California Press: 1495 books
Parasites
Tales of Humanity's Most Unwelcome Guests
Language: English
Release Date: August 10, 2010
Hidden away within living tissues, parasites are all around us—and inside us. Yet, despite their unsavory characteristics, as we find in this compulsively readable book, parasites have played an enormous role in civilizations through time and around the globe. Parasites: Tales of Humanity’s Most...
by Barbara Johnson
Language: English
Release Date: February 25, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: February 25, 2010
Countering impressions of Moses reinforced by Sigmund Freud in his epoch-making Moses and Monotheism, this concise, engaging work begins with the perception that the story of Moses is at once the most nationalist and the most multicultural of all foundation narratives. Weaving together various texts—biblical...
The God Problem
Expressing Faith and Being Reasonable
Language: English
Release Date: October 1, 2012
The United States is one of the most highly educated societies on earth, and also one of the most religious. In The God Problem, Robert Wuthnow examines how middle class Americans juggle the seemingly paradoxical relationship between faith and reason.
Based on exceptionally rich and candid...
Restless Souls
The Making of American Spirituality
Language: English
Release Date: September 5, 2012
Yoga classes and Zen meditation, New-Age retreats and nature mysticism—all are part of an ongoing religious experimentation that has surprisingly deep roots in American history. Tracing out the country’s Transcendentalist and cosmopolitan religious impulses over the last two centuries, Restless...
Uncertain Tastes
Memory, Ambivalence, and the Politics of Eating in Samburu, Northern Kenya
Language: English
Release Date: October 13, 2009
This richly drawn ethnography of Samburu cattle herders in northern Kenya examines the effects of an epochal shift in their basic diet-from a regimen of milk, meat, and blood to one of purchased agricultural products. In his innovative analysis, Jon Holtzman uses food as a way to contextualize and...
The Walking Whales
From Land to Water in Eight Million Years
Language: English
Release Date: November 13, 2014
Hans Thewissen, a leading researcher in the field of whale paleontology and anatomy, gives a sweeping first-person account of the discoveries that brought to light the early fossil record of whales. As evidenced in the record, whales evolved from herbivorous forest-dwelling ancestors that resembled...
The Gnu's World
Serengeti Wildebeest Ecology and Life History
Language: English
Release Date: April 12, 2014
This is the first scholarly book on the antelope that dominates the savanna ecosystems of eastern and southern Africa. It presents a synthesis of research conducted over a span of fifty years, mainly on the wildebeest in the Ngorongoro and Serengeti ecosystems, where eighty percent of the world’s...
Changing Energy
The Transition to a Sustainable Future
Language: English
Release Date: September 12, 2017
Changing Energy outlines how humanity established the current energy economy through three previous transitions, and how we now stand poised for a necessary fourth transition. Human societies around the globe have received immense benefits from uses of coal, oil, gas, and uranium sources, yet we...
by Steven W. Buskirk
Language: English
Release Date: January 12, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: January 12, 2016
Wild Mammals of Wyoming and Yellowstone National Park provides the scholar, conservationist, and interested lay reader with information on the state's 117 wild mammalian species from grizzly bears to pygmy shrews. It describes the history of mammalogy in Wyoming, the zoogeography of Wyoming mammals,...
Frozen Earth
The Once and Future Story of Ice Ages
Language: English
Release Date: February 15, 2013
In this engrossing and accessible book, Doug Macdougall explores the causes and effects of ice ages that have gripped our planet throughout its history, from the earliest known glaciation—nearly three billion years ago—to the present. Following the development of scientific ideas about these dramatic...
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Language: English
Release Date: May 31, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: May 31, 2012
This major reference is an overview of the current state of theoretical ecology through a series of topical entries centered on both ecological and statistical themes. Coverage ranges across scales—from the physiological, to populations, landscapes, and ecosystems. Entries provide an introduction...
Sexual Selections
What We Can and Can’t Learn about Sex from Animals
Language: English
Release Date: June 4, 2002
Scientific discoveries about the animal kingdom fuel ideological battles on many fronts, especially battles about sex and gender. We now know that male marmosets help take care of their offspring. Is this heartening news for today's stay-at-home dads? Recent studies show that many female birds once...
Maps of Time
An Introduction to Big History
Language: English
Release Date: October 3, 2011
An introduction to a new way of looking at history, from a perspective that stretches from the beginning of time to the present day, Maps of Time is world history on an unprecedented scale. Beginning with the Big Bang, David Christian views the interaction of the natural world with the more recent...
Drama Kings
Players and Publics in the Re-creation of Peking Opera, 1870-1937
Language: English
Release Date: February 13, 2007
In this colorful and detailed history, Joshua Goldstein describes the formation of the Peking opera in late Qing and its subsequent rise and re-creation as the epitome of the Chinese national culture in Republican era China. Providing a fascinating look into the lives of some of the opera’s key...