Peter Laufer

The author of Mission Rejected describes the author's unexpected encounters in the darker world of butterflies, where he learned about the roles of organized crime, ecological destruction, and natural-history-museum dynamics that are influencing their survival.

The Startling Subculture of Criminals, Collectors, and Conservationists

The Dangerous World of Butterflies

Exploring the fine line between amusements and abuse, an investigative journalist looks at the roles animals have played in entertainment and sports and examines the ways people have used animals for their pleasure.

The Controversial Line Between Entertainment and Abuse

No Animals Were Harmed

Inside the World of Animal Smuggling and Exotic Pets

Forbidden Creatures

A fascinating exploration into the world of turtles across the globe; Laufer charts the lore, love, and peril to a beloved species. Dreaming in Turtle is a compelling story of a stalwart animal prized from prehistory through to today—an animal threatened by human greed, pragmatism, and rationalization. It stars turtles and shady and heroic human characters both, in settings ranging from luxury redoubts to degraded habitats, during a time when the confluence of easy global trade, limited supply, and inexhaustible demand has accelerated the stress on species. The growth of the middle class in high-population regions like China, where the turtle is particularly valued, feeds this perfect storm into which the turtle finds itself lashed. This is a tale not just of endangered turtles but also one of overall human failings, frailties, and vulnerabilities—all punctuated by optimistic hope for change fueled by dedicated turtle champions.

A Journey Through the Passion, Profit, and Peril of Our Most Coveted Prehistoric Creatures

Dreaming in Turtle

Calexico creates a new border narrative and an authoritative blueprint for change. Through interviews, on-the-scene reporting, and historical analysis, Calexico contextualizes the region as emblematic of the immigration issues facing California and the nation while spotlighting the little-known unique individuality of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

True Lives of the Borderlands

Calexico

Slow news. Manifesto per un comunismo critico dell'informazione

Peter Morris

Do your employees plan exit strategies around the water cooler? Are your office hallways filled with nasty gossip? Is your productivity shrinking and your profits dissolving? As a manager, every day you're faced with disgruntled employees. Now Peter Morris, host of the popular radio show "The Business Shrink," draws on his long experience to help you fix these problems. Gleaning tips from experts such as CNN commentator Lou Dobbs and job search guru Martin Yate, Morris shows you how to: Give workers strong, positive feedback Break the endless chain of blaming and backstabbing Abolish poor employee performance and boost productivity Nip cases of harassment and bullying in the bud Using sample scenarios, workplace quizzes, and actual examples from Morris's show, you'll learn how to create a harmonious workplace and how to turn disgruntled workers into productive, committed employees.

Manage Challenging Staff Without Losing Your Mind

The Business Shrink - The Disgruntled Employee

Interviewing is a crucial skill for journalists but the list of professions that rely on the interview to conduct business is long. From doctors and police to clergy and the gal or guy at the drive-through window, just about every human interaction is a form of interview. Interviewing: The Oregon Method collects analysis and instruction from three-dozen expert interview practitioners, scholars and teachers. Its chapters take focused looks at interview ethics, the sanctity of quotes, sourcing via social media, studies of interviewing in the virtual world, negotiating identity, and building rapport. The art of interviewing has been taught at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication for generations. This book binds those years of experience into a collection of vibrant essays designed to train novices and invigorate old hands. Interviewing is edited by University of Oregon's James Wallace Chair Professor of Journalism Peter Laufer, who lectures his students, The interview is intimate, immediate, and often an entree toward the soul. Conducting interviews can be both great fun and an art form.Interviewing is a primer of the digital age yet one that embraces age-old lessons, lessons that make clear the crucial importance of successful interviewing techniques for productive civic engagement. In conjunction with the Center for Innovation and Civic Engagement at the University of Oregon, USA, contributors include Pulitzer-prize winning reporter and UO professor Alex Tizon, retired Seattle Times executive editor and UO alumnus Mike Fancher, and the longtime dean of the UO School of Journalism and Communication Tim Gleason. Distributed for the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication Center for Innovation and Civic Engagement.

The Oregon Method

Interviewing

Mann trifft Kröte Wer kann besser über das Leben auf Erden berichten als eine Schildkröte? Sie bewohnt unseren Planeten länger als fast jede andere Art und hat miterlebt wie sich dieser durch das Zutun der Menschen massiv verändert hat. Eine Evolutionsgeschichte und ein Aufruf. Die Spezies der Schildkröte könnte Geschichten über die Evolution und ihre Ursachen erzählen, von denen der Mensch, der im Vergleich ein Jüngling auf Erden ist, nur träumen kann. Angeregt durch das Zusammenleben mit seiner Schildkröte Fred, hat Peter Laufer diese Geschichten niedergeschrieben: von den ersten Begegnungen zwischen Mensch und dem gepanzerten Reptil, bis zur Realität des Schildkrötenlebens, das untrennbar mit dem ökologischen Schicksal der Meere und dem Klimawandel verknüpft ist. Es ist eine kulturgeschichtliche Reise in eine längst vergangene Zeit, ebenso wie ein Aufruf für die Zukunft unseres Planeten einzutreten. Mit einem Vorwort von Richard Branson. "Peter Laufer entführt uns in die Welt der Schildkröten und lässt diese gemächlichen, stetigen, ungeschickten und primitiven Verwandten der Dinosaurier unsere Fantasie, Sympathie und Liebe gewinnen."

Meine Freundschaft mit einem besonderen Geschöpf und die Geschichte seiner Art

Der Traum der Schildkröte

Sheila Swan Laufer

There is no neon to match Nevada’s. The combination of Wild West mythology and the remaining untamed pitch-black nighttime landscape, replete with real cowboys and real gambling, makes the Silver State a unique and appropriate canvas for neon art. Modern Nevada began with a nonstop desire for riches. It continues for many as a state of dreams often vividly expressed through exploding neon. Neon Nevada brings all this alive. Cameras in hand, authors Sheila Swan and Peter Laufer embarked on their first Nevada neon trek in the 1970s. They followed this up with a second nocturnal treasure hunt in the early 1990s—and a third in 2010, in the course of which they discovered that neon is fading fast; most notably on the Las Vegas Strip. Most of all, though, they realized that their passion for the art and craft of neon had not waned. A compelling blend of full-color photographs and absorbing prose, Neon Nevada takes us on a literal and figurative journey not only down the Las Vegas strip but also down quiet two-lane roads punctuated occasionally with neon signs, those glittering beacons of civilization against the desert night sky. The authors talk with sign owners, with those who created and maintained the neon, and those who collect it.

Neon Nevada

The book offers a step-by-step blueprint of radical proposals for the U.S.-Mexican border that go far beyond traditional initiatives to ease restrictions on immigration. Up Against the Wall provides the background to understanding how the border has become a fraud, resulting in nothing more than the criminalization of Mexican and other migrants. The book argues that the border with Mexico should be completely open for Mexicans wishing to travel north.

The Case for Opening the Mexican-American Border

Up Against the Wall

Sheila Swan

A woman's guide to staying safe while traveling covers a wide range of topics and potentially treacherous situations, including how to identify scam artists, choose a safe travel companion, dress appropriately, find safe guides, and navigate hotel registration. Original.

Safety and Security for Women Who Travel

Part food narrative, part investigation, part adventure story, Organic is an eye-opening and entertaining look into the anything goes world behind the organic label. It is also a wakeup call about the dubious origins of food labeled organic. After eating some suspect organic walnuts that supposedly were produced in Kazakhstan, veteran journalist Peter Laufer chooses a few items from his home pantry and traces their origins back to their source. Along the way he learns how easily we are tricked into taking “organic” claims at face value. With organic foods readily available at supermarket chains, confusion and outright deception about labels have become commonplace. Globalization has allowed food from highly corrupt governments and businesses overseas to pollute the organic market with food that is anything but. The organic environment is like the Wild West: oversight is virtually nonexistent, and deception runs amok. Laufer investigates so-called organic farms in Europe and South America as well as in his own backyard in the Pacific Northwest. The book examines what constitutes organic and by whom the definitions are made. The answers will stun readers, who have been sold a questionable, highly suspect, and even false bill of goods for years. View the book trailer for Organic at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owiACnN69rY.

ORGANIC: A JOURNALISTS QUEST TO DISCOVER

A Journalist's Quest to Discover the Truth behind Food Labeling

Organic

Gives women travelers advice on selecting a travel companion, dressing for safety, avoiding sexual predators and scam artists, and having fun despite travel mixups

Safety and Security for Women who Travel

La battaglia delle farfalle. Reportage sulla creatura più fragile del pianeta tra criminali, scienziati e collezionisti

A result of an investigative report by tenacious University of Oregon journalism students, Classroom 15 tells the story of how the dreams of fourth-grade students at the Riverside School, Roseburg, in rural Oregon timber country, were crushed by the prevailing Red Scare, McCarthyism, state and societal censorship, and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. The teacher of Classroom 15, known fondly as Mr. McFetridge, assigned a pen pal project in an effort to take geography lessons outside of the classroom. Imagining a place as far from Oregon as they possibly could, the students wrote letters to nine- and ten-year-old counterparts in the Soviet Union. Janice Boyle, the class secretary, reached out to Oregon's Congressional representative, Charles O. Porter, seeking assistance connecting with peers in Russia. Representative Porter forwarded the letter to the Secretary of State Christian Herter, and a week later the students received the shocking and disheartening news that their benign request had been needlessly denied. In the wake of McCarthyism, the Eisenhower administration subverted the assignment, fearing Communist propaganda would infect the innocent minds of eager Oregon schoolchildren. The students' plight quickly gained national attention with stories running from the Roseburg News-Review to the New York Times. The publicity didn't miss the attention of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. His agents investigated. They traveled to Roseburg, collected evidence, and took it back to the Bureau's regional headquarters in Portland. The public reaction was swift and unrelenting. The teacher and the Congressman were attacked by outraged Roseburg citizens, the school board, and enraged Americans across the country. Classroom 15 is all the above and a page-turning adventure story told with the voices of the empowered, tenacious University of Oregon journalism students who took the nascent story and demonstrated their unwavering devotion to the journalistic process by telling the tale.

How the Hoover FBI Censored the Dreams of Innocent Oregon 4th Graders

Classroom 15

The book offers a step-by-step blueprint of radical proposals for the U.S.-Mexican border that go far beyond traditional initiatives to ease restrictions on immigration. The book argues that the border with Mexico should be completely open for Mexicans wishing to travel north. Up Against the Wall provides the background to understanding how the border has become a fraud, resulting in nothing more than the criminalization of Mexican and other migrants, the bloating of the mismanaged U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the deterioration of living standards along the frontier, and the enrichment of American employers. Placing the border in a historical perspective, Laufer shows how circumstances have deteriorated to the present Trump-exacerbated crisis, and why the region and the migration through it cannot be ignored. Over the last several years he has interviewed dozens of authorities and men and women in the street while reporting from Mexico, along the border, and in the United States. He demonstrates that the security of America's southern border is a fallacy; offers vivid examples to illustrate how the chain of misery and lawbreaking for migrants heading north is initiated by U.S. employers, traces many of the border problems to the Guatemalan-Mexican border, and explores the abuses of the Border Patrol and the growing presence of vigilantes on the American side. Up Against the Wall is sure to provoke a lively debate over the future of Mexican immigration and global migration crises.

This widely praised book chronicles Peter Laufer's adventures within the butterfly industry and the butterfly underground. Laufer begins by examining the allure of butterflies throughout history, but his research soon veers into the high-stake realms of organized crime, ecological devastation, museum collections, and chaos theory. His ever-expanding journey of discovery throughout the Americas and beyond offers a rare look into a theater of intrigue, peopled with quirky and nefarious characters—all in pursuit of these delicate, beautiful creatures. Read this book, and your garden—and the world—will never quite look the same.

Peter Laufer

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