Root Science

Dr. Jessica Hernandez offers listeners an Indigenous, Global-South lens on the climate crisis, delivering a compelling and urgent exploration of its causes—and its costs. She shares how the impacts of colonial climate catastrophe—from warming oceans to forced displacement of settler ontologies—can only be addressed at the root if we reorient toward Indigenous science and follow the lead of Indigenous peoples and communities.

Magic in the air. Demons on the hunt. To save the kingdom, one girl must uncover her hidden abilities. Jak is finally doing what she loves, learning the secrets of magic. But when the queen summons her to meet in private, she discovers that not everything in Skyecliff is as it seems. Now she must find a way to keep to her studies and combat a growing threat within the city itself.

Are you tired of being miserable? You need to transform your life! It’s no use looking out - the power to transform yourself is within you. Let me show you just how different your life could be. My name’s Mark, and I was born and raised in the rolling green hills of Italy. For most of my adult life, I’ve felt like something was wrong. I was dissatisfied, stressed, and worn out by my job. That’s when I discovered the secret to unlocking my inner happiness and changing my life for the better.

The water sprite with roots is personified as a friend who experiences many encounters, imbalances, fears, and hopes in his water cycle journey. Because he shares an affinity with any organic life form derived from carbon and hydrogen, he can communicate with other beings and express their stories from their realities. Most importantly, he talks the walk through his mission of discovering cyclical truths from the sun to water to nutrients to plants to animals to decomposing bacteria to respecting the biodiversity essential for all life.

The first instalment of the weird and wonderful Ayla Trilogy. Growing up in a New York orphanage, Ayla has no idea who her family is. It is not until she comes to Ireland that she finds out just how deep her roots really are. Then her past rises up to haunt her and seeks to destroy her as Ayla is abducted and buried alive in the bowels of the earth. Above ground, her three best friends set out to find and save her from a fate that has been lying in wait for centuries. Guided by Ayla’s uncles, they must make a treacherous journey that takes them down among the very roots of time.

This Mardi Gras festival is like none ever seen before or will ever see in the future. Experience sibling rivalry at its finest as two sisters square off against each other for control of the book of roots. Unite with our hero George Genois as he is drawn deeper into the realm of magic and the forces of good and evil.

John A. Thompson takes a long view of America's dramatic rise as a world power, from the late 19th century into the post-World War II era. He shows how American leaders from Wilson to Truman developed an ever more capacious understanding of the national interest, and why by the 1940s most Americans came to support the price tag, in blood and treasure, attached to strenuous efforts to shape the world. The beliefs and emotions that led them to do so reflected distinctive aspects of U.S. culture, not least the strength of ties to Europe.

Beware Euphoria uncovers the roots of America's moral obsession with drug regulation, offering a lively and fascinating history of the nation's racialized fear of intoxication. Challenging the idea that early anti-drug laws in the United States arose from racial animus, George Fisher instead shows in textured detail how United States drug laws were driven by a deep-seated cultural taboo against euphoria and a preoccupation with white moral integrity.

Liberal democracy in America has always contained contradictions—most notably, a noble but abstract commitment to freedom, justice, and equality that, tragically, has seldom been realized in practice. While these contradictions have caused dissent and even violence, there was always an underlying and evolving solidarity drawn from the cultural resources of America’s “hybrid Enlightenment”. James Davison Hunter, who introduced the concept of “culture wars” 30 years ago, tells us in this new book that those historic sources of national solidarity have now largely dissolved.

Most histories of the Cherokee nation focus on its encounters with Europeans, its conflicts with the U.S. government, and its expulsion from its lands during the Trail of Tears. This work, however, traces the origins of the Cherokee people to the third century B.C.E. and follows their migrations through the Americas to their homeland in the lower Appalachian Mountains.

Eminent scholar Peter Irons makes a powerful and persuasive case that Blacks have always been held back by systemic racism in all major institutions that can hold power over them. Based on a wide range of sources, from the painful words of former slaves to test scores that reveal how our education system has failed Black children, this searing and sobering account of legal and extra-legal violence against Blacks peels away the fictions and myths expressed by White racists.

Thrust behind enemy lines, powerless and exposed. Jak and her companions have landed in Tradehall, now the seat of the enemy's power. They have one goal, to retrieve the Pillars of Eternity, or all will be lost. The Earth is not the only world at stake, but so too is the entirely new planet of Illadar. Together with a band of rebels hiding within the city, Jak must do what she can to make the impossible a reality, but what can she do when she's literally powerless?

Powerless. Abandoned. Without hope. After her friend betrayed her and left her to die on a frozen, unfinished magical world, Jak must survive. Trapped on the frozen planet of Illadar, she must unlearn all she knows about magic and leadership, and replace it with pure instinct to keep living. Not only does the barren wasteland threaten to freeze her and her armies to death, not only is there no way to find food, not only are scouts disappearing mysteriously, but there's only one cave and seven thousand people to house. Tensions are about to rise.

Unearthed is the story of how Claire Ratinon found belonging through falling in love with growing plants. For years, her troubled relationship with the land of her birth left her feeling unwanted, but reconnecting with nature allowed her finally to put down roots. Like many diasporic people of colour, Claire grew up feeling cut off from the natural world. She lived in cities, and stuck with the belief that success and status could fill the space where belonging was absent. Through learning the practise of growing food, she unpicked her beliefs about who she ought to be.

Warlock Marcus Shifter has been sent on the most dangerous mission of his career: travel to the remote Minotaur nation and convince them not to abandon the tenuous peace agreement between the humans and the paranormals. But securing that peace requires his best friend, Steve the Minotaur, to help him find a way into the isolated homeland. A homeland Steve left behind long ago, intending to bury his complicated past.

When 10-year-old Merry Maddock makes a holiday wish on a shooting star, she has no idea how her life will change. Suddenly, she's become the parent to a strange baby owl, and the caretaker of what appears to be an enchanted tree. But will her wish for a family Christmas be granted? Or will her mother's desire for a year without a holiday win out?

Why We Hate tackles a pressing issue of both longstanding interest and fresh relevance: why a social species like Homo sapiens should nevertheless be so hateful to itself. We go to war and are prejudiced against our fellow human beings. We discriminate on the basis of nationality, class, race, sexual orientation, religion, and gender. Why are humans at once so social and so hateful to each other? In this book, Michael Ruse looks at scientific understandings of human hatred, particularly Darwinian evolutionary theory.

In a world bursting with magic, Jak’s ill-chosen powers seem worthless. When she needed them most, her enchantments were nothing compared to the horde of demons that raided her village and murdered her father. Determined to fulfill his dying wish and prove her worth, she sets off on a desperate quest to find her long-lost mother. Knowing she wouldn’t last a day alone in the dangerous wilds, she joins a roving band of warriors and throws her full weight into training under the tutelage of a young man who saved her life during the demon attack.

Western culture hates the fact that we have bodies-from evangelical culture, which insists "you are a soul and have a body," to wellness culture that turns your control over your body into a moral test, to transphobic activism that insists any step taken to change one's body is an immoral act, to the treatment of disabled bodies in a profoundly ableist culture.

Joe's world is turned upside down when he discovers a shattered compass among the brambles where the Crystal Palace once stood and travels through time back to 1888.