"Variably genial, cautionary, lyrical, admonitory, terrifying, horrifying and inspiring...A lifetime of thought, travel, reading, imagination and memory inform this affecting account." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Blending history and anecdote, geography and reminiscence, science and exposition, New York Times bestselling author Simon Winchester tells the breathtaking saga of the Atlantic Ocean. A gifted storyteller and consummate

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Russia's New Fin de Siècle brings together a range of texts on contemporary Russian culture – literary, cinematic and popular – as artists and writers try to situate themselves within the traditional frameworks of past and present, East and West, but also challenge established markers of identity. Investigating Russian culture at the turn of the 21st century, scholars from Britain, Sweden, Russia and the United States explore aspects of culture...

In the Philippines, a dramatic increase in labor migration has created a large population of transnational migrant families. Thousands of children now grow up apart from one or both parents, as the parents are forced to work outside the country in order to send their children to school, give them access to quality health care, or, in some cases, just provide them with enough food. While the issue of transnational families has already generated much...

Beneath the Ice tells the fascinating, often troubling, story of the Sami - the indigenous people of the Scandinavian Arctic. A proud and resilient people in an unforgiving yet stunningly beautiful northern wildscape, the Sami have carved out an existence rich in tradition, where the old ways of reindeer herding, shamanic belief and the veneration of bears have not yet been forgotten. Author Kenneth Steven celebrates this unique culture in a collection...

Highlighting the ways that digital media can be used in interdisciplinary curriculum, Images and Identity brings together ideas from art and citizenship teachers in the Czech Republic, Germany, Ireland, Malta, Portugal and the United Kingdom on producing online curriculum materials. This book offers a practical strategy for ways these different, but related, subjects can be taught. The first part of the book explores issues of art and citizenship...

This ethnography explores the Ngoma healing tradition as practiced in eastern Mpumalanga, South Africa. 'Bungoma' is an active philosophical system and healing practice consisting of multiple strands, based on the notion that humans are intrinsically exposed to each other and that this is the cause of illness, but also the condition for the possibility of healing. This healing seeks to protect the 'exposed being' from harm through augmenting the self....

Money from Nothing explores the dynamics surrounding South Africa's national project of financial inclusion-dubbed "banking the unbanked"-which aimed to extend credit to black South Africans as a critical aspect of broad-based economic enfranchisement. Through rich and captivating accounts, Deborah James reveals the varied ways in which middle- and working-class South Africans' access to credit is intimately bound up with identity, status-making,...

As emotion is often linked with irrationality, it's no surprise researchers tend to underreport the emotions they experience in the field. However, denying emotion altogether doesn't necessarily lead to better research. Methods cannot function independently from the personalities wielding them, and it's time we questioned the tendency to underplay the scientific, personal, and political consequences of the emotional dimensions of fieldwork. This book...

Whakamaa is a Maori word without an English counterpart. This book investigates this central Maori cultural concept in terms of both individual experience and cultural misunderstanding.

In 1982, Harvard-trained ethnobotanist Wade Davis traveled into the Haitian countryside to research reports of zombies--the infamous living dead of Haitian folklore. A report by a team of physicians of a verifiable case of zombification led him to try to obtain the poison associated with the process and examine it for potential medical use.Interdisciplinary in nature, this study reveals a network of power relations reaching all levels of Haitian political...