Give road-weary eyes a break with this spiral-bound Large Scale edition featuring all the maps and accuracy you ve come to expect from Rand McNally, only bigger. This edition features the winners from the first Best of the Road® search for America s best small towns.Use the book s scannable tags to point your smartphone to updated road trip content and tools that enhance your travel planning. To download the Microsoft Tag reader, use the web browser on your phone to navigate to randmcnally.com/TAG and click the link provided. The 2013 Large Scale Road Atlas includes coupons for discounts at hotels, restaurants and family attractions so you can save money on your next road trip. Tags keep the offers fresh scan them with your smartphone to check back for additional deals.Product DescriptionUpdated U.S. atlas contains maps of every U.S. state that are 35% larger than those in standard version atlases plus 350 detailed city inset and national park maps and a comprehensive, unabridged index.Tough plastic spiral binding allows the book to lay open easily.Road construction projects and updates highlighted for every state, conveniently located above maps and updated at maps.randmcnally.com.Tags take your smartphone to even more travel info including a mobile mileage calculator, updated offers from our partners, and the Best of the Road app, where you can review your favorite destinations and points of interestRead about the winning teams and small towns from the first Best of the Road contest and rally. Visit bestoftheroad.com to vote for your favorites.Includes a handy list of hotel chain toll-free numbers for easy access from the road or at homeTourism websites and phone numbers for every U.S. state and Canadian province on map pagesContains mileage chart showing distances between 90 North American cities and national parks with driving times mapsDimensions: 10.375 x 15.375 Coverage: United States

In just over a week, a group of unpaid professional and citizen journalists who met on Twitter created a book to raise money for Japanese Red Cross earthquake and tsunami relief efforts. In addition to essays, artwork and photographs submitted by people around the world, including people who endured the disaster and journalists who covered it, 2:46: Aftershocks: Stories from the Japan Earthquake contains a piece by Yoko Ono, and work created specifically for the book by authors William Gibson, Barry Eisler and Jake Adelstein. “The primary goal,” says the book's editor, a British resident of Japan, “is to record the moment, and in doing so raise money for the Japanese Red Cross Society to help the thousands of homeless, hungry and cold survivors of the earthquake and tsunami. The biggest frustration for many of us was being unable to help these victims. I don’t have any medical skills, and I’m not a helicopter pilot, but I can edit. A few tweets pulled together nearly everything – all the participants, all the expertise – and in just over a week we had created a book including stories from an 80-year-old grandfather in Sendai, a couple in Canada waiting to hear if their relatives were okay, and a Japanese family who left their home, telling their young son they might never be able to return." ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of the price you pay (net of VAT, sales and other taxes) goes to the Japanese Red Cross Society to aid the victims of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. If you'd like to donate more, please visit the Japanese Red Cross Society website, where you can donate either via Paypal or bank transfer (watch out for the fees, though!) or the American Red Cross Society, which accepts donations directed to its Japan Earthquake and Pacific Tsunami fund (but only accepts donations made with U.S.-issued credit cards). And of course, if you like the book, please tell your friends, and tell them to give generously as well! Thank you! Japan really does appreciate your help!

In Collapse, Jared Diamond investigates the fate of past human societies, and the lessons for our own future. What happened to the people who built the ruined temples of Angkor Wat, the long-abandonded statues of Easter Island, the crumbling Maya pyramids of the Yucatan? All saw their cultures collapse because of environmental crises. And it looks as if those crises were self-induced. As in his celebrated global best-seller Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond brings together new evidence from a startling range of sources to tell a story with epic scope. And he lends it urgency for the modern world by probing the roots of decisions which allowed some societies to avoid ecological catastrophe, while others succumbed. How, he asks, can we learn to be survivors?

National BestsellerSeptember 8, 1900, began innocently in the seaside town of Galveston, Texas. Even Isaac Cline, resident meteorologist for the U.S. Weather Bureau failed to grasp the true meaning of the strange deep-sea swells and peculiar winds that greeted the city that morning. Mere hours later, Galveston found itself submerged in a monster hurricane that completely destroyed the town and killed over six thousand people in what remains the greatest natural disaster in American history--and Isaac Cline found himself the victim of a devestating personal tragedy.Using Cline's own telegrams, letters, and reports, the testimony of scores of survivors, and our latest understanding of the science of hurricanes, Erik Larson builds a chronicle of one man's heroic struggle and fatal miscalculation in the face of a storm of unimaginable magnitude. Riveting, powerful, and unbearably suspenseful, Isaac's Storm is the story of what can happen when human arrogance meets the great uncontrollable force of nature.

Product Details Paperback: 368 pages Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company (1994) Language: English ISBN-10: 0395683297 ISBN-13: 978-0395683293 Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces Rachel Carson (1907-1964) spent most of her professional life as a marine biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. By the late 1950s, she had written three lyrical, popular books about the sea, including the bestselling The Sea Around Us, and had become the most respected science writer in America. She completed Silent Spring against formidable personal odds, and with it shaped a powerful social movement that has altered the course of history.

"The Prize" recounts the panoramic history of oil - and the struggle for wealth and power that has always surrounded oil. This struggle has shaken the world economy, dictated the outcome of wars, and transformed the destiny of men and nations. "The Prize" is as much a history of the twentieth century as of the oil industry itself. The canvas of history is enormous - from the drilling of the first well in Pennsylvania through two great world wars to the Iraqui invastion of Kuwait and Operation Desert Storm.

A Silent Spring for oceans, written by "the Rachel Carson of the fish world" (The New York Times)Who can forget the sense of wonder with which they discovered the creatures of the deep? In this vibrant hymn to the sea, Callum Roberts—one of the world’s foremost conservation biologists—leads readers on a fascinating tour of mankind’s relationship to the sea, from the earliest traces of water on earth to the oceans as we know them today. In the process, Roberts looks at how the taming of the oceans has shaped human civilization and affected marine life.We have always been fish eaters, from the dawn of civilization, but in the last twenty years we have transformed the oceans beyond recognition. Putting our exploitation of the seas into historical context, Roberts offers a devastating account of the impact of modern fishing techniques, pollution, and climate change, and reveals what it would take to steer the right course while there is still time. Like Four Fish and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, The Ocean of Life takes a long view to tell a story in which each one of us has a role to play.

Homer called it a divine substance. Plato described it as especially dear to the gods. As Mark Kurlansky so brilliantly relates here, salt has shaped civilization from the beginning, and its story is a glittering often surprising part of the history of mankind. So valuable that it has often served as currency and still does in places today, salt inspired the earliest trade routes across unknown oceans and the remotest deserts. Wars have been fought over salt, and while salt taxes secured empires across Europe and Asia, they have also inspired revolution - Gandhi's salt march in 1930 began the overthrow of British rule in India. From the rural Sichuan province where the last home-made soya sauce is made to the Cheshire brine springs that supplied salt around the globe, Mark Kurlansky has produced a kaleidoscope of world history, a multilayered masterpiece that blends political, commercial, scientific, religious and culinary records into a rich and memorable tale.