 |
Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms: The Story of the Animals and Plants That Time Has Left Behind Richard Fortey From one of the world’s leading natural scientists and the acclaimed author of Trilobite!, Life: A Natural History of Four Billion Years of Life on Earth and Dry Storeroom No. 1 comes a fascinating chronicle of life’s history told not through the fossil record but through the stories of organisms that have survived, almost unchanged, throughout time. Evolution, it seems, has not completely obliterated its tracks as more advanced organisms have evolved; the history of life on earth is far older—and odder—than many of us realize.
Scattered across the globe, these remarkable plants and animals continue to mark seminal events in geological time. From a moonlit beach in Delaware, where the hardy horseshoe crab shuffles its way to a frenzy of mass mating just as it did 450 million years ago, to the dense rainforests of New Zealand, where the elusive, unprepossessing velvet worm has burrowed deep into rotting timber since before the breakup of the ancient supercontinent, to a stretch of Australian coastline with stromatolite formations that bear witness to the Precambrian dawn, the existence of these survivors offers us a tantalizing glimpse of pivotal points in evolutionary history. These are not “living fossils” but rather a handful of tenacious creatures of days long gone.
Written in buoyant, sparkling prose, Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms is a marvelously captivating exploration of the world’s old-timers combining the very best of science writing with an explorer’s sense of adventure and wonder. |
 |
When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice Terry Tempest Williams The beloved author of Refuge returns with a work that explodes and startles, illuminates and celebrates
Terry Tempest Williams’s mother told her: “I am leaving you all my journals, but you must promise me you won’t look at them until after I’m gone.” Readers of Williams’s iconic and unconventional memoir, Refuge, well remember that mother. She was one of a large Mormon clan in northern Utah who developed cancer as a result of the nuclear testing in nearby Nevada. It was a shock to Williams to discover that her mother had kept journals. But not as much of a shock as what she found when the time came to read them. “They were exactly where she said they would be: three shelves of beautiful cloth-bound books . . . I opened the first journal. It was empty. I opened the second journal. It was empty. I opened the third. It too was empty . . . Shelf after shelf after shelf, all of my mother’s journals were blank.” What did Williams’s mother mean by that? In fifty-four chapters that unfold like a series of yoga poses, each with its own logic and beauty, Williams creates a lyrical and caring meditation of the mystery of her mother's journals. When Women Were Birds is a kaleidoscope that keeps turning around the question “What does it mean to have a voice?” |
 |
American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation Eric Rutkow In the bestselling tradition of Michael Pollan’s Second Nature, this fascinating and unique historical work tells the remarkable story of the relationship between Americans and trees across the entire span of our nation’s history. Like so many of us, historians are guilty of taking trees for granted. The history of trees in America is no less than the history of the United States itself—from the majestic pines of the East coveted by the King of England for British warships to the orange groves of California, which lured settlers west. Without trees, there would have been no ships, railroads, stockyards, furniture, wagons, barrels, or firewood. Never before has anyone ever treated our country’s trees as the subject of a broad historical and cultural study, and the result is an accessible, informative, and thoroughly entertaining read. As symbols of liberty, community, and civilization, trees are perhaps the loudest silent figures in America’s complicated history. The journey of how forests morphed from dark, unmapped infinities, to vast timber reserves essential to the creation of the American empire, and finally to sanctuaries of nature is a complex tale. Americans started as people frightened of the woods, became a nation that depended upon its forests for progress and profit, and finally arrived at the present point. Today, few people know where timber comes from or can name many tree species, but most of us share a sense that to destroy trees is to destroy part of ourselves. Audacious in its 400-year scope, authoritative in its detail, and elegant in its execution, this one-of-a-kind read is perfect for history buffs and nature lovers alike. |
 |
Desert Solitaire Edward Abbey At last, one of the most popular books on the American West is available once again in hardcover. In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Desert Solitaire, the University of Arizona Press is pleased to publish a new edition featuring a new introduction by the author, his definitive corrections to the text, and new illustrations commissioned exclusively for this volume. Edward Abbey's account of two summers spent in southeastern Utah's canyonlands is surely one of the most enduring works of contemporary American nature writing. In it he tells of his stint as a park ranger at Arches National Monument, of his love for the natural beauty that surrounded him, and of his distaste for the modernizing improvements designed to increase visitation to the park. "I confess to being a nature lover," admits Abbey more than thirty years after his sojourn in the wilderness. "But I did not mean to be mistaken for a nature writer. I never wanted to be anything but a writer, period." First published in 1968 to "a few brief but not hostile notices," Desert Solitaire quietly sold out of its first printing but eventually developed a loyal enough following in paperback to earn Abbey the "nature writer" label he claims never to have wanted. Desert Solitaire lives on because it is a work that reflects profound love of nature and a bitter abhorrence of all that would desecrate it. "Abbey is one of our very best writers about wilderness country," observed Wallace Stegner in the Los Angeles Times Book Review; "he is also a gadfly with a stinger like a scorpion." "This book may well seem like a ride on a bucking bronco," added Edwin Way Teale in the New York Times. "It is rough, tough, combative...passionately felt, deeply poetic." But perhaps the spirit of the man, the work, and the circumstances of its writing were best summarized by Larry McMurtry in his review for the Washington Post: "Edward Abbey is the Thoreau of the American West." |
 |
The Mountains of California (Modern Library Classics) John Muir When John Muir traveled to California in 1868, he found the pristine mountain ranges that would inspire his life’s work. The Mountains of California is the culmination of the ten years Muir spent in the Sierra Nevadas, studying every crag, crook, and valley with great care and contemplation.
Bill McKibben writes in his Introduction that Muir "invents, by sheer force of his love, an entirely new vocabulary and grammar of the wild . . . a language of ecstasy and exuberance."
The Mountains of California is as vibrant and vital today as when it was written over a century ago.
This Modern Library Paperback Classic includes the photographs and line drawings from the original 1898 edition. |
 |
The Voyage of the Beagle (Adventure Classics) Charles Darwin Recorded during a remarkable five-year voyage throughout South America, these findings became the foundation of naturalist Charles Darwin's revolutionary theory of natural selection. His writing brings to life an exotic world of natural wonders, transporting readers to Chile, Argentina, the Andes Mountains, and finally, the Galapagos Islands, the unique ecosystem that inspired Darwin's groundbreaking work. Darwin's work is as relevant today as it was more than 100 years ago, when he first revealed his revolutionary theory.
|
 |
Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth Richard Fortey A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
"Extraordinary. . . . Anyone with the slightest interest in biology should read this book."--The New York Times Book Review
"A marvelous museum of the past four billion years on earth--capacious, jammed with treasures, full of learning and wide-eyed wonder."--The Boston Globe
From its origins on the still-forming planet to the recent emergence of Homo sapiens--one of the world's leading paleontologists offers an absorbing account of how and why life on earth developed as it did. Interlacing the tale of his own adventures in the field with vivid descriptions of creatures who emerged and disappeared in the long march of geologic time, Richard Fortey sheds light upon a fascinating array of evolutionary wonders, mysteries, and debates. Brimming with wit, literary style, and the joy of discovery, this is an indispensable book that will delight the general reader and the scientist alike.
"A drama bolder and more sweeping than Gone with the Wind . . . a pleasure to read."--Science
"A beautifully written and structured work . . . packed with lucid expositions of science."--Natural History |
 |
Travels in Alaska (Modern Library Classics) John Muir In the late 1800s, John Muir made several trips to the pristine, relatively unexplored territory of Alaska, irresistibly drawn to its awe-inspiring glaciers and its wild menagerie of bears, bald eagles, wolves, and whales. Half-poet and half-geologist, he recorded his experiences and reflections in Travels in Alaska, a work he was in the process of completing at the time of his death in 1914. As Edward Hoagland writes in his Introduction, “A century and a quarter later, we are reading [Muir’s] account because there in the glorious fiords . . . he is at our elbow, nudging us along, prompting us to understand that heaven is on earth—is the Earth—and rapture is the sensible response wherever a clear line of sight remains.”
This Modern Library Paperback Classic includes photographs from the original 1915 edition. |
 |
A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation Aldo Leopold Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac has enthralled generations of nature lovers and conservationists and is indeed revered by everyone seriously interested in protecting the natural world. Hailed for prose that is "full of beauty and vigor and bite" (The New York Times), it is perhaps the finest example of nature writing since Thoreau's Walden.
Now this classic work is available in a completely redesigned and lavishly illustrated gift edition, featuring over one hundred beautiful full-color pictures by Michael Sewell, one of the country's leading nature photographers. Sewell, whose work has graced the pages of Audubon and Sierra magazines, walked Leopold's property in Wisconsin and shot these photographs specifically for this edition, allowing readers to see Sand County as Leopold saw it. The resulting layout is spectacular. But the heart of the book remains Leopold's carefully rendered observations of nature. Here we follow Leopold throughout the year, from January to December, as he walks about the rural Wisconsin landscape, watching a woodcock dance skyward in golden afternoon light, or spying a rough-legged hawk dropping like a feathered bomb on its prey. And perhaps most important are Leopold's trenchant comments throughout the book on our abuse of the land and on what we must do to preserve this invaluable treasure. This edition also includes two of Leopold's most eloquent essays on conservation, "The Land Ethic" and "Marshland Elegy."
With this gift edition of A Sand County Almanac, a new generation of readers can walk beside one of America's most respected naturalists as he conveys the beauty of a marsh before sunrise or the wealth of history to be found in an ancient oak. |
 |
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) Annie Dillard Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia's Blue Ridge valley. Annie Dillard sets out to see what she can see. What she sees are astonishing incidents of "mystery, death, beauty, violence." |