BI-O-MIM-IC-RY

(From the Greek nios, life, and mimesis, imitation)

1.Nature as a model. Biomimicry is a new science that studies nature’s model and then imitates or takes inspiration from there designs and processes to solve human problem,e.g., a solar cell inspired by a leaf.

2. Nature as measure. Biomimicry uses an ecological standard to judge the “rightness” of our innovations. after 3.8 billion years of evolution, nature has learned: what works. What is approperate. What lasts.

3. Nature as mentor. Biomimicry is a new way of viewing and valing nature. It introduces an era based not on what we can extract from natural world, but on what we can learn from it.

by Janine M. Benyus

An American Journey

following Robert Frank’s footsteps fifty years after the Americans, French filmmaker Philippe Seclicer retraces Frank’s trip around United States in 1955 and 1956. Using the same unplanned, intuitive aprroach Frank pioneered, and working with only a small digital camera, Seclicer explores the spirit of the Beat Generation and impact of The American on photograph and culture in his 15000-mile odyssey through present-day America.

Melvin Konner

Melvin Konner,a renowned doctor and anthropologist, takes the measure of ” the Jewish body”, considering sex, circumcision and even those most eclusive and controversial of microscopic markers-Jewish genes. Konner looks at Jewish perspectives on the body as well as the ways in which non- Jewish have historically viewd Jewish physiology. With deep insight and great originality,Konner gives us nothing less than an anatomical history of the Jewish people. Melvin Konner holds PHD and MD degrees from Harvard University and taught at Harvard and Emory for over 30 years. his books include The Tangled Wing. Biological constrains on the human spirit and his writings has appeared in the New York  Times, The New York Review of Books, Newsweek, Scientific American and other publications.

Janice Erlbaum

Twenty years after she lived at a homeless shelter for teens, Janice Erlbaumwent back to volunteer. Thirty-four years old and a successful writer, she’d changed her life for the better, now she wanted to help someone else-someone like the girl she’d once been. then she met Sam.Janice followed Sam through detoxes and psy wards, halfway houses and hospitals. But just as Janice was on the verge of becoming the girl’s legal guardian, she discovered that Sam was sicker than anyone knew, in ways nobody could inmagined .Janice Erlbaum’s first book Girlbomb detailed her experiences as a teenager in a homeless shelter, and was named on of the Nw York Public Library’s “25 Books ro Remember” in 2006.

Lucette Lanado

Lucette Lanado was a successful Jewish Egyptian businessman, making deals and trades around Cairo dressed in signature white sharkskin suit.After the rise of the Nasser dictatorship, the Lagnado family lost everything and was forced to trade their life of luxury in Cairo for one of hardship, entering any country that would have them. A vivid, heartbreaking and powerful inversion of the American dream, Lucette Lanado’s unforgottable memoir is a sweeping story of family,faith, tradition, tragedy and triumph set against the stunning backdrops of Cairo, Paris and New York. Lucette Lanado is an award-winning investigative reporter for The Wall Streets Journal and recieved the Saint Rohr Perize for Jewish Literature.

China Hands

James Lilley’s life has been entwined with China’s fate since 1917, when his father started selling kerosene for Standard Oil along the Yangzi river.Lilley spent his childhood in China, much of it in Tsingtao, a bursting,Westernized port city. Days were filled with trips to the beach and trailing around older brother Frank, who became a mentor to young Jim. When world War 2 forced Lilley family to leave China, the die was already cast for a maturing jim. a professor at Yale took him aside and suggested a career in intellegence, a decision that meant a lifetime of returning to the country of his birth.China Hands, written in Lilley’s voice with the assistance of his journalist son Jeffrey, is a memoir of that exceptional life.

Lilley served for nearly thirty years in the CIA in Tokyo,Taiwan,Hongkong,Laos, Bangkok, Cambodia,and Peking before moving to the state Department in the early 1980s to begin a distingulishded diplomatic career. From covert operations during the wars in Korea and Vietnam, to participating in Richard Nixon’s opening to China as the CIA’s first station chief in Peking,Lilley rose up through the ranks of CIA to become the country’s leading intellegence officer on China. Then, as the United States’s top diplomat in Taiwan and South Korea while those countries became “true” democracies in the 1980s, while attempting to somehow bring Taipei and Peking closer together, and as ambassador to Peking during the bloody Tiananmen massacre of 1989, he participated in and witnessws extraordinary changes while advancing America’s interests in Asia.

China Hands recounts his adventures as well those of three generations of his family-all of them absorbing, many of them exciting, and one unduly tragic. It is a fascinating and moving look at America in Asia. Asia itself, and the remarkable life of one especially capable america.