Wild Animals I Have Known

Serge Dedina

Wild Sea: Eco-Wars and Surf Stories from the Coast of the Californias

Many people have lamented the pollution and outright loss of beaches along the coasts of California and Mexico, but very few people have fought on behalf of beaches as hard--or as successfully--as Serge Dedina. Whether taking on an international conglomerate or tackling a state transportation agency, Dedina is truly an eco-warrior. In this sparkling collection of articles, many written for popular magazines, Dedina tells the stories as only an insider could. He writes with a firm grasp of facts along with an advocate's passion and outrage. Sprinkled with just the right mix of humor and surf lingo, Dedina's writing is "weapons grade"--surfer speak for totally awesome. Dedina grew up in Imperial Beach, California, just north of the Mexican border, and he feels equally at home in Mexico and the States. An expert on gray whales, he eloquently describes the fight he helped to lead against the Mitsubishi Corporation, whose plan to build a salt-processing plant in the San Ignacio Lagoon in Baja California would have destroyed the world's last undeveloped gray whale lagoon. With similar fervor, Dedina describes helping to construct the unlikely coalition that succeeded in defeating a ...

Annie Dillard

Holy the Firm

"[This] is a book of great richness, beauty and power and thus very difficult to do justice to in a brief review. . . . The violence is sometimes unbearable, the language rarely less than superb. Dillard's description of the moth's death makes Virginia Woolf's go dim and Edwardian. . . . Nature seen so clear and hard that the eyes tear. . . . A rare and precious book." -- Frederick Buechner, New York Times Book ReviewA profound book about the natural world--both its beauty and its cruelty--from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie DillardIn 1975 Dillard took up residence on an island in Puget Sound, in a wooden room furnished with "one enormous window, one cat, one spider, and one person." For the next two years she asked herself questions about time, reality, sacrifice, death, and the will of God. In Holy the Firm, she writes about a moth consumed in a candle flame, about a seven-year-old girl burned in an airplane accident, about a baptism on a cold beach. But behind the moving curtain of what she calls "the hard things--rock mountain and salt sea," she sees, sometimes far off and sometimes as close by as a veil or air, the power play of holy fire.Here is a lyrical gift to any ...

Storm Dunlop

Collins Star Finder Pack [With Wallchart & Star Finder Planisphere]

The multitude of stars in the sky can be confusing, but the "Collins Star Finder Pack" provides everything stargazers need to identify them correctly. The star finder is accompanied by a 32-page booklet explaining the best way to observe the night sky and also shows the positions of the planets for the next five years. 30 color illustrations.