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From Florida to California and on to Hawaii, gardeners who want a current, thorough and user-friendly guide to the common indoor foliage and outdoor landscape plants for U.S. Department of Agriculture zones 8,9,10 and 11 will welcome this fully illustrated book.
With precise line drawings for nearly 500 plant species, the work presents a description of cultivated ferns, cone-bearing plants and flowering ornamental plants for warmer climates. It offers a description of the families, essential identifying features and horticultural information for each plant, including origin, cold-hardiness zones, propagation techniques and soil fertilizer, irrigation and light requirements. The author also discusses identification features under clearly demarcated headings of growth habit, foliage, stem and bark, flower and fruit. With a comprehensive glossary of terms commonly used in plant identification and a cross-referenced index of common and scientific names, readers will be able to find information with minimal effort.
This book is intended for use by backyard gardeners and will be
especially handy for newcomers to warm temperate and subtropical areas
who seek a reliable resource for plant selection and care. In addition,
it will be indispensable to garden clubs, volunteer Master Gardeners, nursery
professionals, extension agents and landscape architects. It also can serve
as a plant identification text for students of environmental horticulture,
forestry and other plant science-related fields.
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Bijan Dehgan is professor of environmental horticulture at the University
of Florida. He is internationally recognized for his taxonomic and horticultural
research and major publications on the endangered sago palms (cycads) and
the physic nuts (Jatropha).
"Reflects the same concerns found in her better-known non-fiction work -- a fascination with the beauty of Florida and a warning against its imminent destruction."
Tallahassee DemocratIn the pantheon of Florida writers, the late Marjory Stoneman Douglas is cherished as the grande dame. Famous as the author of The Everglades: River of Grass, prolific as a writer and passionate as an environmental crusader for almost a century, she was the nation's best link to a remarkable era in Florida history.
The timeless themes of her stories in this new collection resonate with interest for readers today. Whether the subject is hurricanes, cockfighting, real estate deals, struggling immigrants or corruption in the Everglades, Douglas wrote about it with distinction -- and usually first. Originally published in the Saturday Evening Post during the 1920s and 1930s, the golden age of the short story, these nine works have never before been collected or available in one place.
Kevin M. McCarthy, who edited the companion volume, Nine Florida
Stories by Marjory Stoneman Douglas, offers an introduction
to each story, explaining its significance, setting, unusual references,
place in Douglas' works and significance to the history of South Florida.
The stories: "At Home on the Marcel Waves"; "Solid Mahogany"; "Goodness
Gracious, Agnes"; "A River in Flood"; "The Mayor of Flamingo"; "Stepmother";
"You Got to Go, But You Don't Have to Come Back"; "High-Goal Man"; "Wind
Before Morning."
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Kevin M. McCarthy, professor of English and Florida studies at
the University of Florida, is the author or editor of 17 other books, including
Florida Lighthouses, Florida Stories and More Florida Stories.
In San Francisco, a city famous for its eccentrics, the most celebrated of all was Joshua Norton who, in 1859, declared himself Emperor of the United States. One of the original `49ers, Norton made and lost a fortune (and a good portion of his reason) during those rough-and-ready first years of the "instant" city that grew out of the sand dunes of Yerba Buena. Until his death in 1880, the Emperor presided over the public life of San Francisco. Dressed in his fabled uniform with its plumed hat, Norton made his daily rounds of the city; he attended its civic functions, inspected its progress, issued proclamations, including one that called for the construction of a bridge between Oakland and San Francisco. Norton I became one of San Francisco's most publicized attractions; and he remains a presence that still lingers in the Bay, where hotel suites and inns, a sightseeing boat and even brands of coffee and cigars have been named in his honor.
John Cech's novel recreates those dizzying days of the Gold Rush
and its aftermath, when dreams of sudden riches could quickly become nightmares,
and survival depended on the kindness of strangers and the persistence
of the imagination. It does, finally, what Mark Twain urged someone to
do for his friend the Emperor more than a century ago: "write him up."
Along the way, Cech tells the story not only of Emperor Norton but also
of that Whitman-like catalogue of dreamers -- merchants and mechanics,
bandits and blacksmiths, clerks and clairvoyants, artists and inventors
-- who found themselves rushing for the promise of California.
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John Cech has written extensively about such unique and wide-ranging
voices of American art and letters as Charles Olson, Edward Dahlberg and
Maurice Sendak. He is the author of numerous articles and reviews, children's
books and plays -- most recently a dramatic adaptation of Marjorie Kinnan
Rawlings' The Secret River. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where
he is a professor of English at the University of Florida. This is his
first novel.
"Peskowitz weaves rabbinic rhetoric, archaeological data, and critical theory into a detailed cultural map of Roman-period Judaism. Impressively documented, compellingly argued, this work demonstrates through its particular attention to the ordinary -- work, tools, bodies, gossip, the minutiae of everyday life -- how gender was constructed, attained, and ultimately naturalized. A brilliant work from a major new voice, Spinning Fantasies is an interdisciplinary masterpiece."
A.J. Levine, Vanderbilt University"The reader will never look at the texts explicated in this work in the same way again. Jews and Christians alike will be fascinated by the notions of gender that cut across religions in antiquity. Peskowitz's breadth of citation is dazzling, and her methodological sophistication will undoubtedly set standards for future studies."
Judith Hauptman, Jewish Theological Seminary
Miriam Peskowitz offers a dramatic revision to our understanding of
early rabbinic Judaism. Using a wide range of sources -- archaeology, legal
texts, grave goods, technology, art and writings in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek
and Latin -- she challenges traditional assumptions regarding Judaism's
historical development.
Following the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by Roman armies in 70 c.e., new incarnations of Judaism emerged. Of these, rabbinic Judaism was the most successful, becoming the classical form of the religion.
Through ancient stories involving Jewish spinners and weavers, Peskowitz reexamines this critical moment in Jewish history and presents a feminist interpretation in which gender takes center stage. She shows how notions of female and male were developed by the rabbis of Roman Palestine and why the distinctions were so important in the formation of their religious and legal tradition.
Rabbinic attention to women, men, sexuality and gender took place
within the "ordinary tedium of everyday life, in acts that were both familiar
and mundane." While spinners and weavers performed what seemed like ordinary
tasks, their craft was in fact symbolic of larger gender and sexual issues,
which Peskowitz deftly explicates. Her study of ancient spinning and her
abundant source material will set new standards in the fields of gender
studies, Jewish studies and cultural studies.
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Miriam B. Peskowitz is assistant professor of religion at the University
of Florida and coeditor, with Laura Levitt, of Judaism Since Gender
(1996).
For more information and to view University Press of Florida's catalog,
visit their website at http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~upf/
Key to achieving this goal is the IFAS catalog of publications, videos, posters, identification cards, CD-ROMs and software.
For more information and to view the catalog, visit the IFAS website at http://ems.ifas.ufl.edu/ForSaleResources/forsale_98/