New in Nature and Ecology!

Whit Gibbons and Anne R. Gibbons’s Ecoviews Too: Ecology for All Seasons is based on the popular weekly column “Ecoviews,” published by numerous newspapers for more than thirty years. A follow-up to Ecoviews: Snakes, Snails and Environmental Tales, this lively and entertaining book provides a fascinating and thought-provoking look at the ecology of animals, plants, and their habitats, and promotes awareness of pressing environmental issues.

Because nature, in all its myriad and amazing manifestations, can be enjoyed all year round, this collection is conveniently divided into four sections paralleling the seasons and tracking the adaptations and responses of wildlife to the relentless changes that occur at any location over time. The ecological vignettes focus on seasonal happenings, particularly holidays and historic events that define a moment when the connection between society and our natural surroundings was fundamentally altered.

An intriguing and captivating publication, Ecoviews Too is comprised of fifty informative essays that address ecological topics such as camouflage and mimicry, hibernation and estivation, the human need to encounter scary animals, the mysteries of plant dormancy in winter, the comeback of the wild turkey coinciding with the decline of bobwhites, the chemistry behind the color change in fall leaves, and the top ten environmental problems facing the world today. Educating, entertaining, and delighting a general audience, especially those with an interest in nature, Ecoviews Too provides a useful resource for students and scientists alike.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Whit Gibbons is a professor emeritus of ecology at the University of Georgia’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory in Aiken, South Carolina. He is the author of more than a dozen popular and scientific books on the reptiles and amphibians of the United States, including Their Blood Runs Cold (University of Alabama Press, 1983) and Poisonous Plants and Venomous Animals of Alabama and Adjoining States (University of Alabama Press, 1990). He is the coauthor of Ecoviews: Snakes, Snails, and Environmental Tales (University of Alabama Press, 1998).
 
Anne R. Gibbons was a freelance editor until her retirement in 2014. She has worked for Columbia University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, the University of New Mexico Press, and the University of Alabama Press, among others. She is the coauthor of Ecoviews: Snakes, Snails, and Environmental Tales (University of Alabama Press, 1998).

PRAISE FOR ECOVIEWS TOO
“Ecoviews Too is an excellent collection of essays on ecology, natural history, and conservation, but with an abundance of philosophy and humor.”
—Robert W. Hastings, author of The Lakes of Pontchartrain: Their History and Environments

SPECS
224 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8173-5875-4 Paper
ISBN: 978-0-8173-9083-9 Ebook
$24.95

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New! Pecan: America’s Native Nut Tree

From the first written record of it made by the Spaniard Cabeza de Vaca in 1528 to its nineteenth-century domestication and its current development into a multimillion dollar crop, the pecan tree has been broadly appreciated for its nutritious nuts and its beautiful wood. In Pecan: America’s Native Nut Tree, Lenny Wells explores the rich and fascinating story of one of North America’s few native crops, long an iconic staple of southern foods and landscapes.

Fueled largely by a booming international interest in the pecan, new discoveries about the remarkable health benefits of the nut, and a renewed enthusiasm for the crop in the United States, the pecan is currently experiencing a renaissance with the revitalization of America’s pecan industry. The crop’s transformation into a vital component of the US agricultural economy has taken many surprising and serendipitous twists along the way. Following the ravages of cotton farming, the pecan tree and its orchard ecosystem helped to heal the rural southern landscape. Today, pecan production offers a unique form of agriculture that can enhance biodiversity and protect the soil in a sustainable and productive manner.

Among the many colorful anecdotes that make the book fascinating reading are the story of André Pénicaut’s introduction of the pecan to Europe, the development of a Latin name based on historical descriptions of the same plant over time, the use of explosives in planting orchard trees, the accidental discovery of zinc as an important micronutrient, and the birth of “kudzu clubs” in the 1940s promoting the weed as a cover crop in pecan orchards.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lenny Wells is an associate professor in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at the University of Georgia. His work with the Cooperative Extension Service is focused primarily on developing sustainable methods of pecan culture. Wells edited the Southeastern Pecan Growers Handbook and has been a regular columnist for Pecan South, The Pecan Grower, the Albany Herald, and Georgia Gardening.

PRAISE FOR PECAN
“I have known Lenny Wells for quite some time and was well aware of his expertise as a pecan scientist and extension specialist. What I was not aware of was his ability as a storyteller. I was captivated by the story, and riveted by the accounts as he related them. The book is not only a unique history of the pecan, but an interesting account of a significant part of American history.”
—William D. Goff, senior editor for Pecan Production in the Southeast

“Lenny Wells has done a masterful job weaving together many topics regarding the pecan-tree improvement, propagation, horticulture, and the related topics of environmental science, natural history, and the duality of human planning and human caprice-relating it to the history and culture of North America over the last four hundred years.”
—Henry Hughes, director of education at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens, Birmingham, Alabama

SPECS
320 pages / 35 color figures / 8 B&W figures / 1 map
ISBN: 978-0-81730 1887-1 Cloth
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8896-6 Ebook
$29.95

New from FC2, “The Seven Autopsies of Nora Hanneman”

The nineteen stories in The Seven Autopsies of Nora Hanneman track the splintered trajectory of the title character, tracing a chickenscratch line of psychosexual development from childhood to old age. Two schoolgirls culminate their sexual exploration in a surreal act of cannibalism. A sister molds her dead brother’s body into a bird. A woman gives birth to balls of twine and fur (among other things). A sex worker engages a version of herself in a brothel of prostituted body parts.

Courtney E. Morgan tears apart a host of archetypes and tropes of femininity—dismembering them, skinning them, and then draping them one by one over her characters like fur coats—revealing them as illfitting, sometimes comedic, sometimes monstrous, and always insufficient, masks. In stories that range from fairy tale to horror story, from confessional to erotica to creation myth, mutability, instability, and liminality are foregrounded, blurring the lines between birth and death, death and sex, tugging at the transitional spaces of adolescence and gestation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Courtney E. Morgan’s work has appeared in Pleiades, The American Book Review, The Red Anthology, and elsewhere. The founder and editor of The Thought Erotic, an online journal, she received her MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder and lives in Denver.

PRAISE FOR SEVEN AUTOPSIES
“Courtney Morgan’s dark and surprising stories turn sharp corners. You read and discover that the passage between life and death is the threshold you already crossed. Morgan is a writer whose sentences produce what they describe: the disorderly sensation of a threatening desire.”
—Joanna Ruocco, author of Dan, Another Governess/The Least Blacksmith, and A Compendium of Domestic Incidents

“The Seven Autopsies of Nora Hanneman is disarming and smart and spooky. I’ve never read anything quite like it.”
—Noy Holland, author of Bird and Swim for the Little One First

“In The Seven Autopsies of Nora Hanneman, Courtney Morgan has designed a map of the female body and a psychosexual journey. Weaving her way through different storytelling modes, including fairy tale and horror, fiction and nonfiction, literal and lyric, these creepy but also vital stories create, decreate, and recreate the skins we live in: language and the body. Breathtakingly.”
—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Small Backs of Children and The Chronology of Water: A Memoir

SPECS
216 pages
ISBN: 978-1-57366-059-4 Paper
ISBN: 978-1-57366-870-5 Ebook
$17.95