New Release Books

Today’s first Featured New Release is Skinner ($4.99 Kindle), by David Bernstein [DarkFuse].

Book Description
For six close friends, a weekend away turns deadly when their vehicle skids off the road and crashes in a remote part of the Adirondack Mountains.

In the direct path of a blizzard, they are hurt, cold and scared, wondering if they’ll make it through the night. But the group’s luck seemingly changes when they take refuge in a small cabin.

Their plan is simple: wait for the storm to pass. But there is something else out there that has its own plans for them.

Invade. Reveal secrets. Invoke madness. Make enemies out of friends. Create chaos. And shed blood.

Today’s second Featured New Release is Between the Tides ($12.99 Kindle), by Susannah Marren [St. Martin’s Press / Macmillan].

Book Description
Lainie Smith Morris is perfectly content with her life in New York City: she has four children, a handsome surgeon husband, and good friends. This life she has built is shattered, however, when her husband Charles announces he has accepted a job in Elliot, New Jersey, and that the family must relocate. Lainie is forced to give up the things she knows and loves.

Though Charles easily adapts to the intricacies of suburban life, even thriving in it, Lainie finds herself increasingly troubled and bored by her new limited responsibilities, and she remains desperate for the inspiration, comfort, and safety of the city she called home. She is hopelessly lost–until, serendipitously, she reconnects with an old friend/rival turned current Elliot resident, Jess. Pleased to demonstrate her social superiority to Lainie, Jess helps her find a footing, even encouraging Lainie to develop as an artist; but what looks like friendship is quickly supplanted by a betrayal with earth-shattering impact, and a move to the suburbs becomes a metaphor for a woman who must search to find a new home ground in the shifting winds of marriage, family, career, and friendship.

Between the Tides is an engrossing, commanding debut from tremendous new talent Susannah

Today’s third Featured New Release is The Science of Open Spaces: Theory and Practice for Conserving Large, Complex Systems ($38.00 Kindle; $76.66 Hardcover), by Charles G. Curtin [Island Press].

Book Description
From the days of the American Frontier, the term “open spaces” has evoked a vision of unspoiled landscapes stretching endlessly toward the horizon, of nature operating on its own terms without significant human interference. Ever since, government agencies, academia, and conservation organizations have promoted policies that treat large, complex systems with a one-size-fits-all mentality that fails to account for equally complex social dimensions of humans on the landscape. This is wrong, argues landscape ecologist and researcher Charles Curtin. We need a science-based approach that tells us how to think about our large landscapes and open spaces at temporally and spatially appropriate scales in a way that allows local landowners and other stakeholders a say in their futures.

The Science of Open Spaces turns conventional conservation paradigms on their heads, proposing that in thinking about complex natural systems, whether the arid spaces of the southwestern United States or open seas shared by multiple nations, we must go back to “first principles”–those fundamental physical laws of the universe–and build innovative conservation from the ground up based on theory and backed up by practical experience. Curtin walks us through such foundational science concepts as thermodynamics, ecology, sociology, and resilience theory, applying them to real-world examples from years he has spent designing large-scale, place-based collaborative research programs in the United States and around the world.

Compelling for not only theorists and students, but also practitioners, agency personnel, and lay readers, this book offers a thoughtful and radical departure from business-as-usual management of Earth’s dwindling wide-open spaces.

May be price matched at B&N, eBooks.com, iTunes or Kobo for those needing EPUB.

All prices current at the time the post is written. Most books remain at their listed price until “midnight” (each store operates on it’s own timezone and schedule), but prices can change at any moment. I have seen prices change within the hour or even minutes after posting.

from Books on the Knob http://ift.tt/1LFBH2m