This book charts the convergence of science, culture, and politics across Portugal's empire, showing how a global geographical concept was born. In accessible, narrative prose, this book explores the unexpected forms that science took in the early modern world. It highlights little-known linkages between Asia and the Atlantic world.

The history of tropical medicine is as dramatic as the story of humankind. It has its own myths and legends, including tales of epidemics that destroyed whole civilizations. Today, with silent stealth, tropical diseases still claim more lives than all the current wars combined. Having had the privilege of working throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as in the great medical centers of Europe and the United States, the author presents the details essential for understanding pathogenesis, clinical manifestations, therapy, and prevention of the major tropical diseases. The text, now in its eighth edition, has been used for half a century by medical students, practicing physicians, and public health workers around the world. This fascinating book should also be of interest to a broad, nonmedical readership interested in world affairs. All royalties from the sale of this book go to the training of humanitarian workers.

Until relatively recently the valuable tropical montane cloud forests (hereaf ter usually referred to as TMCFs) of the world had scarcely come under the assaults experienced by the downslope montane and lowland forests. TMCFs are not hospitable environments for human occupation, and their remoteness (except in places near Andean high mountain settlements and in the Ethiopian Highlands) and difficult terrain have given them de facto protection. The ad jacent upper montane rain forests have indeed been under assault for timber, fuelwood, and for conversion to grazing and agriculture for many decades, even centuries in the Andes, but true cloud forest has only come under ex ploitation as these lower elevational resources have disappeared. They have also been "nibbled" at from above where there have been alpine grasslands under grazing pressure. Increasingly now, however, these cloud forest eco systems are being fragmented, reduced, and disturbed at an alarming rate. It is now becoming recognized that steps must be taken rapidly to increase our understanding of TMCF and to achieve their conservation, because: their water-capture function is extremely important to society; • their species endemism is high; they serve as refugia for endangered species being marginalized in these environments by increasingly transformed lower elevation ecosystems; they are relatively little studied; yet, their value to science is extremely high; they have low resilience to disturbance; vii viii Preface and many other reasons, which will be discussed subsequently in this publi cation.

From Africa to Asia and Latin America, the era of climate wars has begun. Extreme weather is breeding banditry, humanitarian crisis, and state failure. In Tropic of Chaos, investigative journalist Christian Parenti travels along the front lines of this gathering catastrophe--the belt of economically and politically battered postcolonial nations and war zones girding the planet's midlatitudes. Here he finds failed states amid climatic disasters. But he also reveals the unsettling presence of Western military forces and explains how they see an opportunity in the crisis to prepare for open-ended global counterinsurgency. Parenti argues that this incipient "climate fascism" -- a political hardening of wealthy states-- is bound to fail. The struggling states of the developing world cannot be allowed to collapse, as they will take other nations down as well. Instead, we must work to meet the challenge of climate-driven violence with a very different set of sustainable economic and development policies.

This atlas presents technical information for professionals who process and use temperate or tropical timber. It combines the main technical characteristics of 283 tropical species and 17 species from temperate regions most commonly used in Europe with their primary uses.