David Baker chronicles the extraordinary life and achievements of John Varley Roberts (1841-1920), a working-class Yorkshireman who became a popular composer and one of Victorian England's most celebrated choral trainers as well as Organist of Magdalen College, Oxford.Roberts’ influence was considerable and enduring at a time when church music was undergoing a significant transformation in Britain. Roberts influenced generations of choristers, musicians, and choir directors, sittin...

The war is a war of machines; it will be won on the assembly line.- Lord Beaverbrook, Minister of Aircraft ProductionJust as vital as the battle on land or the struggle at sea, the air war ultimately tipped the balance of power in World War II. Many campaigns rode on the capabilities of their airforce, as British Spitfires were pitted against Messerschmitt Bf 109s and Japanese Zeros.Aerospace expert David Baker explores this battle ...

'Humorous and accessible but never trivial... full of entertainment and insight' SUSAN QUILLIAM, co-author of The Joy of SexHow did sex begin?How did it evolve to be so varied in humans?What might sex look like in the future?The Shortest History of Sex traces the long evolution of human sexuality from the first microscopic couplings two billion years ago to today's somewhat baffling array of passions, impulses and fetishes.

Heresy and the Ideal is a powerful collection of essays and essay-reviews which David Baker wrote and published throughout the 1990s. He thoroughly discusses the work of more than fifty contemporary poets, including T. R. Hummer, Miller Williams, Albert Goldbarth, Jane Kenyon, Galway Kinnell, Charles Simic, Ted Kooser, David Wojahn, Alice Fulton, Louise Glück, and Charles Wright. He takes as his models some of the great critical books of the past three decades, especially Richard Howard's ...

A peaceful throne and a perfect family. What else could Haldor want as the king of Placidius? Nothing more, nothing less… until a vicious witch plots to strike. Will the amiable king be able to transform himself into a gallant one to avenge his brutal loss?King Morwag of Arkèzia is abducted and his valiant sister, Princess Phade, is left to defend her people. She must rescue the king while protecting what she is left with. How is she expected to shield her kingdom all alone… if she...

The citizens of Cancatia believed the war to be over.But evil never rests.A broken heart and a solitary throne are all that remain for Haldor. As if his plight could not worsen, he discovers Auden is not who he once seemed. A prophecy of doom shatters Haldor’s visions of peace. Can the inhabitants withstand what lies ahead?Monsters besiege Arkèzia as Phade struggles to redeem her fractured kingdom. Betrayal lurks around every corner, and perilous emotions threaten t...

A beloved nature poet reflects on environmental change, political transformation, and the ineluctable fact of aging.We are all human and nonhuman on the move. The poems in Transit emerge from just such a walk through the world. In keenly observed verse, David Baker carries us across physical and emotional geographies, moving seamlessly from deep woods, city streets, and creek beds to the contours of his psyche and the larger cultural circumstances that mar...

What is more direct and intimate than one-to-one conversation? Here two forces in American poetry, the Kenyon Review and the University of Arkansas Press, bring together discussions between one of America's leading poets and editors, David Baker, and nine of the most exciting poets of our day. The poets, who represent a wide array of vocations and aesthetic positions, open up about their writing processes, their reading and education, their hopes for and discontents with ...

**“The craft of Whale Fall defies. It asserts, for me, a definition of poetry: an unbearable gulf of feeling made indelible by form.”—Diane Seuss, Paris ReviewA masterful and moving new volume from a “peerless poet of the natural world” (New York Times Book Review).**Acclaimed as an essential voice of the American Midwest, David Baker expands both his environment and his form in his eleventh collection. Whale Fall is about time, measured ...

Written by former NASA engineer Dr David Baker, A Degree in a Book: Electrical and Mechanical Engineering is presented in an attractive landscape format in full-color. With timelines, feature spreads and information boxes, readers will quickly get to grips with the fundamentals of electrical and mechanical engineering and their practical applications.The separate ages of engineering are divided into empirical and scientific periods, then the range of possibilities provided...

Renowned poets and experts in metrics respond to Robert Wallace's pivotal essay which clarifies and simplifies methods of studying poetry. Former United States Poet Laureate Robert Hass has called Wallace's essay a paradigm shift in our understanding of English prosody.

After the Reunion is an intensely lyrical collection of love poems and elegies from “the most expansive and moving poet to come out of the American Midwest since James Wright,” as Marilyn Hacker has described him. In these quiet, powerful, and eloquent poems, David Baker explores the kinship of love to loss, discovering that each is an inevitable component of the other. The final movement of the book is a unification of these two modes and becomes a celebration of continuities, ki...