Best Books of 2011, Kansas City Star"[Jarman's] poems explore faith in its many manifestations, but there is something here transcendent that speaks to... everyone. Highly recommended."—Library JournalBone Fires collects work from over thirty years and charts Mark Jarman's spiritual development as he grows from a poet of childhood and nostalgia through adulthood and the struggles of faith. The section of new poems includes work published in American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, The New Republic, Poetry, and in the yearly anthology Best American Poetry. A landmark collection from one of our nation's most distinguished poets.

Bone Game is a murder mystery on a grand scale. Cole McCurtain, a mixed-blood Indian professor of Indian Studies at Santa Cruz, California, is haunted... by dreams dating back to events of Spanish California. Images of a Spanish priest murdered in 1812, a rearing grizzly bear, and a black-and-white painted Indian who offers bones in his extended hands come at a time when dismembered pieces of a young woman are washing ashore in 1993. The dreams become increasingly urgent as the murders become more frequent, and Cole’s family and friends gather to help-including Choctaw relatives who travel west from Mississippi because "this story’s so big, Cole sees only a little bit of it."  

This revolutionary archeological synthesis argues an alternative model of the earliest human population of North America. E. James Dixon dispels the... stereotype of big-game hunters following mammoths across the Bering Land Bridge and paints a vivid picture of marine mammal hunters, fishers, and general foragers colonizing the New World. Applying contemporary scientific methods and drawing on new archeological discoveries, he advances evidence indicating that humans first reached the Americas using water craft along the deglaciated Northwest Coast about 13,500 years ago, some 2,000 years before the first Clovis hunters. Dixon's rigorous evaluation of the oldest North American archeological sites and human remains offers well-reasoned hypotheses about the physical characteristics, lives, and relationships of the First Americans. His crisply written analysis of scientific exploration is essential reading for scholars, students, and general readers.

History of Anthropology is a series of annual volumes, inaugurated in 1983, each broadly unified around a theme of major importance to both the history... and the present practice of anthropological inquiry. Bones, Bodies, Behavior, the fifth in the series, treats a number of issues relating to the history of biological or physical anthropology: the application of the "race" idea to humankind, the comparison of animals minds to those of humans, the evolution of humans from primate forms, and the relation of science to racial ideology. Following an introductory overview of biological anthropology in Western tradition, the seven essays focus on a series of particular historical episodes from 1830 to 1980: the emergence of the race idea in restoration France, the comparative psychological thought of the American ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan, the archeological background of the forgery of the remains "discovered" at Piltdown in 1912, their impact on paleoanthropology in the interwar period, the background and development of physical anthropology in Nazi Germany, and the attempts of Franx Boas and others to organize a consensus against racialism among British and American scientists in the late 1930s. The volume concludes with a provocative essay on physical anthropology and primate studies in the United States in the years since such a consensus was established by the UNESCO "Statements on Race" of 1950 and 1951. Bringing together the contributions of a physical anthropologist (Frank Spencer), a historical sociologist (Michael Hammond), and a number of historians of science (Elazar Barkan, Claude Blanckaert, Donna Haraway, Robert Proctor, and Marc Swetlitz), this volume will appeal to a wide range of students, scholars, and general readers interested in the place of biological assumptions in the modern anthropological tradition, in the biological bases of human behavior, in racial ideologies, and in the development of the modern human sciences.

In the early days of the Civil War, rumors of gold in the frozen Klondike brought hordes of newcomers to the Pacific Northwest. Anxious to compete,... Russian prospectors commissioned inventor Leviticus Blue to create a great machine that could mine through Alaska’s ice. Thus was Dr. Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine born. But on its first test run the Boneshaker went terribly awry, destroying several blocks of downtown Seattle and unearthing a subterranean vein of blight gas that turned anyone who breathed it into the living dead. Now it is sixteen years later, and a wall has been built to enclose the devastated and toxic city. Just beyond it lives Blue’s widow, Briar Wilkes. Life is hard with a ruined reputation and a teenaged boy to support, but she and Ezekiel are managing. Until Ezekiel undertakes a secret crusade to rewrite history. His quest will take him under the wall and into a city teeming with ravenous undead, air pirates, criminal overlords, and heavily armed refugees. And only Briar can bring him out alive.

Just when the fuss over Darwin's Origin of Species was getting really heated, an extraordinary fossil was found in Germany. Apparently, half bird, half... reptile, it was christened Archaeopteryx and hailed as the missing link which proved that species could change as Darwin had claimed. The reaction was furious and immediate and has remained so to the present day.;Since its discovery the Archaeopteryx has caused more trouble than any other scientific icon. It has been used not just to support dozens of differing views on evolution but to start feuds, destroy reputations, further personal ambition and promote nationalism.;Bones of Contention tells a story not just about a fossil but about the lengths to which people will go to prove themselves right. Sometimes the consequences are funny, often they are disastrous or tragic, but they are never dull. This is the first book to look not only at the life and times of Archaeopteryx but also at the chaotic scientific world into which it emerged.From Victorian bravado to modern-day media, the meaning and relevance of this humble fossil have changed continually with the times, holiding up a mirror to ideals of science, and attitudes to natural history and the material world. It offers a rare insight into the way scientists can really behave in public and behind closed doors.

Since the 1990s the Japanese pet industry has grown to a trillion-yen business with between 6,000 to 8,000 businesses in the Japanese pet funeral... industry, including more than 900 pet cemeteries. Of these about 120 are operated by Buddhist temples, and Buddhist mortuary rites for pets have become an institutionalized practice. Bones of Contention is a book about how Japanese people feel and think about pets and other kinds of animals and, in turn, what pets and their people have to tell us about life and death in Japan today.

In 1959 a young monk named Tsung Tsai (Ancestor Wisdom) escapes the Red Army troops that destroy his monastery, and flees alone three thousand miles... across a China swept by chaos and famine. Knowing his fellow monks are dead, himself starving and hunted, he is sustained by his mission: to carry on the teachings of his Buddhist meditation master, who was too old to leave with his disciple.Nearly forty years later Tsung Tsai — now an old master himself — persuades his American neighbor, maverick poet George Crane, to travel with him back to his birthplace at the edge of the Gobi Desert. They are unlikely companions. Crane seeks freedom, adventure, sensation. Tsung Tsai is determined to find his master's grave and plant the seeds of a spiritual renewal in China. As their search culminates in a torturous climb to a remote mountain cave, it becomes clear that this seemingly quixotic quest may cost both men's lives.

This is a comprehensive and accessible overview of what is known about the structure and mechanics of bone, bones, and teeth. In it, John Currey... incorporates critical new concepts and findings from the two decades of research since the publication of his highly regarded The Mechanical Adaptations of Bones. Crucially, Currey shows how bone structure and bone's mechanical properties are intimately bound up with each other and how the mechanical properties of the material interact with the structure of whole bones to produce an adapted structure.For bone tissue, the book discusses stiffness, strength, viscoelasticity, fatigue, and fracture mechanics properties. For whole bones, subjects dealt with include buckling, the optimum hollowness of long bones, impact fracture, and properties of cancellous bone. The effects of mineralization on stiffness and toughness and the role of microcracking in the fracture process receive particular attention. As a zoologist, Currey views bone and bones as solutions to the design problems that vertebrates have faced during their evolution and throughout the book considers what bones have been adapted to do. He covers the full range of bones and bony tissues, as well as dentin and enamel, and uses both human and non-human examples.Copiously illustrated, engagingly written, and assuming little in the way of prior knowledge or mathematical background, Bones is both an ideal introduction to the field and also a reference sure to be frequently consulted by practicing researchers.

An American graphic novel first! The complete 1300-page epic adventure from start to finish in one deluxe trade paperback. Three modern cartoon cousins... get lost in a pre-technological valley, speanding a year there making new friends and out-running dangerous enemies. Their many adventures include crossing the local people in The Great Cow Race, and meeting a giant mountain lion called RockJaw: Master of the Eastern Border. They learn about sacrifice and hardship in The Ghost Circles and finally discover their own true natures in the climatic journey to The Crown of Horns.

In a world riven by conflict, reconciliation is not always possible -- but it offers one of the few paths to peace for a troubled nation or a troubled... soul. In Bone to Pick, bestselling author and Newsweek editor Ellis Cose offers a provocative and wide-ranging discussion of the power of reconciliation, the efficacy of revenge, and the possibility of forgiveness. People increasingly are searching for ways to put the demons of the past to rest. That search has led parents to seek out the murderers of their children and torture victims to confront their former tormentors. In a narrative drawing on the personal and dramatic stories of people from Texas to East Timor, Cose explores the limits and the promise of those encounters. Bone to Pick is not only the story of victims who have found peace through confronting the source of their pain; it is also a profound meditation on how the past shapes the present, and how history's wounds, left unattended, can fester for generations. Time does not heal all, Cose points out. Memories and anger can linger long beyond a human lifespan. The descendants of Holocaust survivors and African slaves alike feel the effects of their forebears' pain -- and in some cases are still demanding restitution. What is behind the movement for reparations? Why are truth-and-reconciliation commissions sprouting all over the world? Why are old wars being refought and old wounds being reopened? In Bone to Pick, Ellis Cose provides a moving and nuanced guide to such questions as he points the way toward a more harmonious world.

The cornerstone of GRAPHIX, our new graphic novel imprint, BONE is the incredible comic book saga of the unwitting hero who must save an idyllic valley... from the forces of evil.The BONE adventures tell the story of a young bone boy, Fone Bone, and his two cousins, Phoney Bone and Smiley Bone, who are banned from their homeland of Boneville. When the cousins find themselves mysteriously trapped in a wonderful but often terrifying land filled with secrets and danger - and special new friendships - they are soon caught up in adventures beyond their wildest dreams. In OUT FROM BONEVILLE, the three Bone cousins are separated and lost in a vast uncharted desert. One by one, they find their way into a deep, forested valley where they come face to face with...

The cornerstone of GRAPHIX, our new graphic novel imprint, BONE is the incredible comic book saga of an unlikely hero who must save an idyllic valley... from the forces of evil.In OUT FROM BONEVILLE, volume 1 of this 9-book epic, the three Bone cousins -- Fone Bone, Phoney Bone, and Smiley Bone -- are separated and lost in a vast, uncharted desert. One by one, they find their way into a deep, forested valley filled with wonderful and terrifying creatures. Eventually, the cousins are reunited at a farmstead run by tough Gran'ma Ben and her spirited granddaughter Thorn. But little do the Bones know, there are dark forces conspiring against them, and their adventures are only just beginning!