Life is pretty dull without passion. Since early childhood I was attracted to Chinese philosophy, then to all the cultural aspects that reflect it. At the same time, I felt the blood in my veins drawing me to ancestral roots. Learning about other cultures helps us learn about our own. I’ve been driven by sympathy for the immigrant experience, the suffering, and sacrifices made for a better, peaceful life. What prepared me to write Wuxia America includes my academic studies, living and working in Asia, and involvement in martial arts. My inspiration for writing stems from a wish to encourage ways to improve human relations.
The Chinese American presence in the USA started with the gold rush and the building of the transcontinental railroad.
It was a blessing to find Chang’s non-fiction work because he utilized a tremendous about of research to accurately cover the book’s topic. I’m also grateful that his writing style is not dull.
Building a railroad trestle through the High Sierra mountains in winter implies work conditions that affect laborers as well as investors. Chang strings the human sentiments throughout the history of those who participated in noble fashion, Chinese and non-Chinese alike.
In portraying the Chinese experience, Chang’s book as underscores how vital the transcontinental railroad was to the development of America.
“Gripping . . . Chang has accomplished the seemingly impossible . . . He has written a remarkably rich, human, and compelling story of the railroad Chinese.” — Peter Cozzens, Wall Street Journal
WINNER OF THE ASIAN/PACIFIC AMERICAN AWARD FOR LITERATURE WINNER OF THE CHINESE AMERICAN LIBRARIANS ASSOCIATION BEST BOOK AWARD
A groundbreaking, breathtaking history of the Chinese workers who built the Transcontinental Railroad, helping to forge modern America only to disappear into the shadows of history until now
From across the sea, they came by the thousands, escaping war and poverty in southern China to seek their fortunes in…
Andrew Vietze was five years old when he told his older sister that one day, he would be a park ranger. Twenty-eight years later, he put on his badge for the first time as a seasonal ranger in one of the premier wilderness areas in the East, Maine’s Baxter State Park. Home of Katahdin and the terminus of the Appalachian Trail, “Forever Wild” Baxter has no pavement, no electricity, no stores, no cell service. As a boy, Vietze imagined a life flying around in helicopters, rescuing hikers off mountaintops, fighting forest fires, chasing wilderness despoilers, and plucking people out of raging rivers. And he's spent the past twenty years doing just that.
The Last Seasonrecounts the disappearance of ranger Randy Morgenstern in California’s High Sierra. A legend in the NPS for his devotion to wild places, Morgenson spent more than 25 seasons as a backcountry ranger in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks before disappearing without a trace in 1996. An introspective sort who knew every corner of the territory he patrolled, Morgenson left behind a tantalizing mystery that writer Eric Blehm turns into a page-turning, psychological thriller. Did he fall off a cliff? Was he murdered? Did he take his own life? As a young ranger, I read this book late into the night under the hissing gas light of my duty station. We’ve had campers vanish in our wilderness—and a ranger die in the line of duty—so every page rang true.
Destined to become a classic of adventure literature, The Last Season examines the extraordinary life of legendary backcountry ranger Randy Morgenson and his mysterious disappearance in California's unforgiving Sierra Nevada—mountains as perilous as they are beautiful. Eric Blehm's masterful work is a gripping detective story interwoven with the riveting biography of a complicated, original, and wholly fascinating man.
In this profound ecological fable, a mysterious plague has destroyed the vast majority of the human race. Isherwood Williams, one of the few survivors, returns from a wilderness field trip to discover that civilization has vanished during his absence.
Eventually he returns to San Francisco and encounters a female survivor who becomes his wife. Around them and their children a small community develops, living like their pioneer ancestors, but rebuilding civilization is beyond their resources, and gradually they return to a simpler way of life.
A poignant novel about finding a new normal after the upheaval of a global crisis.
Hiking in the Sierra has been equal parts recreation and profession since I’ve been an adult. I’ve worked for the concessionaire in Yosemite Valley, surveyed lakes for rare amphibians, completed a PhD on alpine plants, and, over the past 15 years, written nine books on the Sierra Nevada. I continue to spend every summer obsessively exploring its trails, peaks, and remote lake basins, always excited to see a new view, find a rare flower, or simply see a favorite place in a new light. The rest of the year is spent writing—and reading what others have written, broadening my knowledge about my favorite place on Earth before I set out on the next summer’s adventures.
Rachel Mazur was a wildlife biologist in Yosemite, Kings Canyon, and Sequoia National Parks for many years. A core component of her job was “solving the bear problem”—generation upon generation of bears dependent on human food and ever more aggressive and crafty as they endeavored to satisfy this desire. Her story artfully weaves together the history of bear-human interactions in the Sierra, scientific research on bear habits and diets, and importantly sociology, especially people’s changing perception of acceptable wildlife management and visitors changing expectations of the attractions on offer in a national park. The book is skillfully written and thought-provoking, but also heartening as it ends with evidence that changing wildlife management and visitor actions mean bears are slowly becoming wilder again.
As majestic as they are powerful, and as timeless as they are current, bears continue to captivate. Speaking of Bears is not your average collection of stories. Rather, it is the history, compiled from interviews with more than 100 individuals, of how Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon National Parks, all in California's Sierra Nevada, created a human-bear problem so bad that there were eventually over 2,000 incidents in a single year. It then describes the pivotal moments during which park employees used trial and error, conducted research, invented devices, collaborated with other parks, and found funding to get the crisis…
I married my high school sweetheart and travel partner, and followed my own advice to do graduate work, and started my career working for the French National Railroad in New York City, mapping itineraries for travelers to Europe. Travel means the world to me, and if I don’t have a trip on the horizon, I feel aimless and untethered. I worked in book publishing for 30 years and dropped out of the corporate rat race to take a gap year abroad. I wrote about our “Senior year abroad” in my first book Gap Year Girl. I returned to the US to teach middle school French and organize student trips to France.
I read Almost Somewhere in just two sittings because I couldn’t wait to return to the trail.
I am a life-long hiker in her sixties and I couldn’t believe how much I identified with the self-doubt and misgivings of the twenty-something author on her journey. Roberts writes beautifully, and shares honest, raw reflections on almost every page and I felt every sore muscle, frustration, and joy.
The stunning descriptions of the trail give readers the sense that they’re there beside the author kicking up pebbles with her, but there is so much more to the story. The ups and downs and the surprises remind us that it’s not completing the trek that counts, it’s all that happens and changes us along the way.
Winner of the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award in Outdoor Literature
Day One, and already she was lying in her journal. It was 1993, Suzanne Roberts had just finished college, and when her friend suggested they hike California's John Muir Trail, the adventure sounded like the perfect distraction from a difficult home life and thoughts about the future. But she never imagined that the twenty-eight-day hike would change her life. Part memoir, part nature writing, part travelogue, Almost Somewhere is Roberts's account of that hike.
John Muir had written of the Sierra Nevada as a "vast range of light," and…
Hiking in the Sierra has been equal parts recreation and profession since I’ve been an adult. I’ve worked for the concessionaire in Yosemite Valley, surveyed lakes for rare amphibians, completed a PhD on alpine plants, and, over the past 15 years, written nine books on the Sierra Nevada. I continue to spend every summer obsessively exploring its trails, peaks, and remote lake basins, always excited to see a new view, find a rare flower, or simply see a favorite place in a new light. The rest of the year is spent writing—and reading what others have written, broadening my knowledge about my favorite place on Earth before I set out on the next summer’s adventures.
The folklore of any region is defined by big personalities—people whose impact far outlasts their lifetime and whose name is almost always mentioned with reverence. As the decades pass and their accomplishments and life stories become more distant, it is essential to have books that remind us why they are worth memorializing. This book tells the story of two such Sierran giants, Pete Starr and Norman Clyde. Pete Starr, was a young, accomplished mountaineer when he vanished on a climbing trip in the Minarets, west of Mammoth Lakes. He already had a completed draft of the first comprehensive hiking guide to the Sierra. Norman Clyde probably claims the most first Sierran ascents to his name. When search parties failed to find Starr, only Clyde persisted, showing the true character of a man often remembered for refusing to abide by society's norms.
This riveting narrative details the mysterious disappearance of Peter Starr, a San Francisco attorney from a prominent family, who set off to climb alone in the rugged Minaret region of the Sierra Nevada in July 1933. Rigorous and thorough searches by some of the best climbers in the history of the range failed to locate him despite a number of promising clues. When all hope seemed gone and the last search party had left the Minarets, mountaineering legend Norman Clyde refused to give up. Climbing alone, he persevered in the face of failure, resolved that he would learn the fate…
I’m an award-winning children’s author of more than 100 books, including many biographies. I first fell in love with biographies when I was a child and read about young blind and deaf Helen Keller. Blind and deaf? I couldn’t imagine. Yet, page by page, as I stepped into little Helen’s world, I felt as if I experienced her struggles, triumphs, and tragedies right along with her. I discovered that in spite of her great challenges, she succeeded. That’s why I love biographies and why I write them. I hope my biographies open a door into someone else’s world that can remind readers that they can succeed too, in spite of obstacles in front of them. I try to write the sort of picture books I love—funny, whimsical, captivating, and unforgettable.
I’m a big fan of Don Brown and this is one of my favorites. In this biography, we follow the adventure of Alice Ramsey who was the first woman to drive across the United States. It was 1909, so no easy task since there weren’t any interstates, road maps, or gas stations. Yet, Alice, along with her companions, set off. Magically, Brown lets us go along with them as they ramble past farms and fields, muster their way down roads clogged with pigs, dig themselves out of muddy holes, and urge the car across vast moonlit deserts, and over the grueling Sierra Nevada mountains. Alice’s grand adventure not only celebrates a woman’s first, but takes us along for the long, extraordinary, bumpy ride. Bravo Alice! Bravo Don Brown!
Don Brown introduces us to yet another little-known heroine. On June 9, 1909, twenty-two-year-old Alice Ramsey hitched up her skirts and climbed behind the wheel of a Maxwell touring car. Fifty-nine days later she rolled into San Francisco, becoming the first woman to drive across America. What happened in between is quite a tale! Through words and pictures, the author shares this story of a brave and tenacious young woman who followed her vision to conquer the open road - even when the road was nothing more than a wagon trail. Alice Ramsey's adventure offers a unique perspective on turn-of-the-century…
At some point I decided that if I was going to teach US history, I better have a good sense of what the place looked like. So I drove across the country—and then back again—and then again, and then once more, each time at a different latitude. I drove through North Dakota and South Dakota, Montana and Idaho, Nebraska and Kansas, Arkansas and Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas, up and down California, Oregon and Washington, and on and on. I got addicted to seeing the landscape in all its amazing variety and vastness, and seeing the landscape made the histories come alive.
Surely the Gold Rush is one of the first things we learn about the West, but who were these people? Where did they come from? Susan Johnson is a great storyteller, and this story is peopled with men and women from across the globe, radicals and racists, Chinese, Mexicans, Germans, Irish, and everyone else, how they worked, loved, and made a life.
The world of the California Gold Rush that comes down to us through fiction and film is one of half-truths. In this brilliant work of social history, Susan Lee Johnson enters the well-worked diggings of Gold Rush history and strikes a rich lode.
Johnson explores the dynamic social world created by the Gold Rush in the Sierra Nevada foothills east of Stockton, charting the surprising ways in which the conventions of identity-ethnic, national, and sexual-were reshaped. With a keen eye for character and story, she shows us how this peculiar world evolved over time, and how our cultural memory of…
As a boy in southern California, I knew that the mountains were to the north, that they were big, and that they were somehow related to earthquakes. I loved chemistry and the outdoors and decided on the first day of college that geology offered a great way to be an outdoor chemist. I learned the craft of writing in high school as a sports reporter for the local paper. After I started as a geology professor at the University of North Carolina in 1981, Bob Sharp of Caltech and I founded the Geology Underfoot series to get people into the outdoors to discover geology on their own.
Jones gives a modern account of the roles that the Sierra Nevada range has played in the history of California: barrier to transportation, source of gold, source of water, desert maker, provider of unique ecosystems, inspiration of water law and mining law, target of vacationers, hikers, and climbers, and inspirer of the national park system. This engaging book weaves the history of exploration and development of the state into the larger story of why the range exists, what it is made of, and why it is so odd that the Sierra Nevada, unlike most tall mountain ranges, lacks a low-density root to hold it up. Jones excels at explaining things that I never even thought to wonder about.
From ski towns to national parks, fresh fruit to environmental lawsuits, the Sierra Nevada has changed the way Americans live. Whether and where there was gold to be mined redefined land, mineral, and water laws. Where rain falls (and where it doesn't) determines whose fruit grows on trees and whose appears on slot machines. All this emerges from the geology of the range and how it changed history, and in so doing, changed the country.
The Mountains That Remade America combines geology with history to show how the particular forces and conditions that created the Sierra Nevada have effected broad…
The first dirt I tasted was a fistful of siltstone dust outside the house where I was born in the Mojave Desert. When she could, my mother took long walks around the multicolored washes and canyons. Her accounts of the changing light on the rock walls, her encounters with silence and sidewinders, and her accumulating collection of fossils piqued my enthusiasm for earth science and led me to earn a degree in geology. I discovered that deserts drew from me a special quality of attention as my body and mind became a single organ for listening.
Mary Austin’s truly remarkable book is set in the Mojave and Great Basin Deserts of California. Austin, who (like me) had degrees in science and literature, developed a deep interest in both ecological issues and indigenous practices, particularly those of the Paiute and Hopi.
In this book of poetic, lyrical essays, her finely-tuned attentiveness to the land as a dynamic ecosystem and her accounts of the dialogue between humans and non-humans foreground a major trajectory in environmental literature and advocacy.
Austin has an unaffected, clear-eyed style that blends philosophy, natural history, and storytelling. First published in 1903, the book remains remarkably relevant and moving.
The enduring appeal of the desert is strikingly portrayed in this poetic study, which has become a classic of the American Southwest. First published in 1903, it is the work of Mary Austin (1868-1934), a prolific novelist, poet, critic, and playwright, who was also an ardent early feminist and champion of Indians and Spanish-Americans. She is best known today for this enchanting paean to the vast, arid, yet remarkably beautiful lands that lie east of the Sierra Nevadas, stretching south from Yosemite through Death Valley to the Mojave Desert. Comprising fourteen sketches, the book describes plants, animals, mountains, birds, skies,…
