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Presentation of the sculptural artworks of Newfoundland artist Margaret Ryall

Ned Shenton's eighty plus years have been full of adventure. He grew up in small town Pennsylvania, the son of an famous illustrator father and a writer mother but he did not follow in either of their footsteps. Rather he studied oceanography at Texas A&M and worked in the field for many years. He became an expert in underwater craft and eventually joined Jacques Cousteau's famous diving saucer crew. Along the way he worked on teams that photographed the early space satellites and drilled into the Greenland ice sheet. He has loved several old houses, many boats and innumerable automobiles. Looking back over his well-spent life, Ned Shenton is truly grateful.

1915 to 1918 was a tumultuous period of Chinese history. In 1912, the 250-year-old Qing dynasty had been overthrown and powerful generals and political leaders were vying for power. Warlords and rebel armies were ranging the countryside; there was no effective central government, and foreign businessmen and missionaries were walled in well-defended compounds.In the midst of this chaos, a twenty-four-year-old college graduate named James Archibald Mitchell, landed in Shanghai to teach English at St John’s University, the so-called Harvard of the East.Mitchell was an avid diarist, a skilled photographer and an acute observer of local customs, and whenever he had time off he set out to explore the country, the presence of warring armies and travel difficulties notwithstanding.Arch, as he was known, was brought up in Centreville, Maryland, the son of a popular Episcopalian minster, and was educated at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He was essentially a country boy, a dyed-in-the wool American with no international experience, and the storied Orient was both an inspiration and a shock to him. But as he makes clear in an early journal, his intention was to record what he saw with an objective, eye --- not an easy task for one so deeply schooled in Christianized Western culture.What emerged over the course of three years, is a very personal account of his time in China during the Warlord Period in both words and photographs, a record of peasant life, boat families, climbing and hunting expeditions, and above all, exquisite images of the Chinese people and their land.Apart from being a good, entertaining read and visual documentation, Travels in a Vanishing Empire is record of everyday Chinese life, an aspect of history that is not well covered in books about this period.It is also, although unstated, an account of the moral growth of an individual. Mitchell’s travels reinforced his earliest feelings about people different than himself. He told one of his nephews after he returned home that he would now look at a person and see only another human being. After his return from the East, he joined the ministry and went on to become an early civil-rights activist.

Are there mushrooms in Antarctica? What kinds of fungi grow on deer dung? What would happen to me if I ate Amanita muscaria? What have mushrooms got to do with Santa Claus? All these questions, and many others you would not have guessed to ask, are answered in Giant Polypores and Stoned Reindeer: Rambles in Kingdom Fungi.Mycologist, author, traveler and raconteur, Lawrence Millman has brought together two dozen fascinating myco-tales of encounters with a wide range or organisms from extinct polypores, fungi that start fires and cure wounds, to intoxicated reindeer, wild mushroom collectors and Bornean head hunters.Giant Polypores is a fungophilic ramble from the Antarctic to Honduras to Iceland, searching for new and rare taxons, unusual characters and strange encounters.If you are enamored with such Latin binomials as Ganoderma applanatum, Gymnopilus spectabilis, Inonotus obliquus or Radulomyces copelandii you will love Giant Polypores and Stoned Reindeer. If terms such as resupinate fruiting body, cystidia, hymenium or glaborous make your heart beat just a bit faster, then, as mycologist emeritus, Elio Schaechter said, "I dare you to put this book down once you open it."