Our Books
Under Frederick the Great, every Jew who married was required to buy otherwise unsalable china from the royal porcelain factory. Moses Mendelssohn, a world-famous philosopher in the eighteenth century, was forced to buy twenty life-size porcelain...
The summer of 1964 begins calmly enough. But when civil rights workers come to a small Mississippi town and the Ku Klux Klan responds with intimidation and terrorism, the sultry days and nights are transformed into Freedom Summer. Soon three...
A disarmingly honest story of the author’s restless, rootless, disaffected youth, looking for meaning in drugs and an active outdoor life in the West. From time spent fishing, climbing, and making a living logging—as well as through friendships...
In these essays, the author describes how he found a way to balance his passions for literature and for the outdoors by building a sugarhouse with his sons in the Vermont woods. For him, the “frog run”—the tail end of the sugaring season in New...
Andy Fleck doesn’t have much of a family. A kid with Attention Deficit Disorder, he can’t keep himself from challenging every limit that is set by his adoptive parents Jeff and Laurie. It’s easy to see that Andy is a good kid dealing with his own...
In January 2001, the editors, responding to proposals to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, sent a call to writers across the country. With testimonies by President Jimmy Carter, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Bill McKibben, and Terry...
The author was happily sailing through life, raised among naturalists and nurtured by a family history as American as the Stars and Stripes. But then a short trip to Guatemala changed his life, setting him on a very different path toward radical...
Reared on her father’s thirty thousand-acre ranch, the author grew up to become a rancher herself, raising sport horses. In these essays—which rise and fall with the undulations of the prairie, and which can pack a punch like South Dakota weather...
In this book, the author describes locales that are dear to her because they are still shaped by nature: Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy; Provincetown, Massachusetts; Tucson, Arizona; and Poamoho, Hawaii. The farther we remove ourselves...
These poems explore the territory of longing and loss, love and family, wild land and city street. With nods to Johannes Brahms and Joseph Haydn, Pablo Neruda, Theodore Roethke, and Christopher Smart, this collection tells of a passion for being...
Written in the third century, this is one of the earliest Chinese works about the use of language, intended for those who wish to engage the art of letters at its deepest levels. In sixteen sections, it discusses the joys and problems that face...
This book is the first of its kind, providing a thoughtful, practical process for neighborhood planning for concerned citizens as well as professional planners.
Part traveler’s journal, part philosophical exploration, this book considers the idea of islands and asks whether they encourage eccentricity and grandeur in human beings. Along the way, it introduces beguiling characters and cultures, from the...
As a boy in Colorado, the author fell in love with alpine heights and the butterflies that float above the tree line. This early passion sparked a career in conservation that took him across the globe—until he realized that he was no longer as...
Arranged by letter of the alphabet, with at least one entry per letter, these short pieces capture the variety of daily life in contemporary China. Here, one learns what it is like to travel by “hard-seat” train to a remote village, to smuggle...
Deciding that her life was insufficiently grounded in real-world experience, the author, a Quaker reared as a Catholic, embarked on a year of tending sheep. In this often hilarious book, she describes her time in the barn as well as an extended...
Known for beautifully observed and illustrated books about the rivers, deserts, and mountains of the West, the author here focuses on the guiding principles of her life as naturalist. She moves from details to the larger patterns that link them...
Growing up, the author could define failure easily; it was “to die in Minneota.” But when he returned to his hometown twenty years later, he began to discover more of himself and of our time. This books investigates—through the lens of small-town...
Organized by the seasons of the year, this book explores the natural and soul-sustaining beauty of the largest roadless area east of the Rocky Mountains. Drawing on the works of Thoreau and Wendell Berry, the author turns his naturalist’s eye on...
In this book, the author tells the story of his family’s homestead in the Great Basin, a ranch worked by horses when he was a boy and transformed into an agribusiness by the time he was a grown man. Recounting his life as farmer and writer, he...
Elizabeth is the newest member of the big and boisterous Sheridan family. They try to make her feel at home, but Elizabeth knows from previous experience in foster homes that one day she’ll be sent away. Now all the Sheridan kids are headed to...
A creature almost mythic, Colter—the brown dog of the Yaak—charges through mountain valleys following the scent of game. In this book, the author gives a history of his years with Colter—including vignettes about interactions with well-known...
An award-winning poet, a mother, a lover of the land and every creature in it, as well as a student of zoology, the author is at home in the vocabulary of nature. In this work of prose punctuated and intensified by poetry, she describes the...
Skinhead. Neo-Nazi. Lexi Jordan knows the names her friends use to talk about themselves, but she isn’t quite sure what they mean. She knows the tattoo on her head and her heavy boots are part of belonging—and Lexi wants to belong. But she begins...
In these truth-telling stories about a neighborhood of Puerto Rican adolescents growing up in the South Bronx, we meet the youth who fight every day for survival in our cities.