Arctic Dreams

Under the Sea Wind

Rachel Carson · 239 pages

Rachel Carson--pioneering environmentalist and author of Silent Spring--opens our eyes to the wonders of the natural world in her groundbreaking paean to the sea. 2016 marks the 75th Anniversary of the publication of Under the Sea-Wind. Celebrating the mystery and beauty of birds and sea creatures in their natural habitat, Under the Sea-Wind--Rachel Carson's first book and her personal favorite--i

The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks

Terry Tempest Williams · 416 pages

"A personal, lyrical, and idiosyncratic ode to our national parks"-- "For years, America's national parks have provided public breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why close to 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now, to honor the centennial of the National Park Service, Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the beloved memoir When Women W

The Snow Leopard

Peter Matthiessen · 338 pages

This lovely book (1978) describes a two month search for the snow leopard with naturalist George Schaller in the Dolpo region of Nepal. The book combines the search for the snow leopard with a search for inner meaning (Zen Buddism)

The Wild Places

Robert Macfarlane · 340 pages

“An eloquent (and compulsively readable) reminder that, though we’re laying waste the world, nature still holds sway over much of the earth’s surface. ”—Bill McKibben Are there any genuinely wild places left in Britain and Ireland? That is the question that Robert Macfarlane poses to himself as he embarks on a series of breathtaking journeys through some of the archipelago’s most remarkable landsc

Into the Wild

Jon Krakauer · 207 pages

In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose

The Sea Inside

Philip Hoare · 374 pages

In this book the author sets out to rediscover the sea and its islands, birds, and beasts. Starting at his home on the shores of Britain's Southampton Water and moving in ever widening circles, like the migration patterns of whales, he explores London, the Isle of Wight, the Azores, Sri Lanka, Tasmania, and New Zealand. As he weaves together literary and natural history, we encounter memorable peo

Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer

A botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation espouses having an understanding and appreciation of plants and animals.

This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland

Gretel Ehrlich · 400 pages

For the last decade, Gretel Ehrlich has been obsessed by an island, a terrain, a culture, and the men and women who long for and love the complex frailties and treacherous beauty of a world defined by ice. Greenland, the world's largest island, 840,000 square miles in extent, is covered by the largest continental ice sheet in the world. Her guide, her inspiration, her companion in spirit was the g

My First Summer in the Sierra

John Muir · 225 pages

Presents the journal of naturalist John Muir in which he records his thoughts and experiences in the Sierra Mountains where he went for the first time in 1869 while working as an overseer hired on to help move a band of sheep to summer pasture.

Coming into the Country

John McPhee · 438 pages

The Maine Woods

Henry David Thoreau · 340 pages

The Maine Woods is a characteristically Thoreauvian book: a personal account of exploration, of exterior and interior discovery in a natural setting, conveyed in taut, workmanlike prose. Thoreau's evocative renderings of the life of the primitive forest--its mountains, waterways, fauna, flora, and inhabitants--are valuable in themselves. But his impassioned protest against despoilment in the name

Desert Solitaire

Edward Abbey · 270 pages

An account of the author's experiences, observations, and reflections as a seasonal park ranger in southeast Utah. When Desert Solitaire was first published in 1968, it became the focus of a nationwide cult. Rude and sensitive. Thought-provoking and mystical. Angry and loving. Both Abbey and this book are all of these and more. Here, the legendary author of The Monkey Wrench Gang, Abbey's Road an

Last Chance to See

Douglas Adams, Mark Carwardine · 222 pages

An interactive multimedia exploration of the authors' trip around the world in search of endangered species. Contains the unabridged text of the book Last chance to see, a reading of the entire book by Douglas Adams, and over 800 full-screen color photographs. Allows the user to either read or listen to the book, to choose any chapter within the book, and to explore the many sidebars that provide

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Cheryl Strayed · 315 pages

A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again. At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she'd lost everything when her mother died young of cancer. Her family scattered in their grief, her marriage was soon destroyed, and slowly her life spun out of control. Four years after her mot

A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation from Round River

Aldo Leopold · 269 pages

First published in 1949 and praised in The New York Times Book Review as a trenchant book, full of vigor and bite, A Sand County Almanac combines some of the finest nature writing since Thoreau with an outspoken and highly ethical regard for Americas relationship to the land. Written with an unparalleled understanding of the ways of nature, the book includes a section on the monthly changes of the

The Log from the Sea of Cortez

John Steinbeck · 286 pages

This exciting day-by-day account of Steinbeck's trip to the Gulf of California with biologist Ed Ricketts, drawn from the longer Sea of Cortez, is a wonderful combination of science, philosophy, and high-spirited adventure.

Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival

Bernd Heinrich · 368 pages

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary

Caspar Henderson · 437 pages

The creatures that abound in Henderson's book—from the axolotl to the zebrafish—are, with one exception, very much with us, albeit sometimes in depleted numbers. *The Book of Barely Imagined Beings* transports readers to a world of real creatures that seem as if they should be made up—that are somehow more astonishing than anything we might have imagined. The yeti crab, for example, uses its furry

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Annie Dillard · 279 pages

What is the true nature of Nature? Is it a harmonious, interconnected system, operating according to the principles of co-dependence and benevolence? Or is it red in tooth and claw, an unfeeling, unthinking force, in which the individual is overwhelmed and subsumed to serve a larger purpose, one mysterious and obscure? This is what this volume is all about: an exploration into the nature of Nature

The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature

David George Haskell · 278 pages

Reveals what can be understood about the natural world through the author's year-long observation of a one-square-meter patch of old-growth Tennessee forest, explaining the scientific ties binding all life and how the ecosystem has cycled for millions ofyears. "In this wholly original book, biologist David Haskell uses a one-square-meter patch of old-growth Tennessee forest as a window onto the e

The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World

Andrea Wulf · 484 pages

From the Prologue... When nature is perceived as a web, its vulnerability also becomes obvious. Everything hangs together. If one thread is pulled, the whole tapestry may unravel. After he saw the devastating environmental effects of colonial plantations at Lake Valencia in Venezuela in 1800, Humboldt became the first scientist to talk about harmful human-induced climate change. Deforestation t

Shark Drunk: The Art of Catching a Large Shark from a Tiny Rubber Dinghy in a Big Ocean

Morten A. Stroksnes · 307 pages

In the great depths surrounding the Lofoten islands in Norway lives the infamous Greenland shark. At twenty-six feet in length and weighing more than a ton, it is truly a beast to behold. But the shark is not just known for its size alone: its meat contains a toxin that, when consumed, has been known to make people drunk and hallucinatory. Shark Drunk is the true story of two friends, the author a

The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea

Callum Roberts · 405 pages

Who can forget the sense of wonder with which they discovered as a child the creatures of the deep? In this vibrant hymn to the sea, one of the world's foremost conservation biologists, known as the "Rachel Carson of the fish world" (The New York Times), takes us back in time to tell the story of man and the sea, from the earliest traces of water on earth to the oceans as we know them today. If yo

Journal of Researches Into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World

Charles Darwin · 576 pages