The child’s immersion into nature is a most relevant theme for me as an environmental educator, but it is critical to America as a whole. Our future depends upon it. We continue to live in a culture that shoves nature into the background, something viewed as pleasant scenery but not truly interactive in our lives. The “store” has become the source of things to many young people. The current generation of American parents is not equipped to teach children about nature and its indelible place in our survival as a species; therefore, books must become surrogates in this mission.
One boy alone in the wilderness—without any outside contact—is a crash course in “survival skills,” but this education also comes with a shift in philosophy that harkens back to paleo times when humans lived directly with the land.
When I read this book, I was coming of age in my relationship with the forest and was determined to learn about my ties to atavism and my potential as a defector from modern civilization. Though this book’s realities are stretched by the imagination, the soul of that human/wilderness relationship shines through.
"Should appeal to all rugged individualists who dream of escape to the forest."-The New York Times Book Review
Sam Gribley is terribly unhappy living in New York City with his family, so he runs away to the Catskill Mountains to live in the woods-all by himself. With only a penknife, a ball of cord, forty dollars, and some flint and steel, he intends to survive on his own. Sam learns about courage, danger, and independence during his year in the wilderness, a year that changes his life forever.
"An extraordinary book . . . It will be read year…
As a veteran of 40+ years as a camp counselor and teacher of primitive survival skills, I loved this book for taking me back into that magic of the summer camp setting.
Oddly, I never attended a camp in my youth, largely because my family was never drawn toward nature. Somehow, I was born with an ineffable love of the forest, and as an adult, I found my calling as a teacher in the wilderness, even running my own summer camp in the mountains of Georgia.
This book’s setting in the Smoky Mountains is close to home. The relationships in this story ring true, and the nostalgia for those summer days of watching young boys and girls absorb “the real world” is kindled by Mr. Price’s work.
"I'm as peaceful a man as you're likely to meet in America now, but this is about a death I may have caused. Not slowly over time by abuse or meanness but on a certain day and by ignorance, by plain lack of notice. Though it happened thirty-four years ago, and though I can't say it's haunted my mind that many nights lately, I suspect I can draw it out for you now, clear as this noon. I may need to try." Set in a summer camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains during the deceptively tranquil 1950s, The Tongues of…
Nominated for the Shamus Award for Best Original Paperback, and winner of the Beverly Hills Book Award.
Francis Hoyt, arrogant, athletic, brilliant, manipulative and ruthless is a master burglar who specializes in stealing high-end silver and jewelry. He's never been caught in the act. Recently retired Connecticut state investigator Charlie…
I loved this book for its dissection of the human relationships formed against a background of wilderness.
With survival comes tension, and though this throws discord into the lives of the characters, it makes for a compelling plot. This is one of those books that will form an indelible bond with the reader, who cannot help but imagine his/her interaction with the cast, should he/she have been part of the story.
A plane crashes on a desert island and the only survivors, a group of schoolboys, assemble on the beach and wait to be rescued. By day they inhabit a land of bright fantastic birds and dark blue seas, but at night their dreams are haunted by the image of a terrifying beast. As the boys' delicate sense of order fades, so their childish dreams are transformed into something more primitive, and their behaviour starts to take on a murderous, savage significance.
First published in 1954, Lord of the Flies is one of the most celebrated and widely read of modern…
For a character to be stranded alone in the wilderness almost forces the reader to slip into the shoes of the protagonist.
There is no human-to-human interaction, but there is the age-old relationship of human-to-nature. This struggle taps into the atavistic side of man. Such a story contains only one source of thoughts (a boy, in this case), but the countless connections between the boy and all the aspects of wilderness present a plot of myriad give-and-take scenarios.
The protagonist deals with hunger and food, cold and fire, danger and safety, solitude and epiphany. Hatchet is one of the great young adult books that serves adults wonderfully.
This award-winning contemporary classic is the survival story with which all others are compared—and a page-turning, heart-stopping adventure, recipient of the Newbery Honor. Hatchet has also been nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read.
Thirteen-year-old Brian Robeson, haunted by his secret knowledge of his mother’s infidelity, is traveling by single-engine plane to visit his father for the first time since the divorce. When the plane crashes, killing the pilot, the sole survivor is Brian. He is alone in the Canadian wilderness with nothing but his clothing, a tattered windbreaker, and the hatchet his mother…
Nate Champion might be the most heroic figure of America’s Old West ... and yet one of popular history’s best-kept secrets. Now he finally gets his due in this historical novel duology. His humble beginnings in Texas prepare him for a life with horses and cattle. Though a well-known horse…
Though this book has a terrific storyline, a finely fleshed-out cast of characters, and a very appealing writing style, what mattered to me most was a tacit bond of honor between the main character (the well-known private detective, Spenser) and his cohort in danger (Hawk). Their banter and ripostes are Parker’s trademarks that have made him a bestseller.
But what lies beneath that friendship is a code of honor that appeals to me in a powerful way. In this story, a young boy must rise above the pettiness of his parents’ friction and divorce. Spenser and Hawk provide the physical protection that he needs, but just as important is what the boy comes to understand about friendship and loyalty by observing his protectors’ interactions.
“[Robert B.] Parker's brilliance is in his simple dialogue, and in Spenser.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
A bitter divorce is only the beginning. First the father hires thugs to kidnap his son. Then the mother hires Spenser to get the boy back. But as soon as Spenser senses the lay of the land, he decides to do some kidnapping of his own.
With a contract out on his life, he heads for the Maine woods, determined to give a puny 15 year old a crash course in survival and to beat his dangerous opponents at their own brutal game.
While Tyler Raintree’s parents are divorcing, the mother hides her son from his abusive father at Camp Itawa in the mountains of north Georgia. There, young Tyler meets nineteen-year-old camp counselor Stoney St. Ney and Bobby Whitehorse, a full-blooded Cherokee man. These two staffers become the boy’s bodyguards and teachers as they try to protect him and his mother from a father who has connections to organized crime.
All seems to go well for a time, as Tyler is introduced to the forest and the ways of the Native Americans who had once lived on the land. When the mafia comes to the mountains to abduct the boy, the gangsters must step onto the foreign playing field of wilderness, where Stoney and Bobby are most “at home.”
Prisons are at bursting point. Criminals are released early and the guilty walk free from courts. The Justice system is in a state of collapse and no-one is safe.
i4Ni is created to solve the problem. i4Ni is a humanoid which, according to its 'creator' Jules Von Beck, will serve…
The first female police detective in Acapulco, Emilia Cruz, dives into an ocean of secrets and lies when she is forced to lead the investigation into her own lieutenant's murder.
Caught between the powerful head of the police union and resentful colleagues, Emilia becomes a pawn in a game of…
