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Trans
By Sheila Heti, Juliet Jacques. 2015
Moving memoir and insightful examination of transgender politics "Six weeks before sex reassignment surgery (SRS), I am obliged to stop…
taking my hormones. I suddenly feel very differently about my forthcoming operation."In July 2012, aged thirty, Juliet Jacques underwent sex reassignment surgery--a process she chronicled with unflinching honesty in a serialised national newspaper column. Trans tells of her life to the present moment: a story of growing up, of defining yourself, and of the rapidly changing world of gender politics.Fresh from university, eager to escape a dead-end job, she launches a career as a writer in a publishing culture dominated by London cliques and still figuring out the impact of the Internet. She navigates the treacherous waters of a world where, even in the liberal and feminist media, transgender identities go unacknowledged, misunderstood or worse. Yet through art, film, music, politics and football, Jacques starts to become the person she had only imagined, and begins the process of transition. Interweaving the personal with the political, her memoir is a powerful exploration of debates that comprise trans politics, issues which promise to redefine our understanding of what it means to be alive.Revealing, honest, humorous, and self-deprecating, Trans includes an epilogue with Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?, in which Jacques and Heti discuss the cruxes of writing and identity.From the Hardcover edition.Stratigraphic Paleobiology: Understanding the Distribution of Fossil Taxa in Time and Space
By Mark E., Patzkowsky, Steven M. Holland. 2012
Whether the fossil record should be read at face value or whether it presents a distorted view of the history…
of life is an argument seemingly as old as many fossils themselves. In the late 1700s, Georges Cuvier argued for a literal interpretation, but in the early 1800s, Charles Lyell's gradualist view of the earth's history required a more nuanced interpretation of that same record. To this day, the tension between literal and interpretive readings lies at the heart of paleontological research, influencing the way scientists view extinction patterns and their causes, ecosystem persistence and turnover, and the pattern of morphologic change and mode of speciation. With Stratigraphic Paleobiology, Mark E. Patzkowsky and Steven M. Holland present a critical framework for assessing the fossil record, one based on a modern understanding of the principles of sediment accumulation. Patzkowsky and Holland argue that the distribution of fossil taxa in time and space is controlled not only by processes of ecology, evolution, and environmental change, but also by the stratigraphic processes that govern where and when sediment that might contain fossils is deposited and preserved. The authors explore the exciting possibilities of stratigraphic paleobiology, and along the way demonstrate its great potential to answer some of the most critical questions about the history of life: How and why do environmental niches change over time? What is the tempo and mode of evolutionary change and what processes drive this change? How has the diversity of life changed through time, and what processes control this change? And, finally, what is the tempo and mode of change in ecosystems over time?Michel and Ti-Jean
By George Rideout. 2014
In this probing character study, Rideout fashions a hypothetical 1969 meeting in a bar in St. Petersburg, Florida, between Quebec…
playwright Michel Tremblay and an individual whom he believes to be a truly great writer - beat generation author Jack Kerouac, whose Francophone mother affectionately called him Ti-Jean. At the time of their meeting, Kerouac is forty-seven years old and only months away from death, destroyed by drink in an attempt to live up to the wild image of the "beatnik" stereotype he coined in his novel On the Road. Michel Tremblay is twenty-seven and his first widely produced play, Les Belles Soeurs, has premiered a year before.As he encounters his writing idol, the younger man must break through the older man's emotional barriers to establish common ground. Ultimately, Kerouac's Québécois background helps Tremblay understand his work, recognize the role religion takes, and the place women play in his psyche, as stated metaphorically in the various female characters who populate Les Belles Soeurs.The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Palaeontology, Second Edition
By Martin J. S. Rudwick. 1976
"It is not often that a work can literally rewrite a person's view of a subject. And this is exactly…
what Rudwick's book should do for many paleontologists' view of the history of their own field. "—Stephen J. Gould, Paleobotany and Palynology "Rudwick has not merely written the first book-length history of palaeontology in the English language; he has written a very intelligent one. . . . His accounts of sources are rounded and organic: he treats the structure of arguments as Cuvier handled fossil bones. "—Roy S. Porter, History of ScienceAnoxia: Evidence for Eukaryote Survival and Paleontological Strategies (Cellular Origin, Life in Extreme Habitats and Astrobiology #21)
By Joseph Seckbach, Alexander Altenbach. 2011
ANOXIA defines the lack of free molecular oxygen in an environment In the presence of organic matter anaerobic…
prokaryotes produce compounds such as free radicals hydrogen sulfide or methane that are typically toxic to aerobes The concomitance of suppressed respiration and presence of toxic substances suggests these habitats are inhospitable to Eukaryota Ecologists sometimes term such environments Death Zones This book presents however a collection of remarkable adaptations to anoxia observed in Eukaryotes such as protists animals plants and fungi Case studies provide evidence for controlled beneficial use of anoxia by for example modification of free radicals use of alternative electron donors for anaerobic metabolic pathways and employment of anaerobic symbionts The complex interwoven existence of oxic and anoxic conditions in space and time is also highlighted as is the idea that eukaryotic inhabitation of anoxic habitats was established early in Earth historyWhat the L?
By Kate Clinton. 2005
I mean "What the L ?" in a buoyant, smart-ass, get-a-load-of-this, relentlessly optimistic, might-as-well-live "What the L?" tone. A leap…
of faith, if you will. And I will. I am a faith-based comic. In addition to the frivolous, salutary pleasure of laughing, I believe in the power of laughter to subvert authority and promote democracy.I Am My Own Wife
By Charlotte Von Mahlsdorf. 1995
A soft-spoken transvestite wanting nothing more than to live as a hausfrau, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf instead was caught up in…
the most harrowing dramas of 20th century Europe, surviving both the Nazis and the Communists. I Am My Own Wife is her exquisitely written autobiography where she reveals her lifelong pursuit of sexual liberty. The memoirs of a transvestite Berliner, the story of the wonderful Gründerzeit museum, a look at German culture from the point of view of a permanent outsider, Charlotte's tale, like her life, is a surprising and provocative weave of sex, politics, and history.With the success of a new play about Charlotte, hailed by The New York Times as the "most stirring new work to appear on Broadway this fall," her story is reaching an entirely new readership of enthusiastic theater fans.Von Mahlsdorf was also the subject of a documentary, I Am My Own Woman (1993), directed by Rosa von Praunheim.How to Build a Dinosaur
By Jack Horner, James Gorman. 2009
A world-renowned paleontologist reveals groundbreaking science that trumps science fiction: how to grow a living dinosaur Over a decade after…
Jurassic Park, Jack Horner and his colleagues in molecular biology labs are in the process of building the technology to create a real dinosaur. Based on new research in evolutionary developmental biology on how a few select cells grow to create arms, legs, eyes, and brains that function together, Jack Horner takes the science a step further in a plan to "reverse evolution" and reveals the awesome, even frightening, power being acquired to recreate the prehistoric past. The key is the dinosaur's genetic code that lives on in modern birds- even chickens. From cutting-edge biology labs to field digs underneath the Montana sun, How to Build a Dinosaur explains and enlightens an awesome new science.James Merrill
By Langdon Hammer. 2015
Langdon Hammer has given us the first biography of the poet James Merrill (1926-95), whose life is surely one of…
the most fascinating in American literature. Merrill was born to high privilege and high expectations as the son of Charles Merrill, the charismatic cofounder of the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch, and Hellen Ingram, a muse, ally, and antagonist throughout her son's life. Wounded by his parents' bitter divorce, he was the child of a broken home, looking for repair in poetry and love. This is the story of a young man escaping, yet also reenacting, the energies and obsessions of those powerful parents. It is the story of a gay man inventing his identity against the grain of American society during the eras of the closet, gay liberation, and AIDS. Above all, it is the story of a brilliantly gifted, fiercely dedicated poet working every day to turn his life into art. After college at Amherst and a period of adventure in Europe, Merrill returned to the New York art world of the 1950s (he was friendly with W. H. Auden, Maya Deren, Truman Capote, Larry Rivers, Elizabeth Bishop, and other midcentury luminaries) and began publishing poems, plays, and novels. In 1953, he fell in love with an aspiring writer, David Jackson. They explored "boys and bars" as they made their life together in Connecticut and later in Greece and Key West. At the same time, improbably, they carried on a forty-year conversation with spirits of the Other World by means of a Ouija board. The board became a source of poetic inspiration for Merrill, culminating in his prizewinning, uncanny, one-of-a-kind work The Changing Light at Sandover. In his virtuosic poetry and in the candid letters and diaries that enrich every page of this deliciously readable life, Merrill created a prismatic art of multiple perspectives and comic self-knowledge, expressing hope for a world threatened by nuclear war and environmental catastrophe. Holding this life and art together in a complex, evolving whole, Hammer illuminates Merrill's "chronicles of love & loss" and the poignant personal journey they record.From the Hardcover edition.How come the only thing my family tree ever grows is nuts?" Wade Rouse attempts to answer that question in…
his blisteringly funny new memoir by looking at the yearly celebrations that unite us all and bring out the very best and worst in our nearest and dearest. Family is truly the only gift that keeps on giving--namely, the gifts of dysfunction and eccentricity--and Wade Rouse's family has been especially charitable: His chatty yet loving mother dresses her sonas a Ubangi tribesman, in blackface, for Halloween in the rural Ozarks; his unconventional engineer ofa father buries his children's Easter eggs; his marvelouslyMartha Stewart-esque partner believes Barbie is his baby; his garage-sale obsessed set of in-laws areconvinced they can earn more than Warren Buffett by selling their broken lamps and Nehru jackets; hismutt Marge speaks her own language; and his oddball collection of relatives includes a tipsy Santa Clauswith an affinity for showing off his jingle balls. In the end, though, the Rouse House gifted Wade with love,laughter, understanding, superb comic timing, and a humbling appreciation for humiliation. Whether Wade dates a mime on his birthday to overcome his phobia of clowns or outruns a chubchasing boss on Secretary's Day, he captures our holidays with his trademark self-deprecating humor and acerbic wit. He paints a funny, sad, poignant, andoutlandish portrait of an an all-too-typical family that will have you appreciating--or bemoaning--yourown and shrieking in laughter.From the Hardcover edition.Modern Brides & Modern Grooms
By Liza Monroy, Mark O'Connell. 2014
How to make any wedding liberating, brave, and sexy.This post-DOMA book is for any couple-same or opposite sex-seeking a personalized…
wedding that dignifies the relationship and the individual self. No "new normal" here-this guide emboldens you to harness your unique, brazen, queer truth; to be creative; and to plan your wedding your way.Every fiancé faces the question: How do I become something new without losing myself? Using his own story-from how he and his husband connected via MTV's The Real World to the real world of their marriage-author Mark O'Connell reflects on conflicts that arrive during wedding transitions, as well as various other transitions throughout your lives.As a psychotherapist, O'Connell offers ideas to bridge relational gaps with your partner, family, and friends. As a professional actor, he also offers insight into the ways your wedding is a theatrical production: how this can help you to conceptualize the event, consolidate your efforts, and increase creative collaboration as a couple. This will serve you not only on the day, but also for the rest of your time together.Whether we're straight, gay, or other, weddings inspire us to carve out more fun, freedom, recognition, life-space, love-space, and connubial space than we've ever had before.Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels
By Justin Vivian Bond. 2011
WINNER OF A 2012 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD"Like Bond, the memoir is droll, pensive and filled with zingers teetering between funny…
and ferocious."-The New York Times"Bond's fabulosity is matched by a trenchant wit, and [V's] over-the-top stories are smartly edged with politics, sexual or otherwise."-The New York TimesRecently hailed as "the greatest cabaret artist of [V's] generation" in The New Yorker, Mx. Justin Vivian Bond makes a brilliant literary debut with this staggeringly candid and hilarious novella-length memoir.With a recent diagnosis of attention deficit disorder, and news that V's first lover from childhood has been imprisoned for impersonating an undercover police officer, Bond recalls in vivid detail coming of age as a trans kid. Always haunted by the knowledge of being "different," Bond was further confused when the bully next door wanted to meet secretly. Their trysts went on for years, and made Bond acutely aware of sexual power and vulnerability. With inimitable style, Bond raises issues about LGBTQ adolescence, homophobia, parenting, and sexuality, while being utterly entertaining.Singer, songwriter, and Tony-nominated performance artist Mx. Justin Vivian Bond is an Obie, Bessie, and Ethyl Eichelberger Award winner. As one half of the performance duo Kiki and Herb, Bond has toured the world, headlining at Carnegie Hall, the Sydney Opera House, and London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, and starring in a Tony nominated run on Broadway, Kiki and Herb Alive on Broadway. Film credits include a role in John Cameron Mitchell's feature Shortbus. Bond has recently released two records, Dendrophile, and Silver Wells.Palaeopathology
By Tony Waldron. 2009
Paleopathology is designed to help bone specialists with diagnosis of diseases in skeletal assemblages. It suggests an innovative method of…
arriving at a diagnosis in the skeleton by applying what are referred to as "operational definitions. " The aim is to ensure that all those who study bones will use the same criteria for diagnosing disease, which will enable valid comparisons to be made between studies. This book is based on modern clinical knowledge and provides background information so that those who read will understand the natural history of bone diseases, and this will enable them to draw reliable conclusions from their observations. Details of bone metabolism and the fundamentals of basic pathology are also provided, as well as a comprehensive and up-to-date bibliography. A short chapter on epidemiology provides information on how best to analyze and present the results of a study of human remains.Evolutionary Paleoecology: The Ecological Context of Macroevolutionary Change
By David J. Bottjer, Warren Allmon. 2001
One of the most important questions we can ask about life is "Does ecology matter?" Most biologists and paleontologists are…
trained to answer "yes," but the exact mechanisms by which ecology matters in the context of patterns that play out over millions of years have never been entirely clear. This book examines these mechanisms and looks at how ancient environments affected evolution, focusing on long-term macroevolutionary changes as seen in the fossil record. Evolutionary paleoecology is not a new discipline. Beginning with Darwin, researchers have attempted to understand how the environment has affected evolutionary history. But as we learn more about these patterns, the search for a new synthetic view of the evolutionary process that integrates species evolution, ecology, and mass extinctions becomes ever more pressing. The present volume is a benchmark sampler of active research in this ever more active field.P.K. Strother, Choice"T. rex" and the Crater of Doom
By Carl Zimmer, Walter Alvarez. 1997
Sixty-five million years ago, a comet or asteroid larger than Mt. Everest slammed into the Earth, causing an explosion equivalent…
to the detonation of a hundred million hydrogen bombs. Vaporized impactor and debris from the impact site were blasted out through the atmosphere, falling back to Earth all around the globe. Terrible environmental disasters ensued, including a giant tsunami, continent-scale wildfires, darkness, and cold, followed by sweltering greenhouse heat. When conditions returned to normal, half the genera of plants and animals on Earth had perished.This horrific story is now widely accepted as the solution to a great scientific murder mystery what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs? In T. rex and the Crater of Doom, the story of the scientific detective work that went into solving the mystery is told by geologist Walter Alvarez, one of the four Berkeley scientists who discovered the first evidence for the giant impact. It is a saga of high adventure in remote parts of the world, of patient data collection, of lonely intellectual struggle, of long periods of frustration ended by sudden breakthroughs, of intense public debate, of friendships made or lost, of the exhilaration of discovery, and of delight as a fascinating story unfolded.Controversial and widely attacked during the 1980s, the impact theory received confirmation from the discovery of the giant impact crater it predicted, buried deep beneath younger strata at the north coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. The Chicxulub Crater was found by Mexican geologists in 1950 but remained almost unknown to scientists elsewhere until 1991, when it was recognized as the largest impact crater on this planet, dating precisely from the time of the great extinction sixty-five million years ago. Geology and paleontology, sciences that long held that all changes in Earth history have been calm and gradual, have now been forced to recognize the critical role played by rare but devastating catastrophes like the impact that killed the dinosaurs.Romaine Brooks: A Life
By Cassandra Langer. 2015
The artistic achievements of Romaine Brooks (1874-1970), both as a major expatriate American painter and as a formative innovator in…
the decorative arts, have long been overshadowed by her fifty-year relationship with writer Natalie Barney and a reputation as a fiercely independent, aloof heiress who associated with fascists in the 1930s. In Romaine Brooks: A Life, art historian Cassandra Langer provides a richer, deeper portrait of Brooks's aesthetics and experimentation as an artist--and of her entire life, from her chaotic, traumatic childhood to the enigmatic decades after World War II, when she produced very little art. This provocative, lively biography takes aim at many myths about Brooks and her friends, lovers, and the subjects of her portraits, revealing a woman of wit and passion who overcame enormous personal and societal challenges to become an extraordinary artist and create a life on her own terms. Romaine Brooks: A Life introduces much fresh information from Langer's decades of research on Brooks and establishes this groundbreaking artist's centrality to feminism and contemporary sexual politics as well as to visual culture.Leave the Light On
By Jennifer Storm. 2010
A revealing, hopeful account of a young woman's ascent out of the bleak despair of addiction and how recovery helped…
her confront the traumas and secrets that kept her living in the dark for so long.Don't Get Me Started
By Kate Clinton. 1998
Kate Clinton's first book of irreverent humorLet's get one thing straight. I'm not. I'm out and proud. My closet was…
huge, complete with a foyer, turnstile, a few dead bolts, and a burglar alarm. It wasn't until I had lived and slept with a woman for a year that it occurred to me to ask, "Do you think we're lesbians?"Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man
By Thomas Page Mcbee. 2014
"Thomas Page McBee's Man Alive hurtled through my life. I read it in a matter of hours. It's a confession,…
it's a poem, it's a time warp, it's a brilliant work of art. I bow down to McBee-his humility, his sense of humor, his insightfulness, his structural deftness, his ability to put into words what is often said but rarely, with such visceral clarity and beauty, communicated."-Heidi Julavits, author of The Vanishers and The Uses of EnchantmentWhat does it really mean to be a man?In Man Alive, Thomas Page McBee attempts to answer that question by focusing on two of the men who most impacted his life&mash;one, his otherwise ordinary father who abused him as a child, and the other, a mugger who almost killed him. Standing at the brink of the life-changing decision to transition from female to male, McBee seeks to understand these examples of flawed manhood and tells us how a brush with violence sent him on the quest to untangle a sinister past, and freed him to become the man he was meant to be.Man Alive engages an extraordinary personal story to tell a universal one-how we all struggle to create ourselves, and how this struggle often requires risks. Far from a transgender transition tell-all, Man Alive grapples with the larger questions of legacy and forgiveness, love and violence, agency and invisibility.Praise for Man Alive:"Man Alive is a sweet, tender hurt of a memoir ... about forgiveness and self-discovery, but mostly it's about love, so much love. McBee takes us in his capable hands and shows us what it takes to become a man who is gloriously, gloriously alive."-Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist and An Untamed State"Thomas Page McBee's story of how he came to claim both his past and his future is by turns despairing and hopeful, exceptional and relatable. To read it is to witness the birth of a fuller, truer self. I loved this book."-Ann Friedman, columnist, New York Magazine"'Whoever's child I am, my body belongs to me,' McBee writes, and his book is an elegant, generous transcription of the journey toward this incandescent, non-aggrandized, life-sustaining form of self-possession-the kind that emanates from dispossession, rather than running from it."-Maggie Nelson, author of Bluets and The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning"Exquisitely written and bristling with emotion, this important book reminds us of how much vulnerability and violence inheres to any identity. A real achievement of form and narrative."-Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of FailureAbout the Author:Thomas Page McBee was the "masculinity expert" for VICE and writes the columns "Self-Made Man" for The Rumpus and "The American Man" for Pacific Standard. His essays and reportage have appeared in the the New York Times, TheAtlantic.com, Salon, and BuzzFeed, where he was a regular contributor on gender issues. He lives in New York City where he works as the editor of special projects at Quartz, and is currently at work on a book about modern American masculinity.ender have appeared in The New York Times and via TheAtlantic.com, VICE, BuzzFeed, and Salon. Thomas gives lectures on masculinity and media narratives across the country. He lives in New York City.Swish
By Joel Derfner, Elton John. 2013
A hilarious and deeply moving account of one man's journey from stereotype to truth.Joel Derfner is a knitter, an aerobics…
instructor, a cheerleader, a go-go dancer, and a musical theater composer, but when he realizes one day that he's a walking gay cliché he embarks on a quest for deeper meaning. A very, very funny quest for deeper meaning. And whether he's confronting the demons of his past at a GLBT summer camp, using the Internet to "meet" men--many, many men--or going undercover to a conference of ex-gays, he discovers that what he's looking for--and sometimes even finds, hidden underneath the surface of everyday life--is his own identity. In the tradition of David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs, yet with its own particular flair, Swish is a story told with not just wit but humor; not just candor but honesty; and not just compassion but humanity.Swish is the best book about being gay I've ever read. But it's not just about being gay; it's about being human.Elton JohnIn a culture where we disguise vulnerability with physical perfection and material success, Derfner skewers heartache with Wildean wit . . . [Derfner is] the next Noël Coward.Out.comDerfner's writing is perfect. . . . He's your best friend. He's your brother. He is you.EDGE Los AngelesSometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant, always clever, and unpredictable.Philadelphia Gay News