A Perfect Red - Empire, Espionage and the Quest for the Color of Desire
Pirates! Kings! Beautiful ladies! Daring spies! Elements essential for a page-turning action/adventure thriller, yes, but who would think they'd turn up in a scholarly examination of a little-known substance called cochineal? It is responsible for producing that elusive shade of red deemed vital for dyeing royalty's robes, and the quest for this coveted resource involved some of history's most infamous episodes and ignoble scoundrels.
The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World's Most Endangered Languages
Part travelogue and part scientist's notebook, The Last Speakers is the poignant chronicle of author's expeditions around the world to meet with last speakers of vanishing languages. The speakers' eloquent reflections and candid photographs reveal little-known lifeways as well as revitalization efforts to teach disappearing languages to younger generations. Thought-provoking and engaging, this unique book illuminates the global language-extinction crisis through photos, graphics, interviews, traditional wisdom never before translated into English, and first-person essays that thrillingly convey the adventure of science and exploration.
Flying Foam - One Man's Quest to Build a Flying Car
Few people set out to design a flying car and fewer survive the process. Colin Hilton is one of them. Over the course of four years ~ at the cost of one separation, one career and bankruptcy ~ he shows the world it cannot be done. What he salvages is a blueprint for another form of transport altogether: a flat-pack flying machine made of foam. "It will take us" he says, "toward the flying car." Dream on. In a unique 'developer's diary' he describes how you can build a surface-skimmer of your own and look equally foolish.
It had all begun with the theft of the Orb that had so long protected the West from the evil God Torak. Before that, Garion had been a simple farm boy. Afterward, he discovered that his aunt was really the Sorceress Polgara and his grandfather was Belgarath, the Eternal Man. Then, on the long quest to recover the Orb, Garion found to his dismay that he, too, was a sorcerer.
John Coltrane and Black America's Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music
Added by: isabeljimenez | Karma: 1202.60 | Fiction literature | 16 February 2011
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John Coltrane and Black America's Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the MusicEdited by prominent musician and scholar Leonard Brown, John Coltrane and Black America's Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music is a timely exploration of Coltrane's sound and its spiritual qualities that are rooted in Black American music-culture and aspirations for freedom. A wide-ranging collection of essays and interviews featuring many of the most eminent figures in Black American music and jazz studies and performance.
