the book is about a person who is relating a story suggesting that strange and unusual farm animals down the road from where he lives are doing strange and weird things. the actions that this person says he has witnessed or is witnessing are things that these animals would not and could not ever be capable of doing or even think of doing in real life.

Corruption, infatuation, and conflicting loyalties collide in a rural Southern mill town in this debut novel by an award-winning poet and environmentalist.On a placid Blue Ridge mountain lake on Labor Day Weekend in 1935, three locals in an overloaded boat drown, and the cotton mill scion who owns the lake is indicted for their murders. Decades later Ben Crocker—a reluctant participant in the aftermath of this long-forgotten tragedy—is drawn back into the morally am...

After reading J. A. Baker’s fifty-year-old British nature classic The Peregrine, John Lane found himself an ocean away, stalking resident red-shouldered hawks in his neighborhood in Spartanburg, South Carolina. What he observed was very different from what Baker deduced from a decade of chronicling the lives of those brooding migratory raptors. Baker imagined a species on the brink of extinction because of the use of agricultural chemicals on European farms. A half century later i...

Tommy is a Central Systems Postal Service captain tasked with returning the dead letters to their senders. On this trip a casket malfunctions. When he investigates he discovers a young woman who has been frozen for sixty-three years is thawing out. Once she awakens without any memories of her past her presence ignites an adventure that brands them as rogue, pits them against pirates and sees them chased across the galaxy by programing code from her distant past. In the process they uncover...

"In an age that values faster and faster travel, Lane's river memoir affirms the great value of floating and observing."— BooklistThree months after a family vacation in Costa Rica ends in tragedy when two fellow rafters die on the flooded Rio Reventazón, John Lane sets out with friends from his own backyard in upcountry South Carolina to calm his nerves and to paddle to the sea.Like Huck Finn, Lane sees a river journey as a portal to change, but un...

Lane drew a circle on a map that represented a one-mile radius from his home, and explored every facet of the place including the topography, history, ancient and current citizenry, and industry. This exploration sharpened his sense of place and serves as a model for how we might look at our own homes, terrain, and communities.

For space operators to find a derelict ship on one of the many dead worlds at the fringe of the Galaxy was not unusual, but in this instance it led to one of the weirdest adventures ever experienced by mortal beings. From a salvage point of view it was a worthless find, but its log book-and the small but priceless cargo it carried-opened up a wide field of speculation, prompting the people who found it to penetrate deeper into space in search of the nameless world from which the wreck had ...

First published in 1992. Aluminium is a relatively new material, first used on a commercial basis just over 100 years ago. Today it has taken its place alongside other traditional materials as an established building element. In this variable reference source, John Lane discusses the history and development of aluminium usage in the building industry. Its characteristics of strength, lightness and durability, coupled with easy formability, make it and ideal medium for this market.T...

Before the novel and the film Deliverance appeared in the early 1970s, any outsiders one met along the Chattooga River were likely serious canoeists or anglers. In later years, untold numbers and kinds of people have felt the draw of the river’s torrents, which pour down the Appalachians along the Georgia-South Carolina border. Because of Deliverance the Chattooga looms enigmatically in our shared imagination, as iconic as Twain’s Mississippi—or maybe Conrad’s Congo....

Acclaimed as one of the funniest and most perceptive accounts ever written about Peru, this travel book is exotically set in South America, spanning the sandy shores of the Pacific coast, across the heights of the snow-capped Andes to the dark rain forests of the Amazon, relating an interlude passed by an English adviser based in Lima improbably establishing a Ladies' Healthcare Clinic.Aside from the eccentric trials and tribulations of setting the new facility to work, a central f...

Romance, adventure, adversity and success - such is the panoramic sweep of this compelling story that starts and finishes in the little-known heart of the Amazon rain forest. A story that reaches out from the New World to the Old and back again to the jungle city of Iquitos and the headwaters of the mighty Amazon, king of rivers - this is a triumphal and joyous celebration of love and creation that sings in the heart like a great symphony.

One night, poet and environmental writer John Lane tuned in to a sound from behind his house that he had never heard before: the nearby eerie and captivating howls of coyotes. Since this was Spartanburg, South Carolina, and not Missoula, Montana, Lane set out to discover all he could about his new and unexpected neighbors.Coyote Settles the South is the story of his journey through the Southeast, as he visits coyote territories: swamps, nature preserves, old farm fields, s...