Word: alan
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Sometimes you don't know what you've got until it's gone. And that's the thought-experiment author Alan Weisman presents in his book The World Without Us - TIME's #1 Non-Fiction book of 2007. What if humanity were to vanish? What would happen to our planet? TIME's Amy Lennard Goehner discusses these and other end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it questions with the author...
Almost every revived American folk-music form was once recorded for the Library of Congress by musicologist Alan Lomax. He taped Sacred Harp in 1942 and '59. Unlike other finds such as Leadbelly, it failed to spark during the 1960s folk revival, but musicologists were infected. Now the form had imitable LPs and an academic beachhead...
...story itself has more romantic resonance than some of the more self-important Disney tales. Hans Christian Andersen gets a lot of the credit for that, but book writer Doug Wright (Grey Gardens, I Am My Own Wife) at least managed not to screw it up. Composer Alan Menken (with Glenn Slater replacing the late Howard Ashman as lyricist) has added several catchy new songs to his already fine score; the Broadway-razzmatazz number in which the Ursula, the sea witch (a sharp Sherie Renee Scott), celebrates her evil ways, "I Want the Good Times Back," would have made...
...Alan Rabinowitz knows tough. The director of the Wildlife Conservation Society's science and exploration program, Rabinowitz made his bones as a young zoologist who would go anywhere to map the shrinking habitats of big animals. He's endured 500-mile hikes through pure jungle, survived malaria, leech attacks, shaky flights on questionable airlines and virtually every other threat that comes from walking the wild parts of the world. His physical bravery earned him a movie-star nickname - the "Indiana Jones" of wildlife science - and even at 53, the muscle-bound Rabinowitz looks like he could wrestle a boa constrictor...
Rabinowitz makes clear just how painful the process was in his new book, Life in the Valley of Death. (Watch Alan Rabinowitz talk about the Hukawng Valley reserve, and the changing nature of wildlife conservation, on the new video Greencast.) First there was the forbidding Hukawng Valley itself, a remote chunk of mountainous jungle on the border with India, dubbed the "Valley of Death" by British refugees fleeing the Japanese advance into Burma during World War II. When Rabinowitz hiked deep into the Hukawng in 1999 - braving carnivorous leeches, among other trials - he was the first scientist to visit...