Новинки Шарман Эпт Рассел

From the bestselling author of An Obsession with Butterflies comes a magical story of America in the time of the conquistadors.

In 1528, the real-life conquistador Cabeza de Vaca shipwrecked in the New World, where he lived for eight years as a slave, trader, and shaman. In this lyrical weaving of history and myth, the adventurer takes his four-year-old daughter Teresa from her home in coastal Texas to travel with him as a companion. But once Cabeza de Vaca reaches the outposts of New Spain and prepares to return overseas, politics compel him to leave the young girl behind. Her new life is that of a servant in the kitchen of a Spanish official.

Teresa grows up estranged from the magic she knew as a child, when she could speak to the earth and listen to animals. When a new epidemic of measles devastates the area, sixteen-year-old Teresa sets off in pursuit of a wisewoman she once met, a woman with secrets—a possible mentor. The girl befriends a warhorse, abandoned by a Spanish soldier grieving the death of his family, and a Mayan boy, a werejaguar who cannot control his shape-shifting. Because the boy and Teresa carry the measles virus, they are chased by Plague, another shape-shifter who takes on many human forms: Teresa’s dead mother, the housekeeper from the Spanish kitchen, and finally Cabeza de Vaca himself. Plague tries to trick Teresa into entering northern villages to further spread the epidemic.

To save herself and others, she is forced to listen to the earth again, sinking underground, swimming through limestone and fossil beds, looking for the means to outwit Plague, tame the jaguar in the Mayan boy, and find her own place in the New World.

Winner of Arizona Author's Award for Fiction, finalist for New Mexico Book Award for Children's Literature and the May Sarton Award for Children's Literature. (

In the exploding world of citizen science, hundreds of thousands of volunteers are monitoring climate change, tracking bird migration, finding stardust for NASA, and excavating mastodons. The sheer number of citizen scientists, combined with new technology, has begun to shape how research is conducted. Non-professionals become acknowledged experts: dentists turn into astronomers and accountants into botanists.

Diary of a Citizen Scientist is a timely exploration of this phenomenon, told through the lens of nature writer Sharman Apt Russell’s yearlong study of a little-known species, the Western red-bellied tiger beetle. In a voice both humorous and lyrical, Russell recounts her persistent and joyful tracking of an insect she calls “charismatic,” “elegant,” and “fierce.” Patrolling the Gila River in southwestern New Mexico, collector’s net in hand, she negotiates the realities of climate change even as she celebrates the beauty of a still-wild and rural landscape.

Russell’s self-awareness—of her occasionally-misplaced confidence, her quest to fill in “that blank spot on the map of tiger beetles,” and her desire to become newly engaged in her life—creates a portrait not only of the tiger beetle she tracks, but of the mindset behind self-driven scientific inquiry. Falling in love with the diversity of citizen science, she participates in crowdsourcing programs that range from cataloguing galaxies to monitoring the phenology of native plants, applauds the growing role of citizen science in environmental activism, and marvels at the profusion of projects around the world.

Diary of a Citizen Scientist offers its readers a glimpse into the transformative properties of citizen science—and documents the transformation of the field as a whole.

Every day, we wake up hungry. Every day, we break our fast. Hunger is both a natural and an unnatural human condition. In Hunger, Sharman Apt Russell explores the range of this primal experience. Step by step, Russell takes us through the physiology of hunger, from eighteen hours without food to thirty-six hours to three days to seven days to thirty days. In quiet, elegant prose, she asks a question as big as history and as everyday as skipping lunch: How does hunger work?

"Счастье, если в детстве у нас хороший слух: если мы слышим, как красота, любовь и бесполезность громко славят друг друга каждую минуту, из каждого уголка мира природы", - пишет американская писательница Шарман Эпт Рассел в своем "Романе с бабочками". На страницах этой элегантной книги все персонажи равны и все равно интересны: и коварные паразиты-наездники, подстерегающие гусеницу, и бабочки-королевы, сплетающиеся в восьмичасовом постбрачном полете, и английская натуралистка XVIII столетия Элинор Глэнвилль, которую за ее страсть к чешуекрылым ославили сумасшедшей, и американский профессор Владимир Набоков, читающий лекцию о бабочках…