Horn Of Darkness

Download or read book Horn of Darkness written by Carol Cunningham and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2000 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The black rhino is nature's tank, feared by all animals. Even lions will break off a hunt to detour around one. And yet the black rhino is on the edge of extinction, its numbers dwindling from 100,000 at the turn of the century, to less than 2,500 today. The reason is that in places like Yemen, China, Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand, the rhino's horn is more valuable than gold, so valuable that people will risk their lives to harvest it. To deter rhino poachers, African governments have spent millions--on helicopters, paramilitary operations, fences and guard dogs, even relocation to protected areas. Finally, Namibia decided to de-horn its rhino population, in a last ditch effort to stop the slaughter. In 1991, Carol Cunningham and Joel Berger, and their eighteen-month-old daughter Sonja, went to Namibia to weigh the effects of de-horning on rhinos. In Horn of Darkness, they tell the story of three years in the Namib Desert, studying Africa's last sizable population of free-roaming black rhinos. This is the closest most readers will come to experiencing life in the remaining wilds of Africa. Cunningham and Berger, writing nate chapters, capture what it is like to leave the comforts of civilization, to camp for months at a time in a land filled with deadly predators, to study an animal that is reclusive, unpredictable, and highly dangerous. The authors describe staking out water holes in the dead of the night, creeping to within twenty-seven meters of rhinos to photograph them, all the while keeping a lookout for hyenas, elephants, and lions. They recount many heart-pounding escapes--one rhino forces Carol Cunningham up a tree, an unseen lion in hot pursuit of hyenas races right past a frozen Joel Berger--and capture the adrenaline rush of inching closer to a rhino that might flee--or charge--at any moment. They also give readers a clear sense of the careful, patient work involved in studying animals, the frustration of long days without finding rhinos or seeing other people, coping with heat and thirst (the Namib desert is one of the driest on Earth), with dirt and insects, driving hundreds of kilometers in a Land Rover packed to capacity, slowing amassing records on one hundred individual rhinos over the course of several years. And perhaps most important, the authors reveal that the data they collected suggests that the de-horning project might backfire--that in the four years after de-horning began, calf survival was down (the evidence suggests that hyenas might be preying on calves and the horn less mothers couldn't defend their offspring). They also describe the dark side of scientific work, from the petty jealousy of other scientists--outside researchers were often seen as ecological imperialists--to the controversy that erupted after the authors published their findings, as furious officials of the Namibian conservation program denounced their findings and through delays and other tactics effectively withheld a permit to allow the couple to continue their study. Weaving together the historical accounts of other naturalists, a vividly detailed look at life in the wild, and a behind-the-scenes glimpse of scientific work and the dark side of the conservation movement, Horn of Darkness is destined to be a classic work on the natural world.

Download or read book Only If You Dare written by Josh Allen and published by Holiday House. This book was released on 2021-08-31 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirteen chilling short stories to keep you up at night--but only if you dare. You never know what's out to get you. Though you might think you're safe from monsters and menaces, everyday objects can turn against you, too. A mysterious microwave. A threatening board game. A snowman that refuses to melt. Even your own heartbeat has its secrets. Thu-thump. Thu-thump. When you stop to listen, each beat sounds more menacing than the last. Master storyteller Josh Allen brings thirteen nightmare scenarios to life in this page-turning collection that's perfect for budding horror junkies. In his wondrous world, danger waits behind every doorway . . . even in the most ordinary places. Kids eager for age-appropriate horror will relish every thrill and chill. Eerie illustrations by award-winning artist Sarah Coleman accompany the stories, packaged in a stunning hardcover edition complete with glow-in-the-dark jacket. Readers will sleep with one eye open! Don't miss the author and illustrator's other creepy collections: Out to Get You and Once They See You.

Download or read book Tom Horn written by Chip Carlson and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did Tom Horn kill Willie Nickell? He was a death sentence to rustlers and the devil incarnate to homesteaders in late nineteenth-century Wyoming. Did Tom Horn commit the 1901 murder of the fourteen-year-old son of a sheep-owning homesteader who had stolen from the cattle barons ranges? If not, who did? Cheyenne author Chip Carlson, in this, his third book, answers these questions and others with the monumental results of more than ten years of research into primary sources. Who were Tom Horn s other victims? Was there collusion on the part of three governors in two Colorado murders? How could the jury return a verdict of guilty in Tom Horn s trial in the face of evidence that someone else was the killer? Why did Tom Horn s parents flee to Canada? Was there jury tampering and bribery? Why did Tom Horn say I would kill him and be done with him? What was the role of schoolteacher Glendolene Kimmell, and where did she end her years? Tom Horn, the most notorious of Wyoming s range detectives and a pre-eminent name in Wyoming history, operated unchecked until he was arrested for the murder of Willie Nickell. The murder and questionable nature of Horn s conviction still ignite firestorms of controversy in Wyoming. Before he was hanged Horn said, I have lived about fifteen ordinary lives. I would like to have had somebody who saw my past and could picture it to the public. It would be the most god damn interesting reading in the country. Now author Chip Carlson provides that reading.

Download or read book People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present written by Dara Horn and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Con­tem­po­rary Jew­ish Life and Prac­tice Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Wall Street Journal, Chicago Public Library, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living. Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager. Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture—and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks—Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones. In these essays, Horn reflects on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the mythology that Jewish family names were changed at Ellis Island, the blockbuster traveling exhibition Auschwitz, the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China, and the little-known life of the "righteous Gentile" Varian Fry. Throughout, she challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present. Horn draws upon her travels, her research, and also her own family life—trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious ten-year-old, her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks in her children’s school, the profound perspective offered by traditional religious practice and study—to assert the vitality, complexity, and depth of Jewish life against an antisemitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of "Never forget," is on the rise. As Horn explores the (not so) shocking attacks on the American Jewish community in recent years, she reveals the subtler dehumanization built into the public piety that surrounds the Jewish past—making the radical argument that the benign reverence we give to past horrors is itself a profound affront to human dignity. Now including a reading group guide.

Download or read book Egg & Spoon written by Gregory Maguire and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2014-09-09 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this tour de force, master storyteller Gregory Maguire offers a dazzling novel for fantasy lovers of all ages. Elena Rudina lives in the impoverished Russian countryside. Her father has been dead for years. One of her brothers has been conscripted into the Tsar’s army, the other taken as a servant in the house of the local landowner. Her mother is dying, slowly, in their tiny cabin. And there is no food. But then a train arrives in the village, a train carrying untold wealth, a cornucopia of food, and a noble family destined to visit the Tsar in Saint Petersburg — a family that includes Ekaterina, a girl of Elena’s age. When the two girls’ lives collide, an adventure is set in motion, an escapade that includes mistaken identity, a monk locked in a tower, a prince traveling incognito, and — in a starring role only Gregory Maguire could have conjured — Baba Yaga, witch of Russian folklore, in her ambulatory house perched on chicken legs.

Download or read book The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place written by Julie Berry and published by Roaring Brook Press. This book was released on 2014-09-23 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There's a murderer on the loose—but that doesn't stop the girls of St. Etheldreda's from attempting to hide the death of their headmistress in this rollicking farce. The students of St. Etheldreda's School for Girls face a bothersome dilemma. Their irascible headmistress, Mrs. Plackett, and her surly brother, Mr. Godding, have been most inconveniently poisoned at Sunday dinner. Now the school will almost certainly be closed and the girls sent home—unless these seven very proper young ladies can hide the murders and convince their neighbors that nothing is wrong. Julie Berry's The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place is a smart, hilarious Victorian romp, full of outrageous plot twists, mistaken identities, and mysterious happenings.

Download or read book Horn of Africa written by Philip Caputo and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Vietnam veteran and foreign correspondent Charlie Gage is recruited by the shadowy Thomas Colfax to assist with something called Operation Atropos, he has no idea he is about to be enlisted for guerilla warfare in northeast Africa. Once he realizes he’s a mercenary, however, he is not at all concerned. Ever since his young secretary was killed by a grenade at their bureau office in Beirut a couple of years before, he has lost all volition. Which is why he so readily capitulates not only to Colfax, but also, and more dangerously so, to every command of Jeremy Nordstrand, the mystical megalomaniac determined to achieve greatness on their seemingly suicidal mission. Set in the forsaken yet exotic deserts of Ethiopia, Horn of Africa is a vividly detailed and masterfully plotted novel chronicling a broken man’s struggle for salvation and inner freedom in the midst of a broken nation’s fight for stability and peace.