Best Selling Books by Matthew Hollis

Winner of the Costa Biography Award, a fascinating exploration of one of the 20th century''s most influential poets.

A riveting account of the making of T. S. Eliot’s celebrated poem The Waste Land on its centenary. Renowned as one of the world’s greatest poems, The Waste Land has been said to describe the moral decay of a world after war and the search for meaning in a meaningless era. It has been labeled the most truthful poem of its time; it has been branded a masterful fake. A century after its publication in 1922, T. S. Eliot’s enigmatic masterpiece remains one of the most influential works ever written, and yet one of the most mysterious. In a remarkable feat of biography, Matthew Hollis reconstructs the intellectual creation of the poem and brings the material reality of its charged times vividly to life. Presenting a mosaic of historical fragments, diaries, dynamic literary criticism, and illuminating new research, he reveals the cultural and personal trauma that forged The Waste Land through the lives of its protagonists—of Ezra Pound, who edited it; of Vivien Eliot, who sustained it; and of T. S. Eliot himself, whose private torment is woven into the seams of the work. The result is an unforgettable story of lives passing in opposing directions and the astounding literary legacy they would leave behind.

Combining worldly wisdom with detailed understanding to produce poems that speak with a sense of purpose ond place, the poet writes a knowing, lyrical poetry set against a landscape of big skies and battened-downed horizons.

Understanding the principles of base ten is essential to understanding numbers and operations. Students will become familiar with the concept of place value through engaging narratives and real-life situations. Students will then be challenged to use place value in the context of algebraic operations, demonstrating the knowledge they’ve gained from reading. Eye-catching visuals help walk readers through the math problems, while age-appropriate language encourages learning. Jada loves to make jewelry, and it also helps her, and students, practice principles of base ten. This volume meets CCSS Math Standard 2.NBT.B.7.

In Earth House, Matthew Hollis evokes the landscape, language and ecology of the isles of Britain and Ireland to explore how our most intimate moments have resonance in the wider cycle of life. Beginning in the slate waters of the north, the book revolves around the cardinal points and the ancient elements: through the wide skies of the east and the terrain of a southern city, to the embers of places lost to us, to which we can no longer return. What emerges is a moving meditation on time and the transformative phases of nature that calls many forces into its presence - the wisdoms of Anglo-Saxon verse, the metamorphoses of Norse and Celtic myth, the stoicism of classical thought and the far east - unforgettably phrased by a writer who, in the words of the TLS, ''makes the language of his poetry an event in itself''. Subtly attuned to the rhythms of the turning world, these poems open with the passing of an old life and culminate in the birth of a new one. They bravely work the seam between the present and the past, between destruction and renewal, humanity and our environment, and make Earth House a timeless exploration of our timed encounter with the remarkable lives of our planet. Earth House is Matthew Hollis''s long awaited follow up to Ground Water (2004), shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Whitbread Poetry Award. He is the author of Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas and The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem, recipients of the Costa Award for Biography and Sunday Times Biography of the Year.

This is a selection of the very best contemporary poetry published in Britain and the Republic of Ireland

It''s the end of the world and Sam Bland feels fine. The apocalypse hit like a tsunami, too fast for any government agency to contain. Sam is not a hero. He''s a reclusive psychology professor, wholly unprepared for survival, but spared from the virus by his antisocial tendencies. He didn''t like society before, and now all the phonies who made life miserable are zombies trying to eat him, but at least he doesn''t have to talk to them anymore. Charisse is his last glimmer of hope, but she''s a head-case, owned by a sociopathic yuppie warlord, and she might be playing him. That doesn''t deter Sam as he traverses the city, learning to kill and live amidst the dying and the killers, while alpha men fight for domination around him. In order to liberate the woman he thinks he loves, Sam must face the demons running amok in the world and in his head.

X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) is a powerful technique to determine the structure and function of molecules. It provides element-specific information on geometry, chemical bonding, oxidation state, and spin state, and its applications range from biology to material science. For dilute samples, XAS is measured by partial fluorescence yield (PFY), where the intensity of a weak fluorescence line is recorded as a measure of absorption as the energy of the incident x-ray beam is scanned across an absorption edge of the element of interest. PFY increases the sensitivity for XAS if an x-ray detector is used that can efficiently separate the small fluorescence signal of interest from the x-ray background due to other elements in the sample. This dissertation describes the development of a high-resolution x-ray detector based on arrays of superconducting tunnel junctions (STJs). It is cooled to its operating temperature below 0.3 K with a liquid-cryogen-free adiabatic demagnetization refrigerator cryostat, and offers more than an order of magnitude improvement in energy resolution over conventional Ge- or Si-based solid state detectors. For operation in XAS experiments at a synchrotron, the STJ detector array is held at the end of a cold finger that can be inserted into an ultra-high vacuum endstation. This dissertation describes the design and performance of the STJ x-ray spectrometer, and demonstrates its use in PFY-XAS experiments in metallo-organic compounds at the Advanced Light Source synchrotron.

X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy (XAS) is a powerful technique that can provide important information for the study of biological systems. The study of the structure and chemistry at the active metal sites in metalloproteins is important not only for theunderstanding of the function of the molecules themselves, but also in the hope that the mechanisms once understood may lead to advancement in catalytic chemistry and materials. While techniques using high-energy "hard" X-rays have been well developed for over three decades, the highly useful low-energy or "soft" X-ray regime has seen more recent application to biomolecules. Furthermore, the technical necessities of soft X-ray experiments - most notably the need for Ultra-High Vacuum (UHV) - place restrictions on the form and state of the sample and usually preclude liquid or frozen solution measurements. The Helium atmosphere chamber is designed to allow soft XAS of biomolecules and model compounds in a frozen state without exposure to UHV by isolating the sample inside a cryogenic gaseous exchange gas environment. The implementation allows easier sample handling than typical UHV chambers and measurement in conditions ranging from atmosphere (760 Torr) to 100s of mTorr. The system integrates with the existing end station setup at beam line 4.0.2 at the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.