Bookshlef - a tal da Prateleira

Planetwalker: A Memoir of 22 Years of Walking and 17 Years of Silence - John Francis

As a young man, John Francis witnesses the devastating effects of a 1971 oil spill in San Francisco Bay. He stops using motorised transportation and begins a walk that will continue for twenty-two years and span two continents. A few months later, he takes a vow of silence that lasts seventeen years. Through his silence and walking he learns to listen and to become a good steward of the earth. Born the son of West Indian immigrants in North Philadelphia, John overcomes fear and the objections of his family as he walks from California to Montana in silence, earning college and graduate degrees in science and environmental studies. He then walks through America's heartland, where he earns a PhD. in land resources. When he reaches the East Coast, the United Nations Environment Programme appoints him goodwill ambassador to the world's grassroots communities, and the U.S. government recruits him to write oil spill regulations following the Exxon Valdez disaster." Planetwalker" is the deeply personal and engaging story of John's remarkable journey - the positive experiences, the challenging times, the diverse characters encountered, the majesty of our land - and the wisdom he gained along the way. Along with John's poems, drawings, and watercolors, the book also contains practical suggestions on how we too can become better stewards of the earth and make our own pilgrimages both great and small.

E o classico, indispensavel numa cidade em que ninguem tem tempo:

Einstein's Dreams - Alan Lightman

In this book, Alan Lightman has created a series of vignettes that describe some dreams that Einstein could have had while trying to understand the mysteries of relativity, space, and time. Each vignette contains a world that behaves according to a particular model or perception of time and space, inhabited by people who have evolved behaviors and philosophies as a consequence of this paradigm.
The stories work on at least two different levels. The first level contains many elements of science fiction. It asks questions like "What if time were circular and known to be so?" or "What if causality did not exist?" Picky readers looking only at this aspect will find the book to be rather uneven and strained. For example, a world with no time has been described with a series of evocative and frozen images of people and things, such as "A cat watching a bug on the window.". But a world without time could not have reached this state. Rather the worlds that Lightman described have reached some state, approximately something that we would recognize, and then have had this new time condition imposed upon them. But, these exceptions aside, the internal logic of each world can be very thought provoking.