Book cover of The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks

Book description

America’s national parks are breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why more than 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the environmental classic Refuge and the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, returns with…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked The Hour of Land as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This is an engrossing tour of public lands from Terry Tempest Williams, a poet and essayist who is an American treasure. From this beautiful and vivid book, I realized spiritual connections between human beings and nature, between past and future, between the soul and the earth.

"Our national parks are blood," she writes. 

From Nate's list on public lands and conservation.

No one writes better about landscapes, including national parks, than Terry Tempest Williams. To celebrate—and interrogate—the centennial of the National Park Service in 2016, she published The Hour of Land, a breathtaking personal, political, and literary engagement with American national parks and the histories, landscapes, and people they represent. They are, as she shows, both scarred and sacred, and that makes parks so meaningful. Again and again, her words and ideas jump off the page and expressed things I’ve long believed but never articulated like, when she suggests parks might be “breathing spaces for a society that increasingly holds…

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