What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorWild: 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
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
Barbara Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp, Camille Kingsolver · 384 pages
Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver returns with her first nonfiction narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat."As the U.S. population made an unprecedented mad dash for the Sun Belt, one carload of us paddled against the tide, heading for the Promised Land where water falls from the sky and green stuff grows all around. We were about to begi
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
Braiding Sweetgrass
Robin Wall Kimmerer
A botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation espouses having an understanding and appreciation of plants and animals.
Prodigal Summer
Barbara Kingsolver · 444 pages
Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia.From her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin, Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. She is caught off guard by a young hunter who invades her
Walden
Henry David Thoreau · 260 pages
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
Basin and Range
John McPhee · 215 pages
From the blog *View From The Blue House* - "John McPhee is considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction. In 1978 he started a set of journeys across America with geologists that turned into a series of five books published over twenty years. Basin and Range is the first book in the series and mostly concerns the geological landscape from eastern Utah to eastern California. Rather than pr
Travels with Charley: In Search of America
John Steinbeck · 256 pages
A quest across America, from the northernmost tip of Maine to California's Monterey Peninsula To hear the speech of the real America, to smell the grass and the tress, to see the colors and the light—these were John Steinbeck's goals as he set out, at the age of fifty-eight, to rediscover the country he had been writing about for so many years. With Charley, his French poodle, Steinbeck drives the
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
The Road to Mecca
Muhammad Asad · 380 pages
This autobiographical work by one of Europe's best known convert to Islam gives us a rounded portrait of a man in search of adventure and truth. It is part spiritual autobiography, part summary of the author's intuitive insights into Islam and the Arabs, part an impressive travelogue. Punctuated with abundant adventure, moments of contemplation, colorful narrative, brilliant description and lively
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
Stolen: A Letter to My Captor
Lucy Christopher · 301 pages
Gemma, a British city-living teenager, is kidnapped while on holiday with her parents. Her kidnapper, Ty, takes her to the wild land of outback Australia. To Gemma's city-eyes, the landscape is harsh and unforgiving and there are no other signs of human life for hundreds of kilometres in every direction. Here, there is no escape. Gemma must learn to deal with her predicament, or die trying to figh
The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky
Ellen Meloy · 330 pages
In this invigorating mix of natural history and adventure, artist-naturalist Ellen Meloy uses turquoise--the color and the gem--to probe deeper into our profound human attachment to landscape. From the Sierra Nevada, the Mojave Desert, the Yucatan Peninsula, and the Bahamas to her home ground on the high plateaus and deep canyons of the Southwest, we journey with Meloy through vistas of both great
The Solace of Open Spaces
Gretel Ehrlich · 131 pages
A collection of essays in which the author discusses her personal relationship with the natural beauty and harshness of Wyoming.
Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
Janisse Ray · 285 pages
A memoir of a childhood, spend in an isolated Georgia community of Crackers, that grew into a passion to save the vanishing longleaf pine ecocystem in which she was raised.
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
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Michael Pollan · 450 pages
What should we have for dinner?" To one degree or another this simple question assails any creature faced with a wide choice of things to eat. Anthropologists call it the omnivore's dilemma. Choosing from among the countless potential foods nature offers, humans have had to learn what is safe, and what isn't—which mushrooms should be avoided, for example, and which berries we can enjoy. Today, as
The Land of Little Rain
Mary Austin · 95 pages
Mary Hunter Austin (1868-1934) moved with her family from Illinois to the desert on the edge of the San Joaquin Valley in 1888. In the next fifteen years she moved from one desert community to another, working on her sketches of desert and Indian life. Spending the last years of her life in Santa Fe, Austin remained a lifelong defender of Native Americans and was recoginzed as an expert in Native
The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light
Paul Bogard · 337 pages
Describes how ever-present, modern artificial lights have changed the way humans experience darkness and bemoans the fact that the primal dark sky can no longer influence science and art.
The Secret Knowledge of Water
Craig Childs · 288 pages
Deserts are environments that can be inhospitable even to seasoned explorers. Craig Childs has spent years in the deserts of the American West, and his treks through arid lands in search of water reveal the natural world at its most extreme.
Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field
John Lewis-Stempel · 298 pages
Lab Girl
Hope Jahren · 408 pages
An illuminating debut memoir of a woman in science; a moving portrait of a longtime friendship; and a stunningly fresh look at plants that will forever change how you see the natural world Acclaimed scientist Hope Jahren has built three laboratories in which she’s studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Her first book is a revelatory treatise on plant life—but it is also so much more. Lab
The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas
Jerry Dennis · 308 pages
"If fresh water is a treasure, the Great Lakes are the mother lode. No bodies of water can compare to them. Superior is the largest lake on earth, and the five lakes together contain a fifth of the world's supply of standing fresh water. Their ten thousand miles of shoreline bound seven states and a Canadian province and are longer than the entire Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States;