Beaches, barrier islands and tidal inlets are valuable coastal resources and provide desirable environments that are often densely populated. They are dynamic landforms that change constantly, driven by both normal processes and energetic storms. They behave as one interconnected system and must be understood and managed as such. This book discusses their various morphologic features, as well as the processes that shape them and future challenges due to environmental change. A major focus is placed on the interaction between sandy beaches and tidal inlets, and the sediment exchange among various morphologic features. Balancing these valuable sediment resources while maintaining the natural sediment exchange constitutes a major goal of modern shore protection and coastal management. Illustrated with numerous aerial photographs to demonstrate how beaches and tidal inlets interact, this book provides a valuable reference for graduate students, researchers and professionals working in coastal management and geomorphology.

When Wang Ping was nine years old, she secretly set about binding her feet with elastic bands. Footbinding had by then been outlawed in China, women’s feet “liberated,” but at that young age she desperately wanted the tiny feet her grandmother had–deformed and malodorous as they were. By first examining the root of her own girlhood desire, Wang unleashes a fascinating inquiry into a centuries-old custom. Aching for Beauty combines Wang’s unique perspective and remarkable literary gifts in an award-winning exploration of the history and culture surrounding footbinding. In setting out to demystify this reviled tradition, Wang probes an astonishing range of literary references, addresses the relationship between beauty and pain, and discusses the intense female bonds that footbinding fostered. Her comprehensive examination of the notions of hierarchy, femininity, and fetish bound up in the tradition places footbinding in its proper context in Chinese history and opens a window onto an intriguing culture.

Publisher Fact Sheet A fascinating & haunting exploration of the bound foot in Chinese culture.

Looking at a wide swath of Chinese history and literature, this collection examines various issues stemming from immigration to America. Wang Ping conveys the voices of centuries of farmers and factory laborers, revolutionaries, writers, artists, and craftsmen. She has a unique gift for telling small stories with powerful emotional effects. The titular poem, "Ten Thousand Waves," was inspired by a tragedy that occurred on February 5, 2004. More than 20 Chinese laborers drowned in Morecambe Bay, England, when they were caught by an incoming tide. They were collecting cockles late in the evening, having been misinformed about the tidal times. The victims were undocumented immigrants, mainly from Fujian Province, China. In 2006, English filmmaker Nick Broomfield directed and produced Ghosts, a dramatic film based on the tragedy at Morecambe Bay. Not long after that, another filmmaker, Isaac Julien, commissioned Ping to write a narrative script for his film on global immigration, Small Boats. When he saw the finished poem, Julien decided to make a film installation specifically on Chinese immigration, which he entitled Ten Thousand Waves, after Ping's poem. Ten Thousand Waves has been featured at the Pace Foundation galleries in San Antonio, Texas, and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

There are only two ways to live our life, according to Albert Einstein: one is as if nothing is a miracle; the other, as if everything is a miracle. Life of Miracles along the Yangtze and Mississippi is a book about how the impossible became possible--about things that happened in China and America to the people Wang Ping grew up with, met, and befriended along her journeys between these two distant rivers. This is also a story about water, alive with spirits and energy, giving birth to all sentient beings. We are water. The river runs through us. Those who live in harmony with water can ride the current of the universe--the secret of Tao, reaching all the way to the sea of miracles, one story, one droplet, and one wave at a time. A miracle is a state of mind, a way of living: how we face hardship, pain, and tragedies, how we transform them into fuels for our journey and transcend them into joy and hope. This is a book about how ordinary people perform miracles every day; how we are touched, touching, all the time, across oceans and continents, across time and space, through our stories.

As an alternative therapist with "limited" knowledge, I actually have greater freedom and objectivity in performing my analyses, since I am not bound by the restrictions of the standard theories. For example, since the emergence of the idea that carbohydrates and excess calories are the causes of obesity, nearly all subsequent theories have involved "carbo diets," "carbo detox" or "low-calorie diets," "calorie burning," and the like. However, my observations and practice over the past dozen years have proven that carbohydrates, fats, and sugar, and possibly blood type, affect body weight increase only when a person consumes greater than normal quantities. If dietary intake is too low (less than normal), thus not meeting the body's needs for cell growth, these factors have little or no influence. Why does the title of this book combine the words "slim" and "recovered?" Simply because in over 80 percent of obesity cases, the patients have other health problems as well. The most common complaint is acute or chronic gastric problems; others include vertigo, anemia, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels, heart, liver and kidney problems, and menstrual difficulties. So we can see that excess body weight is closely related to other health complaints. In Slim and Recovered, Ping Wang analyzes the problems of being overweight and disease, based solely on his observations and experience in therapeutic practice. He limits the illnesses discussed here to those that have been handled with satisfactory results providing greater insight. The basic philosophy introduced in this book is that we should not consume more food than our digestive organs can handle, so that we can avoid obesity and other health problems; and we should not deceive ourselves by thinking that fruit, vegetables, and water will not make us fat. These cases are analyzed from a perspective that is unconventional, yet based on reality. Discover the answers to these difficult questions: Why do some people eat a lot, but stay slim? I consume low-fat, low-carb, low-calorie food and drink, and routinely exercise on the treadmill, why am I still overweight? Why do some vegetarians get high blood pressure and even suffer strokes? Why do some people have strokes when they're still very young? I regularly exercise with weights and equipment, why are my arms and legs getting larger, not smaller? My mother drinks plenty of water, why are her legs swollen and her uric acid levels so high?

The collection of stories follows a Chinese woman in key moments of her life-- from the child who discovers a contraband lipstick during the Cultural Revolution to the young woman in America who finally obtains her green card. On the way, the reader discovers such Chinese cultural concepts as chu jai, whereby no matter how successful, a woman is without a home until she is married. The author is a Chinese immigrant and this is her first book.

There is a close association between urban poverty and housing transitional societies. Along with job security, housing was the most important element of the socialist welfare system. Housing privatisation has far reaching economic implications.

This book looks at coastal management as it applies to the physical barrier/inlet system of the Gulf of Mexico. This is an excellent region for considering this topic because it has a wide range of situations to be considered in its management-remote areas, huge urban populations, and tidal inlets, including some natural, some dredged, and others that have been structured for more than a century. Discussing options for managing and protecting the various elements of the barrier/inlet system, the authors consider each approach in terms of costs, logistics, and success or failure. They extensively cover anthropogenic impact as well as management problems generated by natural processes, especially hurricanes and other severe storms. The authors discuss the impact of management decisions and related projects, providing decision makers with the proper information to make decisions on zoning, development, construction of major structures, environmental concerns, etc.

In this new collection of poems, Wang Ping lyrically recounts her relationships, her arrival and survival in New York from Shanghai, a trip to the Southwest United States, and her experience returning to China after an absence of ten years. In addition to personal memories, Ping emphasizes the cultural neglect and importance of her female ancestors.