"Welcome to a world of wind and bone, songs and silence, betrayal and courage. Kirit Densira cannot wait to pass her wingtest and begin flying as a trader by her mother's side, being in service to her beloved home tower and exploring the skies beyond. When Kirit inadvertently breaks Tower Law, the city's secretive governing body, the Singers, demand that she become one of them instead. In an attempt to save her family from greater censure, Kirit must give up her dreams to throw herself into the dangerous training at the Spire, the tallest, most forbidding tower, deep at the heart of the City. As she grows in knowledge and power, she starts to uncover the depths of Spire secrets. Kirit begins to doubt her world and its unassailable Laws, setting in motion a chain of events that will lead to a haunting choice, and may well change the city forever--if it isn't destroyed outright"--

You'll find complete plans and instructions for building a kiln of any size and purpose in this informative volume. Plus, discover the principles of efficient design and information on refractory materials, building methods, flues, curved and common walls, bricklaying courses and arches.

A memoir from the travel writer and editor who spent her childhood moving between her "Great Alaskan" father on the tundra in the summer and her more urbane mother in Baltimore during the school year, a lifestyle that led to an adult who both feared and idolized human connection.

Presents simple experiments that exhibit the principles of the Earth sciences.

A little girl, oblivious to the world around her, supports herself on an axe that is taller than she herself. The sharp blade that has just felled a tree points right at what is beneath her dress, lifted by a gentle updraft. The stump mirrors her rosy pudenda. Stephan Melzl (b. Basel, 1959; lives and works in Frankfurt am Main) has set the child into a detail from Fragonard’s rococo painting “Swing,” which shows a courtly lady on a swing inviting her lover’s gaze to penetrate beneath her skirt; Melzl’s own picture bears the curt title “Cut” (2011). The meticulously calculated hyperbole of Melzl’s Renaissance-style oil-on-wood depictions of his subjects may be read as a sharp-edged barb against hypocritical visions of the idyllic life that we are only too prone to cling to. So the artist’s visual universe is about more than the ambiguous motifs: it aims to sharpen the gaze with which the viewer contemplates the artist’s theatrical productions and the diverse associations they evoke. Thi