I’ve spent a career as an educator and writer exploring how it is that we humans are a part of the natural world in which we live. We are all interconnected with each other and with the ecosystem in which we live, be it a “pristine” wilderness or a concreted-over metropolis. This is wisdom that of course has been long known by many peoples throughout history, though something that seems easily forgotten as we bustle our way through life. Through these books, maybe we can begin to remember that interconnectedness.
I have given away many copies of this book and like to keep an extra copy handy so that I can give it to a friend or even a stranger when I sense they are seeking something that helps them understand how they are connected to the natural world. The first time I finished this book, I immediately began reading it again—it’s that important and that beautifully written. If I was to only have one book that I could keep and read this would be it.
Called the work of "a mesmerizing storyteller with deep compassion and memorable prose" (Publishers Weekly) and the book that, "anyone interested in natural history, botany, protecting nature, or Native American culture will love," by Library Journal, Braiding Sweetgrass is poised to be a classic of nature writing. As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer asks questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces indigenous teachings that consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take "us on a journey that is…
This book taught me how to look at the world I lived in and the history I come from in a different way. After reading this book I questioned everything I was doing as a teacher and began to see my role as a teacher, as a father, as a citizen concerned about my ecological impact in a different way. And it’s written as an immensely compelling and engaging conversation between a man and a gorilla. I mean, what more could you want?
One of the most beloved and bestselling novels of spiritual adventure ever published, Ishmael has earned a passionate following. This special twenty-fifth anniversary edition features a new foreword and afterword by the author.
“A thoughtful, fearlessly low-key novel about the role of our species on the planet . . . laid out for us with an originality and a clarity that few would deny.”—The New York Times Book Review
Teacher Seeks Pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.
It was just a three-line ad in the personals section, but it launched the adventure of…
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are taken…
Barbara Kingsolver writes what I think is some of the most beautiful prose of any American novelist. She immediately sucks you in with interesting characters interacting in a complex and rich interconnected world. With this book, she sets these characters within the complex web of understanding and exploring the interconnections of the natural world and we begin with one central character and experience an outward spiral of interpersonal, social, and ecological interweaving.
It is summer in the Appalachian mountains and love, desire and attraction are in the air. Nature, too, it seems, is not immune. 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 most private spaces and interrupts her self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the mountain, Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself marooned in a strange place where she must declare or…
This is a collection of (probably) semi-autobiographical stories about the author’s experience in the Vietnam War (and some childhood thrown in for good measure) utilizes tremendous craft of efficient prose. The author opens up the world and characters in it for us to crawl inside and root around and explore. In so doing we can see common threads of humanity emerge throughout these stories and characters in an otherwise completely inhospitable and inhuman environment.
The million-copy bestseller, which is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.
'The Things They Carried' is, on its surface, a sequence of award-winning stories about the madness of the Vietnam War; at the same time it has the cumulative power and unity of a novel, with recurring characters and interwoven strands of plot and theme.
But while Vietnam is central to 'The Things They Carried', it is not simply a book about war. It is also a book about the human heart - about the terrible weight of those things we carry through…
Pioneer Paddles of the Colonial South
by
William D. Auman,
Award-winning novelist William Auman, author of If Trees Could Testify..., takes the reader on a time-traveling odyssey featuring 345 bodies of water in six states within the historical context through which they unfold.
Journey into remaining Colonial-era wilderness with stories of pirate treasure, epic frontiersmen, Indigenous Peoples, and Revolutionary…
I began reading Sig Olson books when I was in high school, prompted by a biology teacher. Olson uses eloquent prose and emotional description to describe the wilderness lake country of Northern Minnesota and Southern Ontario. Over a career of decades he wrote about his experiences in the wilderness and easily brings the reader into his world, allowing them to see it through his eyes and experiences. Reflectionsis his last book, and is truly just that, reflections of a life lived on the edge of wilderness and the struggles of balancing desires for preservation of wilderness with encroachment of the modern world.
With the eye of a biologist and the soul of an artist, Goodwin guides the reader on a personal and educational journey through the Northwoods of the Great Lakes Region. He reflects on the elegance of the evolutionary process and the interconnectedness of all living things. At times a microscopic examination of the forest floor, and at others a far-reaching gaze into the wonders of a night sky. Goodwin explores this enhanced place and the delicate dance its history, geology, and organisms have performed since before recorded time. Along the way, he asks the difficult questions about stewardship and spirituality that only connecting to nature and understanding our place in it can begin to answer.
Hope, Laughter, Survival on the Refugee Trail
by
Eileen Kay,
Dramatic true story with a wacky sense of humor.
Retired English teacher in Budapest meets foreign medical students fleeing the war in Ukraine, producing a sweet and unlikely friendship, spicy soup, and wicked joking. A sense of humor, however dark, can keep us from despair.
A young woman embarks on a life-changing cross-country trip to face a family secret rooted in America's most turbulent decade. Layla James, a recent graduate and budding photographer, never knew anything about her father except that he named her for the iconic song by Eric Clapton.
