricate relationships with them. The book is illustrated with specially commissioned drawings, and deals not only with the wild beauty of carnivores and their conservation, but also with the topics of furs and medicine, man-eaters and sheep-killers. Kruuk explains in simple terms the role of carnivores in nature, how they impact human life, art and literature, and how we instinctively respond to them and why.

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Humans have mixed emotions concerning carnivores. We admire them as beautiful hunters, cosset them as pets, and use their pelts and other products in clothing, medicines and cosmetics. However, they are also responsible for killing us and our livestock, carry disease and compete with us for space and food. While some advocate the conservation of predators such as wolves and tigers, others see them as vermin and want them gone. In this book, Hans Kruuk, a life-long naturalist with a passion for predators tells the fascinating story of carnivores and our intricate relationships with them. Illustrated with specially commissioned drawings, it deals with the wild beauty of carnivores and their conservation, but also with furs and medicine, man-eaters and sheep-killers, explaining in simple terms what the role of carnivores is in nature, how this impacts on human lives, our art and literature, how we instinctively respond to them and why.

Hunter and Hunted : Relationships between Carnivores and People

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Hunter and Hunted : Relationships between Carnivores and People
Hans Kruuk
Manufacturer: NY
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000MUBVC4

Book Description

Kiyosi Itô's greatest contribution to probability theory may be his introduction of stochastic differential equations to explain the Kolmogorov-Feller theory of Markov processes. Starting with the geometric ideas that guided him, this book gives an account of Itô's program.

The modern theory of Markov processes was initiated by A. N. Kolmogorov. However, Kolmogorov's approach was too analytic to reveal the probabilistic foundations on which it rests. In particular, it hides the central role played by the simplest Markov processes: those with independent, identically distributed increments. To remedy this defect, Itô interpreted Kolmogorov's famous forward equation as an equation that describes the integral curve of a vector field on the space of probability measures. Thus, in order to show how Itô's thinking leads to his theory of stochastic integral equations, Stroock begins with an account of integral curves on the space of probability measures and then arrives at stochastic integral equations when he moves to a pathspace setting. In the first half of the book, everything is done in the context of general independent increment processes and without explicit use of Itô's stochastic integral calculus. In the second half, the author provides a systematic development of Itô's theory of stochastic integration: first for Brownian motion and then for continuous martingales. The final chapter presents Stratonovich's variation on Itô's theme and ends with an application to the characterization of the paths on which a diffusion is supported.

The book should be accessible to readers who have mastered the essentials of modern probability theory and should provide such readers with a reasonably thorough introduction to continuous-time, stochastic processes.

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bibliographic data provided by earthtomes:

Collected Stories of John O'Hara: Selected and With an Introduction by Frank MacShane
John O'Hara
Manufacturer: Random House
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
20th Century | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0394540832
Release Date: 1985-02-12

Customer Reviews:

bibliographic data provided by earthtomes:.......2006-02-22

Author: O'Hara, John, 1905-1970.
Title: Stories by John O'Hara / selected and with an introduction by Frank MacShane.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: New York : Random House, c1984.
Edition Date: 1985
Language: English
Projected Pub Date: 8501
Physical Details: xii, 414 p. ; 24 cm.
Other Authors: MacShane, Frank.
ISBN: 0-394-54083-2 /

Selected Short Stories of John O'Hara (Modern Library Classics)

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The Jeweler Who Did Not Flinch
A Prodigious Writer of Short Stories
A Great Short Story Writer
Neglected Master of the Short Story

Selected Short Stories of John O'Hara (Modern Library Classics)
John O'Hara
Manufacturer: Modern Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Classics | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 081296697X
Release Date: 2003-03-11

Book Description

“John O’Hara’s fiction,” wrote Lionel Trilling, “is preeminent for its social verisimilitude.” Made famous by his bestselling novels, including BUtterfield 8 and Appointment in Samarra, O’Hara (1905–1970) also wrote some of the finest short fiction of the twentieth century.

First published by the Modern Library in 1956, Selected Short Stories of John O’Hara displays the author’s skills as a keen social observer, a refreshingly frank storyteller, and a writer with a brilliant ear for dialogue. “The stories in this volume,” writes Louis Begley in his new Introduction, “show the wide range of [O’Hara’s] interests and an ability to treat with a virtuoso’s ease characters and situations from any place on America’s geographic and social spectrum.”

Customer Reviews:

The Jeweler Who Did Not Flinch.......2006-10-17

Included in this collection is the best single 5 pages, perhaps, in century 20 American fiction, a short-short story called "Graven Image." It is worth the price of the book, and anyone coming to O'Hara is advised to begin his encounter here.

O'Hara was much maligned and misunderstood in his lifetime, and remains so. Irish but Protestant, rancourous but wise, chain-smoking, probably no more than 5 feet tall in shoes, it is now becoming clear what a giant he was. Everybody mocked O'Hara, mistaking his oft-tawdry subject matter for himself, a process at times he seemed to mischieviously collaborate in. Everywhere, that is, except on paper. They are all long dead now so it no longer matters, only the paper survives. He was perhaps equal to any century 20 American short fiction writer, a very high compliment when Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Cheever, Capote, Updike, Carolyn Gordon et al are in the running.

Well, fellow Americans, stand up for the little guy. Read him and weep. While a lot of his coevals ran off to Paris, Africa or wherever, the little guy stayed at home and minutely recorded a massive and awful transformation of his beloved nation -- chiefly chronicling the breakdown in the institution of marriage and the spread of Gilded Age pretense into ordinary folks everywhere, with spreading affluence and free time galore. It is painful stuff for each and every one of us too, delivered without comment or overt moralizing. Son of a small town doctor, he wielded a cold pen the way his pa used a scalpel. No wonder everybody hated him -- but the result is a body of work meticulously recording the massive social changes in the USA with the precision of glacier-cut striations on granite.

"There it is now gentleman, you can take your hats off now," John Peale Bishop said upon the death of Scott Fitzgerald. The comment is more appropriate to O'Hara, the biggest little guy our country has yet produced in the realm of literature.

A Prodigious Writer of Short Stories.......2003-09-02

John O'Hara was a prodigious writer of short stories. In THE NEW YORKER and other magazines he had more than four hundred stories published. In addition eleven volumes of his short stories were issued during his lifetime.

O'Hara never attended college because of the untimely death of his father but he remained forever interested in the minutia associated with university life. One story which reflected his obsession with the latter subject was "Graven Image."

Some of my other personal favorites in this volume are "Too Young" and "The Next-To-Last Dance of the Season." Another story entitled "The Doctor's Son" is very autobiographical and is influenced by O'Hara's experiences during the influenza epidemic at the end of World War I.

A Great Short Story Writer.......2003-09-01

John O'Hara is one of the leading twentieth century American writers of manners and morals. In SELECTED SHORT STORIES OF JOHN O'HARA the author gives a good sampling of his skills in this art. One example is "Walter T. Carriman" in which O'Hara describes the life of a man who lived most of his life in Philadelphia. There are thirty-one other short stories in this collection such as "Too Young" and "Graven Image." A short biography is also included in addition to an introduction by Louis Begley.

It is important to appreciate O'Hara's upbringing as an Irish-Catholic outsider in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. The similarities with John P. Marquand's experiences as a poor cousin living with wealthier relatives in Massachusetts are striking. Marquand is best remembered for his books about upper class New Englanders while O'Hara's strength is writing about middle and upper class people in Pennsylvania, Los Angeles, New York City and Long Island.

Neglected Master of the Short Story.......2003-05-21

These are absolute gems, and whenever I see someone reading John Cheever or Raymond Carver I tell them to put those overrated hacks away and to check out John O'Hara.

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Selected short stories
John O'Hara
Manufacturer: Modern Lib
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

General | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B0007JYRCG

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Selected Short Stories of John O'Hara
John O'Hara
Manufacturer: Modern Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000RBAON0

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Selected Short Stories of John o'Hara
John o'Hara
Manufacturer: Modern Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000LL6LE2

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SELECTED SHORT STORIES OF JOHN O'HARA

Manufacturer: Modern Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000B7I8NI

Product Description

"A Modern Library Book - The Best of the World's Best Books"

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Selected Short Stories of John O'hara
John O'Hara
Manufacturer: Modern Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000KE4LQA

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