Emily Wilson

Philosopher, dramatist, rhetorician, Stoic and pragmatist, Seneca was one of the most contradictory figures in ancient Rome, embracing a stern ascetic morality while amassing a fortune under Nero and eventually committing suicide. This definitive biography reveals a life lived perilously in the gap between ideals and reality.

What makes falcons different from other birds of prey? If it isn't their small size, it's their unique ability to be trained by people to hunt. Readers learn these facts and more through this volume, which offers an exciting perspective on important elementary life science topics. Readers will delight in learning about this raptor's appearance, survival techniques, predatory behavior, and more. Popular falcon species such as the Peregrine falcon are closely examined. Detailed photographs and fact boxes complete a comprehensive learning experience.

Beavers are nature's engineers, and their industriousness begins at home These busy animals work tirelessly to create elaborate lodges. Though they're important sites of food storage, safety, and raising kits, beaver homes also create and sustain ecosystems. This book, which was written to support elementary science curricula, allows readers to explore important science concepts, including habitat welfare and relationships in the natural world. Readers will learn about beavers' behavior, appearance, survival tactics, and their hardworking spirit. Colorful images, fact boxes, and diagrams offer opportunities for additional learning.

Beavers are nature's engineers, and their industriousness begins at home These busy animals work tirelessly to create elaborate lodges. Though they're important sites of food storage, safety, and raising kits, beaver homes also create and sustain ecosystems. This book, which was written to support elementary science curricula, allows readers to explore important science concepts, including habitat welfare and relationships in the natural world. Readers will learn about beavers' behavior, appearance, survival tactics, and their hardworking spirit. Colorful images, fact boxes, and diagrams offer opportunities for additional learning.

By any measure, Seneca (?4-65AD) is one of the most significant figures in both Roman literature and ancient philosophy. His writings are voluminous and diverse, ranging from satire to disturbing, violent tragedies, from metaphysical theory to moral and political discussions of virtue and anger. Seneca found himself at the turbulent center of Roman imperial power, making him thus an important witness to the Empire's first dynasty, the Julio-Claudians. Exiled by the emperor Claudius in the wake of a sex scandal, he was eventually brought back to Rome to become tutor and, later, speech-writer and advisor to Nero. Seneca was suspected of plotting against Nero, condemned to die, and ultimately took his own life-an act that is one of the most iconic suicides in Western history. The life and works of Seneca pose a number of fascinating challenges. How can we reconcile the bloody tragedies with the prose works advocating a life of Stoic tranquility? How are we to balance Seneca the man of principle, who counseled a life of calm and simplicity, with Seneca the man of the moment, who amassed a vast personal fortune in the service of an emperor seen by many, at the time and afterwards, as an insane tyrant? In this definitive and moving biography, Emily Wilson presents Seneca as a man under enormous pressure, struggling for compromise in a world of absolutism. The Greatest Empire offers us the portrait of a life lived perilously in the gap between political realities and philosophical ideals, between what we aspire to be and what we are.

Good Night, Bears: Learning About Hibernation is aligned to the Common Core State Standards for English/Language Arts, addressing Literacy. RI.1.8 and Literacy. L.1.4. Big brown bears and their cubs go through all the steps to get ready for hibernation. Readers will love the up-close photographs and narrative nonfiction text. This book should be paired with "Why Do Animals Hibernate? (9781448889952) from the InfoMax Common Core Readers Program to provide the alternative point of view on the same topic.

Eight years after her revelatory first book, Emily Wilson deepens her focus and extends her vision in new poems of striking intelligence and originality. Venturing into landscapes both interior and exterior, ""Micrographia"" explores what Wilson calls 'the complex rigged wildness' of geographical, emotional, and verbal states, a territory located 'somewhere in that/enjambment within/a cave within the brain'. Following in the tradition of such poets as Dickinson, Bishop, and Ammons, Wilson's work regards the mind as 'enmeshed' with the natural world, always 'at the hinge of going over'. Her way of speaking is as precisely calibrated and as restless as her way of seeing, and the terrain of ""Micrographia"" rises from a rich and unpredictable encounter with poetic language and form. At the same time, the voice of these poems is never less than urgent, 'coming clear by the foment/moving through it'. Wilson's eye travels the troubled boundaries between visible and invisible worlds, ranging from coastal Nova Scotia to the Andean highlands to Brooklyn's industrial Gowanus Canal to the poet's own backyard. Steeped in tradition but spoken in tones that are utterly distinctive, these intricate poems enter into the microscopic, micrographic spaces between words and things, between thinking and being.

There were heroic lives and deaths before and after, but none quite like Socrates'. He did not die by sword or spear, braving all to defend home and country, but as a condemned criminal, swallowing a painless dose of poison. And yet Socrates' death in 399 BCE has figured large in our world ever since, shaping how we think about heroism and celebrity, religion and family life, state control and individual freedom, the distance of intellectual life from daily activity--many of the key coordinates of Western culture. In this book Emily Wilson analyzes the enormous and enduring power the trial and death of Socrates has exerted over the Western imagination. Beginning with the accounts of contemporaries like Aristophanes, Xenophon, and, above all, Plato, the book offers a comprehensive look at the death of Socrates as both a historical event and a controversial cultural ideal. Wilson shows how Socrates' death--more than his character, actions, or philosophical beliefs--has played an essential role in his story. She considers literary, philosophical, and artistic works--by Cicero, Erasmus, Milton, Voltaire, Hegel, and Brecht, among others--that used the death of Socrates to discuss power, politics, religion, the life of the mind, and the good life. As highly readable as it is deeply learned, her book combines vivid descriptions, critical insights, and breadth of research to explore how Socrates' death--especially his seeming ability to control it--has mattered so much, for so long, to so many different people.

Twenty heart-felt narratives of survival and courage