Death by Water

Death by Water
Author: Kenzaburo Oe
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Total Pages: 443
Release: 2015-10-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0802190871

Kenzaburo Oe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for creating "an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today." In Death by Water, his recurring protagonist and literary alter-ego returns to his hometown village in search of a red suitcase fabled to hold documents revealing the details of his father’s death during WWII: details that will serve as the foundation for his new, and final, novel. Since his youth, renowned novelist Kogito Choko planned to fictionalize his father’s fatal drowning in order to fully process the loss. Stricken with guilt and regret over his failure to rescue his father, Choko has long been driven to discover why his father was boating on the river in a torrential storm. Though he remembers overhearing his father and a group of soldiers discussing an insurgent scheme to stage a suicide attack on Emperor Mikado, Choko cannot separate his memories from imagination and his family is hesitant to reveal the entire story. When the contents of the trunk turn out to offer little clarity, Choko abandons the novel in creative despair. Floundering as an artist, he’s haunted by fear that he may never write his tour de force. But when he collaborates with an avant-garde theater troupe dramatizing his early novels, Kogito is revitalized by revisiting his formative work and he finds the will to continue investigating his father’s demise. Diving into the turbulent depths of legacy and mortality, Death by Water is an exquisite examination of resurfacing national and personal trauma, and the ways that storytelling can mend political, social, and familial rifts.

Where the Water Goes

Where the Water Goes
Author: David Owen
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2017-04-11
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0698189906

“Wonderfully written…Mr. Owen writes about water, but in these polarized times the lessons he shares spill into other arenas. The world of water rights and wrongs along the Colorado River offers hope for other problems.” —Wall Street Journal An eye-opening account of where our water comes from and where it all goes. The Colorado River is an essential resource for a surprisingly large part of the United States, and every gallon that flows down it is owned or claimed by someone. David Owen traces all that water from the Colorado’s headwaters to its parched terminus, once a verdant wetland but now a million-acre desert. He takes readers on an adventure downriver, along a labyrinth of waterways, reservoirs, power plants, farms, fracking sites, ghost towns, and RV parks, to the spot near the U.S.–Mexico border where the river runs dry. Water problems in the western United States can seem tantalizingly easy to solve: just turn off the fountains at the Bellagio, stop selling hay to China, ban golf, cut down the almond trees, and kill all the lawyers. But a closer look reveals a vast man-made ecosystem that is far more complex and more interesting than the headlines let on. The story Owen tells in Where the Water Goes is crucial to our future: how a patchwork of engineering marvels, byzantine legal agreements, aging infrastructure, and neighborly cooperation enables life to flourish in the desert—and the disastrous consequences we face when any part of this tenuous system fails.

Dead in the Water

Dead in the Water
Author: Richard Beasley
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2021-02-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1761061062

Full-throated and provocative, this is a very personal battle cry to save our most precious natural resource. 'I LOVE IT.' Peter FitzSimons 'With a deft mixture of outrage, humour and in-depth knowledge, only Beasley could make water policy a page turner.' Craig Reucassel 'It's great to shed some more light on the policy creep and mismanagement that is driving environmental degradation of many of the Murray-Darling Basin rivers.' Professor Richard Kingsford, Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists 'We want to reset these bio-diversities and the ecologies in our country. We want to see our fish spawning as they once were, our animals coming back down to drink. Fresh quality water out of the Coorong, not this super saline stuff that we're living in today's environment. It's slowly dying. You can smell the impact of what's happening . . .' Grant Rigney, Ngarrindjeri Nation, from his sworn evidence at the Royal Commission into the Murray-Darling Basin. Richard Beasley is fed up. He's fed up with vested interests killing off Australia's most precious water resource. He's fed up with the cowardice and negligence that have allowed Big Agriculture and irrigators to destroy a river system that can sustain both the environment and the communities that depend on it. He's fed up that a noble plan to save Murray-Darling Basin based on the 'best scientific knowledge' has instead been corroded by lies, the denial of climate change, pseudoscience and political expediency. He pulls no punches. He's provocative, he's outrageous, he points the finger without shame. And he will leave you very, very angry. Dead in the Water would be political satire of the highest order . . . if it weren't so tragically true.

Titanic

Titanic
Author: Tom Bradman
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 129
Release: 2012-03-29
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 140818074X

Fascinating fictional retelling of the events that led to the tragedy of the Titanic, based on documents from the National Archives and written by bestselling author Tony Bradman and his son Tom. A Belfast boy is terrified of getting a job in the dockyard where the Titanic is being built, and where his father died. Instead he gets a job on the ship, where he thinks his biggest problem is his rivalry with a fellow ship's boy who calls him a coward. On the night the unsinkable ship meets the iceberg, he must find out how brave he really is.

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes
Author: Dan Egan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2017-03-07
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0393246442

New York Times Bestseller Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Award "Nimbly splices together history, science, reporting and personal experiences into a taut and cautiously hopeful narrative.… Egan’s book is bursting with life (and yes, death)." —Robert Moor, New York Times Book Review The Great Lakes—Erie, Huron, Michigan, Ontario, and Superior—hold 20 percent of the world’s supply of surface fresh water and provide sustenance, work, and recreation for tens of millions of Americans. But they are under threat as never before, and their problems are spreading across the continent. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes is prize-winning reporter Dan Egan’s compulsively readable portrait of an ecological catastrophe happening right before our eyes, blending the epic story of the lakes with an examination of the perils they face and the ways we can restore and preserve them for generations to come.

Water-Related Death Investigation

Water-Related Death Investigation
Author: Kevin L. Erskine
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2010-10-25
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1439816379

All too often, police called to the scene of a water-related death may consider it an accidental drowning before they even arrive. But the investigation of these types of deaths requires the same careful and thorough documentation as in other potentially non-natural deaths and these efforts must be carried through all stages of investigation. Water

Death by Water

Death by Water
Author: Kerry Greenwood
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2018-04-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1472126769

The nice men at P+O are worried. A succession of jewellery thefts from first class passengers is hardly the best advertisement for their cruise liners, particularly when it is likely that a passenger is doing the stealing. Phryne Fisher, with her Lulu bob, green eyes, Cupid's bow lips and Chanel travelling suits, is exactly the sort of elegant sleuth to take on a ring of jewellery thieves aboard the high seas - or at least, aboard the SS Hinemoa on a luxury cruise to New Zealand. With the Maharani - the Great Queen of Sapphires - as the bait, Phryne rises magnificently to the challenge. There are shipboard romances, champagne cocktails, erotic photographers, jealous husbands, mickey finns, blackmail and attempted murder, all before the thieves find out - as have countless love-smitten men before them - that where the glamorous and intelligent Phryne is involved, resistance is futile.

The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray

The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray
Author: Jorge Amado
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 96
Release: 2012-08-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101603542

A Penguin Classic Widely considered the greatest work by the foremost Brazilian author of the twentieth century, The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray comes to Penguin Classics in a new translation by the dean of Portuguese-language translators, Gregory Rabassa. It tells the story of Joaquim Soares da Cunha, who drops dead after he abandons his life of upstanding citizenship to assume the identity of Quincas Water-Bray, a “champion drunk” and bum who is whisked along on a postmortem journey that climaxes in his loss at sea. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Blue Death

The Blue Death
Author: Robert D. Morris
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2007-07-31
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0060730897

With the keen eyes of a scientist and the sensibilities of a seasoned writer, Dr. Robert Morris chronicles the fascinating and at times frightening story of our drinking water. His gripping narrative vividly recounts the epidemics that have shaken cities and nations, the scientists who reached into the invisible and emerged with controversial truths that would save millions of lives, and the economic and political forces that opposed these researchers in a ferocious war of ideas. In the gritty world of nineteenth-century England, amid the ravages of cholera, Morris introduces John Snow, the physician who proved that the deadly disease could be hidden in a drop of water. Decades later in the deserts of Africa, the story follows Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch as they raced to find the cause of cholera and a means to prevent its spread. In the twentieth century, burgeoning cities would subdue cholera and typhoid by bending rivers to their will, building massive filtration plants, and bubbling poisonous gas through their drinking water. However, with the arrival of the new millennium, the demon of waterborne disease is threatening to reemerge, and a growing body of research has linked the chlorine relied on for water treatment with cancer and stillbirths. In The Blue Death, Morris dispels notions of fail-safe water systems. Along the way he reveals some shocking truths: the millions of miles of leaking water mains, constantly evolving microorganisms, and the looming threat of bioterrorism, which may lead to catastrophe. Across time and around the world, this riveting account offers alarming information about the natural and man-made hazards present in the very water we drink.