Barnett - Rain : a natural and cultural history
Here you can read online Barnett - Rain : a natural and cultural history full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2015, publisher: Crown Publishers, genre: Art. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
Rain : a natural and cultural history: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Rain : a natural and cultural history" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
Abstract: Cynthia Barnetts Rain begins four billion years ago with the torrents that filled the oceans, and builds to the storms of climate change. It weaves together science--the true shape of a raindrop, the mysteries of frog and fish rains--with the human story of our ambition to control rain, from ancient rain dances to the 2,203 miles of levees that attempt to straitjacket the Mississippi River... As climate change upends rainfall patterns and unleashes increasingly severe storms and drought, Barnett shows rain to be a unifying force in a fractured world.--Book jacket
Barnett: author's other books
Who wrote Rain : a natural and cultural history? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Rain : a natural and cultural history — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Rain : a natural and cultural history" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Font size:
Interval:
Bookmark:
MORE ADVANCE PRAISE FORRAIN
Like the weather, theres no predicting the delightful and sometimes disturbing surprises waiting on every page of Rain. Whether shes writing about Mesopotamia or the Met Office, Cynthia Barnett illuminates the hidden connections that tie our fate to a precious resource we neglect at our peril.
DAN FAGIN, author of the Pulitzer Prizewinning Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation
Rain is one of the most elegant and absorbing books ever written about the natural world. Writing with grace and imagination, Cynthia Barnett takes you on a journey into the heart of the most elemental force in our lives. An important, revelatory, and thoroughly wondrous book.
WILLIAM SOUDER, author of On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson
Captivating and compelling, a delightful celebration of precipitation that is brimming with insight. Whether youre desperate for more of it or you just wish it would stop, youll never think of rain in the same way again.
GAVIN PRETOR-PINNEY, author of The Cloud Collectors Handbook
Barnetts beautifully written book envelops the reader in a warm shower of intriguing history and fascinating science. Anyone who looks longingly at rain clouds, rejoices in a spring downpour, or frets about drought will love Rain.
DANIEL CHAMOWITZ, author of What a Plant Knows; director, Manna Center for Plant Biosciences, Tel Aviv University
Rain is one of those uncommonly wonderful books that are both highly significant and deeply pleasurable to read. As we face the coming time of storms, of flood and drought, nothing will be more important than rain. So all gratitude to Cynthia Barnett for writing a book that is clear, surprising, and filled with fascination.
KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE, author of Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water
Cynthia Barnett looks at the human relationship to rainfrom Noah to Thomas Jefferson to our own conflicted attitudes. The result is a book of unexpected connections and wonderful surprises. It will give you more respect for every rainstorm you experience, and more joy in the raindrops.
CHARLES FISHMAN, author of The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water
If you care about this planet, youre lucky that Cynthia Barnett writes so elegantly and intelligently about the stuff that falls on it. Its kind of ironiclike rain on your wedding day?that the folly of mankinds relentless efforts to control the earths water has inspired Barnetts best work yet.
MICHAEL GRUNWALD, author of The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise
A seamless blending of personal narrative with scientific and cultural explanationsFans of Mary Roach will recognize a similar ease of style and interjection of wit. Accessible to every reader, from the environmental scientist to the parent choosing whether their child needs to wear a raincoat that day.
LIBRARY JOURNAL (starred review)
Copyright 2015 by Cynthia Barnett
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barnett, Cynthia, 1966
Rain: a natural and cultural history / by Cynthia Barnett.First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Rain and rainfall. 2. Weather. 3. Rainfall anomalies. 4. Droughts. 5. Physical geography. 6. Climatic changes. 7. Earth sciences. I. Title.
QC925.B315 2014
551.577dc23 2014034180
ISBN9780804137096
eBook ISBN9780804137102
eBook design adapted from printed book design by Gretchen Achilles
Cover design by Anna Kochman
Cover photograph: Ryan McVay/Getty Images
v4.1
a
FOR AARON
And who art thou? Said I to the soft-falling shower ,
Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated:
I am the Poem of Earth, said the voice of the rain ,
Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea ,
Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely formd, altogether changed, and yet the same ,
I descend to lave the drouths, atomies, dust-layers of the globe ,
And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn;
And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own origin, and make pure and beautify it;
(For song, issuing from its birth-place, after fulfilment, wandering,
Reckd or unreckd, duly with love returns.)
WALT WHITMAN
The Voice of the Rain
1885
T he rain on Mars was gentle, and welcome. Sometimes, the rain on Mars was blue. One night, rain fell so marvelously upon the fourth planet from the sun that thousands of trees sprouted and grew overnight, breathing oxygen into the air.
When Ray Bradbury gave Mars rain and a livable atmosphere in The Martian Chronicles, science fiction purists grumbled that it was completely implausible. In the previous century, astronomersand writers like H. G. Wells who borrowed from their work to give sci-fi a tantalizing authenticityhad seen Mars as Earthlike, odds-on favorite for life on a planet other than our own. But by the time The Martian Chronicles was published in 1950, those odds had changed. Scientists viewed Mars as chokingly dry, impossibly harshand far too cold for rain.
Bradbury didnt care to conform to the scientific views of the day. On any planet, he was much more interested in the human story. He created a rain-soaked Venus, too, but not because scientists then considered it a galactic swamp. Bradbury just loved rain. It fit his melancholy like a favorite wool sweater. As a boy, he had loved the summer rains of Illinois, and those that fell during family vacations in Wisconsin. Hawking newspapers on a Los Angeles street corner as a teen, Bradbury never minded a late-afternoon deluge. And in his eighty years of writing every day, raindrops tap-tap-tapped from the typewriter keys into many a short story and every book.
A Bradbury rain could set a gentle scene or a creepy one. It could create moods of gloom, mania, or joy. In his short story The Long Rain, he made rain a character all its own: It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains.
So often making rain the mise-en-scne for life, Bradbury was onto something. Everyone knows that life could not have developed without water. Life as we define it required a wet and watery planet. But the Earth-as-exceptional-blue-marble story many of us grew up with is, in some ways, as much a product of the human imagination as the warm Mars sea of
Font size:
Interval:
Bookmark:
Similar books «Rain : a natural and cultural history»
Look at similar books to Rain : a natural and cultural history. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
Discussion, reviews of the book Rain : a natural and cultural history and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.