Octopus Crowd

Download or read book Octopus Crowd written by Stephen Mullins and published by University Alabama Press. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed study of the origins and demise of schooner-based pearling in Australia For most of its history, Australian pearling was a shore-based activity. But from the mid-1880s until the World War I era, the industry was dominated by highly mobile, heavily capitalized, schooner-based fleets of pearling luggers, known as floating stations, that exploited Australia’s northern continental shelf and the nearby waters of the Netherlands Indies. Octopus Crowd: Maritime History and the Business of Australian Pearling in Its Schooner Age is the first book-length study of schooner-based pearling and explores the floating station system and the men who developed and employed it. Steve Mullins focuses on the Clark Combination, a syndicate led by James Clark, Australia’s most influential pearler. The combination honed the floating station system to the point where it was accused of exhausting pearling grounds, elbowing out small-time operators, strangling the economies of pearling ports, and bringing the industry to the brink of disaster. Combination partners were vilified as monopolists—they were referred to as an “octopus crowd”—and their schooners were stigmatized as hell ships and floating sweatshops. Schooner-based floating stations crossed maritime frontiers with impunity, testing colonial and national territorial jurisdictions. The Clark Combination passed through four fisheries management regimes, triggering significant change and causing governments to alter laws and extend maritime boundaries. It drew labor from ports across the Asia-Pacific, and its product competed in a volatile world market. Octopus Crowd takes all of these factors into account to explain Australian pearling during its schooner age. It argues that the demise of the floating station system was not caused by resource depletion, as was often predicted, but by ideology and Australia’s shifting sociopolitical landscape

Download or read book The Soul of an Octopus written by Sy Montgomery and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction * New York Times Bestseller * A Huffington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of the Year * One of the Best Books of the Month on Goodreads * Library Journal Best Sci-Tech Book of the Year * An American Library Association Notable Book of the Year “Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus does for the creature what Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk did for raptors.” —New Statesman, UK “One of the best science books of the year.” —Science Friday, NPR Another New York Times bestseller from the author of The Good Good Pig, this “fascinating…touching…informative…entertaining” (The Daily Beast) book explores the emotional and physical world of the octopus—a surprisingly complex, intelligent, and spirited creature—and the remarkable connections it makes with humans. In pursuit of the wild, solitary, predatory octopus, popular naturalist Sy Montgomery has practiced true immersion journalism. From New England aquarium tanks to the reefs of French Polynesia and the Gulf of Mexico, she has befriended octopuses with strikingly different personalities—gentle Athena, assertive Octavia, curious Kali, and joyful Karma. Each creature shows her cleverness in myriad ways: escaping enclosures like an orangutan; jetting water to bounce balls; and endlessly tricking companions with multiple “sleights of hand” to get food. Scientists have only recently accepted the intelligence of dogs, birds, and chimpanzees but now are watching octopuses solve problems and are trying to decipher the meaning of the animal’s color-changing techniques. With her “joyful passion for these intelligent and fascinating creatures” (Library Journal Editors’ Spring Pick), Montgomery chronicles the growing appreciation of this mollusk as she tells a unique love story. By turns funny, entertaining, touching, and profound, The Soul of an Octopus reveals what octopuses can teach us about the meeting of two very different minds.

Download or read book The White Feathered Octopus written by Jason Robert Bell and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2013-05-25 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The White Feathered Octopus (Tetragrammatron Press, 2012). This book talks about the gritty hard realties of growing up a blinded street beggar in Cairo, 1937, as if a mutant midwifed counterclockwise to the distant Jauntpads of Rocketcityutopia. It is a science fiction novel, written from one giant cryptographic anagram of Herman Melville's Moby DIck. Not for the faint of heart! Read it if you dare. An erotic sexperiment in Philikdicking ones own mind back from the brink of madness and disability a biography of lowdown heights, back alley knife fights, and cold uptown delights, the whole while you have the sinking feeling that this all might not actually be happening, as if you are a chess piece on a scrabble board. In other words, prepared to have your MindPenis Blown! Can you Get to That?

Download or read book Lovely Octopus written by Hossein Mazhari Malayeri and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2005-11 with total page 55 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In one of the lovely privates the beautiful octopus said to her strong fiancee: you don't know how much I love you, I was crying and praying in the temple after you went till you returned, then my almighty returned you to us again. The brave octopus that saw scholarship, faith and art in his beautiful fiancee's face said: you deserve to be a queen.

Download or read book Octopus! written by Katherine Harmon Courage and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A pleasant, chatty book on a fascinating subject.” — Kirkus Reviews Octopuses have been captivating humans for as long as we have been catching them. Yet for all of our ancient fascination and modern research, we still have not been able to get a firm grasp on these enigmatic creatures. Katherine Harmon Courage dives into the mystifying underwater world of the octopus and reports on her research around the world. She reveals, for instance, that the oldest known octopus lived before the first dinosaurs; that two thirds of an octopus’s brain capacity is spread throughout its arms, meaning each literally has a mind of its own; and that it can change colors within milliseconds to camouflage itself, yet appears to be colorblind.

Download or read book The Plural of Us written by Bonnie Costello and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Plural of Us is the first book to focus on the poet’s use of the first-person plural voice—poetry’s “we.” Closely exploring the work of W. H. Auden, Bonnie Costello uncovers the trove of thought and feeling carried in this small word. While lyric has long been associated with inwardness and a voice saying “I,” “we” has hardly been noticed, even though it has appeared throughout the history of poetry. Reading for this pronoun in its variety and ambiguity, Costello explores the communal function of poetry—the reasons, risks, and rewards of the first-person plural. Costello adopts a taxonomic approach to her subject, considering “we” from its most constricted to its fully unbounded forms. She also takes a historical perspective, following Auden’s interest in the full range of “the human pluralities” in a time of particular pressure for and against the collective. Costello offers new readings as she tracks his changing approach to voice in democracy. Examples from many other poets—including Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens—arise throughout the book, and the final chapter offers a consideration of how contemporary writers find form for what George Oppen called “the meaning of being numerous.” Connecting insights to philosophy of language and to recent work in concepts of community, The Plural of Us shows how poetry raises vital questions—literary and social—about how we speak of our togetherness.

Download or read book The Octopus written by Frank Norris and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on an actual bloody dispute in 1880 between wheat farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad, this tale of greed, betrayal, and a lust for power is played out during the waning days of the western frontier.