Book Club
Dr Nick Baylis This is the ultimate ‘how to be happy’ handbook, offering a practical and effective range of happiness-building techniques, with advice on how to improve your work/life balance, increase self-esteem, nourish your mind and body, and nurture relationships with the ones you love. Dr Nick Baylis is a practicing therapist and former ‘Dr Feelgood’ for The Times Saturday Magazine, who has worked with everyone from young offenders to stressed airline pilots. In this book, he draws on the best ideas from every field, from hypnosis and energy therapy to positive psychology and Buddhism, providing a wealth of inspiring insights on how to relieve stress and achieve lasting contentment.
Ribbon of Wildness Peter Wright The Watershed of Scotland is a line that separates east from west, dividing those river basin areas which drain towards the North Sea from those which flow into the Atlantic Ocean. It meanders from Peel Fell on the
The Rime of the Modern Mariner Nick Hayes In this recasting of Coleridge’s famous poem, the fantastical voyage is now one of environmental disaster. Having set off to acquire a trivial material item, the mariner is becalmed in the North Pacific Gyre – a vast, hypoxic maelstrom of plastic waste – where he comes face to face with the consequences of man’s excessive consumption, in the form of wrathful gods, petroleum slicks and tsunamis, ghostly apparitions, and the great endangered creatures of the deep. Like his ancient antecedent, he too undergoes a dramatic epiphany, before wandering the world telling his story to others. This is a sumptuously crafted book – it looks and feels beautiful, the poetry is full of poignant alliteration, and the drawings exude character and humour. The painstaking effort involved in putting the verse and drawings together is evident in the final quality, and it seems a very fitting modern take on Coleridge’s classic. English border to Duncansby Head near John O`Groats. Over 745 miles, through almost every kind of terrain, the Watershed follows the high ground, offering wide vistas down almost every major river valley, into the heartlands of Scotland. Ribbon of Wildness gives a vivid
introduction to this hitherto largely unknown geographic feature, as the author discovers and walks the route, through landscapes of rock, bog, forest, moor and mountain, describing the evolving kaleidoscope of changing vistas, wide panoramas, ever present wildlife, and the vagaries of the weather.
The Spirit Level
Here Be Dragons
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Dennis McCarthy
Why do we mistrust people more in the UK than in Japan? Why does America have higher rates of teenage pregnancy than France? What makes the Swedish thinner than the Greeks? The answer: inequality.
Why do we find polar bears only in the Arctic and penguins only in the Antarctic? Why are marsupials found only in Australia and South America? This book tells the fascinating story of biogeography, bringing together two great theories of life and Earth – evolution and plate tectonics. This is the story of how life has responded to, and has in turn altered, the everchanging Earth.
Based on years of research, this groundbreaking book shows how almost everything – from life expectancy to depression levels, violence to illiteracy – is affected by how equal, not by how wealthy, a society is; and that societies with a bigger gap between rich and poor are bad for everyone in them. It offers positive solutions to help us move towards a happier, fairer future, and has been heralded as providing a new way of thinking about ourselves and our communities.
We find animals and plants where we do because, over time, the continents have moved, separating and uniting in a long, slow dance; because sea levels have risen, cutting off one bit of land from another; because new and barren volcanic islands have risen up from the sea; and because animals and plants vary greatly in their ability to travel, and separation causes the formation of new species.
Reader Offer - save 20%
Offer ends 30th September 2011.
Readers of The Geographer can purchase The Spirit Level for £7.99 (RRP £9.99), with free p&p. Order by calling the Penguin Bookshop on 0843 060 0021, quoting “Royal Scottish Geographical Society” and “ISBN 9780141032368”. Offer is subject to availability, and open to UK residents only. Please allow up to 14 days for delivery.
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The Rough Guide to Happiness