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Walking
by Henry David Thoreau
Paperback from Watchmaker Publishing
ISBN: 1603863052
Delivery sometimes delayed
An unabridged, illustrated edition of 'Walking' with an introduction
by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the essay 'Night and Moonlight,' at book's end |
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Wild
Flowers Worth Knowing
by Neltje Blanchan
Paperback from IndyPublish
ISBN: 1414259492
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality.
Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to
remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process.
Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors
that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally
important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of
our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. |
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The
Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America
by Timothy Egan
Paperback from Mariner Books
ISBN: 0547394608
On the afternoon of August 20,
1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national
forests of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, whipping the hundreds of small
blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno. Forest rangers
had assembled nearly ten thousand men--college boys, day workers, immigrants
from mining camps--to fight the fire. But no living person had seen anything
like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to
subdue them.Egan narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against
the implacable fire with unstoppable dramatic force. Equally dramatic is
the larger story he tells of outsized president Teddy Roosevelt and his
chief forester, Gifford Pinchot. Pioneering the notion of conservation,
Roosevelt and Pinchot did nothing less than create the idea of public land
as our national treasure, owned by and preserved for every citizen. |
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Excursions
by Henry David Thoreau
Paperback from Watchmaker Publishing
ISBN: 1603863044
An unabridged, illustrated edition with a foreword by Ralph Waldo Emerson,
to include: Biographical Sketch - Natural History of Massachusetts - A
Walk to Wachusett - The Landlord - A Winter Walk - The Succession of Forest
Trees - Walking - Autumnal Tints - Wild Apples - Night and Moonlight |
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Young
Men and Fire
by Norman Maclean
Paperback from University Of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226500624
On August 5, 1949, a crew of
fifteen of the United States Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters,
the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the
Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of these
men were dead or mortally burned. Haunted by these deaths for forty years,
Norman Maclean puts back together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch
tragedy.
Young Men and Fire won the National Book Critics Circle Award
in 1992.
"A magnificent drama of writing, a tragedy that pays tribute to the
dead and offers rescue to the living.... Maclean's search for the truth,
which becomes an exploration of his own mortality, is more compelling even
than his journey into the heart of the fire. His description of the conflagration
terrifies, but it is his battle with words, his effort to turn the story
of the 13 men into tragedy that makes this book a classic."--from New
York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, Best Books of 1992
"A treasure: part detective story, part western, part tragedy, part
elegy and wholly eloquent ghost story in which the dead and the living
join ranks cheerfully, if sometimes eerily, in a search for truth and the
rest it brings."--Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune
"An astonishing book. In compelling language, both homely and elegant,
Young Men and Fire miraculously combines a fascinating primer on
fires and firefighting, a powerful, breathtakingly real reconstruction
of a tragedy, and a meditation on writing, grief and human character....
Maclean's last book will stir your heart and haunt your memory."--Timothy
Foote, USA Today
"Beautiful.... A dark American idyll of which the language can be proud."--Robert
M. Adams, The New York Review of Books
"Young Men and Fire is redolent of Melville. Just as the reader
of Moby Dick comes to comprehend the monstrous entirety of the great
white whale, so the reader of Young Men and Fire goes into the heart
of the great red fire and comes out thoroughly informed. Don't hesitate
to take the plunge."--Dennis Drabelle, Washington Post Book World
"Young Men and Fire is a somber and poetic retelling of a tragic
event. It is the pinnacle of smokejumping literature and a classic work
of 20th-century nonfiction."--John Holkeboer, The Wall Street Journal
"Maclean is always with the brave young dead. . . . They could not
have found a storyteller with a better claim to represent their honor.
. . . A great book."--James R. Kincaid, New York Times Book ReviewOn
August 5, 1949, lightning came crashing down in the vast spruce forest
above Seeley Lake, Montana, and touched off a roaring blaze. As every Westerner
knows, lightning means fire, but the fire that raged through Mann Gulch
that day was huge--the sort that occurs only every few decades. A battery
of paratrooper-firefighters, many of them fresh veterans of World War II,
had been anticipating it, and even looking forward to the chance to fight
a great fire. Before the day ended thirteen of those smokejumpers lay dead,
their charred remains evidence that something had gone terribly wrong.
Norman Maclean gives a thorough account of the incident in language not
meant for the squeamish: "Burning to death on a mountainside is dying at
least three times ... first, considerably ahead of the fire, you reach
the verge of death in your boots and your legs; next, as you fail, you
sink back in the region of strange gases and red and blue darts where there
is no oxygen and here you die in your lungs; then you sink in prayer into
the main fire that consumes." After August 1949, he notes, the Forest Service
came to recognize that not all fires need to be fought and that fire benefits
most forest ecosystems. |
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Fire
Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout
by Philip Connors
Hardcover from Ecco
Media Published: 2011-
ISBN: 0061859362
A decade ago Philip Connors left work as an editor at the Wall Street
Journal and talked his way into a job far from the streets of lower
Manhattan: working as one of the last fire lookouts in America. Spending
nearly half the year in a 7' x 7' tower, 10,000 feet above sea level in
remote New Mexico, his tasks were simple: keep watch over one of the most
fire-prone forests in the country and sound the alarm at the first sign
of smoke.
Fire Season is Connors's remarkable reflection on work, our place
in the wild, and the charms of solitude. The landscape over which he keeps
watch is rugged and roadless--it was the first region in the world to be
officially placed off limits to industrial machines--and it typically gets
hit by lightning more than 30,000 times per year. Connors recounts his
days and nights in this forbidding land, untethered from the comforts of
modern life: the eerie pleasure of being alone in his glass-walled perch
with only his dog Alice for company; occasional visits from smokejumpers
and long-distance hikers; the strange dance of communion and wariness with
bears, elk, and other wild creatures; trips to visit the hidden graves
of buffalo soldiers slain during the Apache wars of the nineteenth century;
and always the majesty and might of lightning storms and untamed fire.
Written with narrative verve and startling beauty, and filled with reflections
on his literary forebears who also served as lookouts--among them Edward
Abbey, Jack Kerouac, Norman Maclean, and Gary Snyder--Fire Season
is a book to stand the test of time. |
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The
Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring
by Richard Preston
Paperback from Random House Trade Paperbacks
Media Published: 2008-
ISBN: 0812975596
Hidden away in foggy, uncharted rain forest valleys in Northern California
are the largest and tallest organisms the world has ever sustained-the
coast redwood trees, Sequoia sempervirens. Ninety-six percent
of the ancient redwood forests have been destroyed by logging, but the
untouched fragments that remain are among the great wonders of nature.
The biggest redwoods have trunks up to thirty feet wide and can rise more
than thirty-five stories above the ground, forming cathedral-like structures
in the air. Until recently, redwoods were thought to be virtually impossible
to ascend, and the canopy at the tops of these majestic trees was undiscovered.
In The Wild Trees, Richard Preston unfolds the spellbinding story
of Steve Sillett, Marie Antoine, and the tiny group of daring botanists
and amateur naturalists that found a lost world above California, a world
that is dangerous, hauntingly beautiful, and unexplored.
The canopy voyagers are young-just college students when they
start their quest-and they share a passion for these trees, persevering
in spite of sometimes crushing personal obstacles and failings. They take
big risks, they ignore common wisdom (such as the notion that there's nothing
left to discover in North America), and they even make love in hammocks
stretched between branches three hundred feet in the air.
The deep redwood canopy is a vertical Eden filled with mosses, lichens,
spotted salamanders, hanging gardens of ferns, and thickets of huckleberry
bushes, all growing out of massive trunk systems that have fused and formed
flying buttresses, sometimes carved into blackened chambers, hollowed out
by fire, called "fire caves." Thick layers of soil sitting on limbs harbor
animal and plant life that is unknown to science. Humans move through the
deep canopy suspended on ropes, far out of sight of the ground, knowing
that the price of a small mistake can be a plunge to one's death.
Preston's account of this amazing world, by turns terrifying, moving,
and fascinating, is an adventure story told in novelistic detail by a master
of nonfiction narrative. The author shares his protagonists' passion for
tall trees, and he mastered the techniques of tall-tree climbing to tell
the story in The Wild Trees-the story of the fate of the world's
most splendid forests and of the imperiled biosphere itself.
From the Hardcover edition. |
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The
Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed
by John Vaillant
Paperback from W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393328643
A tale of obsession so fierce that a man kills the thing he loves
most: the only giant golden spruce on earth.
As vividly as Jon Krakauer put readers on Everest, John Vaillant takes
us into the heart of North America's last great forest, where trees grow
to eighteen feet in diameter, sunlight never touches the ground, and the
chainsaws are always at work.
When a shattered kayak and camping gear are found on an uninhabited
island, they reignite a mystery surrounding a shocking act of protest.
Five months earlier, logger-turned-activist Grant Hadwin had plunged naked
into a river in British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Islands, towing a chainsaw.
When his night's work was done, a unique Sitka spruce, 165 feet tall and
covered with luminous golden needles, teetered on its stump. Two days later
it fell.
The tree, a fascinating puzzle to scientists, was sacred to the Haida,
a fierce seafaring tribe based in the Queen Charlottes. Vaillant recounts
the bloody history of the Haida and the early fur trade, and provides harrowing
details of the logging industry, whose omnivorous violence would claim
both Hadwin and the golden spruce. |
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Wildwood
Wisdom
by Ellsworth Jaeger
Paperback from Shelter Publications
ISBN: 0375753664
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Wetland,
Woodland, Wildland: A Guide to the Natural Communities of Vermont (Middlebury
Bicentennial Series in Environmental Studies)
by Elizabeth H. Thompson, et al
Paperback: 420 pages
University Press of New England; ISBN: 158465077X; (October
)
Reading
the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England
by Tom Wessels, et al
Paperback: 200 pages
Countryman Pr; ISBN: 0881504203; Reprint edition (June
)
Fire
on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire
by John N. Maclean
(Hardcover -- October )
New
England Forests Through Time : Insights from the Harvard Forest Dioramas
by David R. Foster, et al
Paperback: 70 pages
Harvard Univ Pr; ISBN: 0674003446;
A
Field Guide to Eastern Forests North America (Peterson Field Guide Series)
by John C. Kricher, et al
Paperback: 544 pages
Houghton Mifflin Co (Pap); ISBN: 0395928958; (October
15, )
A
Field Guide to California and Pacific Northwest Forests (Peterson Field
Guide Series)
by John C. Kricher, Gordon Morrison (Illustrator)
(Paperback -- November 15, )
The
Trees in My Forest
by Bernd Heinrich
Paperback: 237 pages
Harper Perennial; ISBN: 0060929421; )
Fire
in Sierra Nevada Forests: A Photographic Interpretation of Ecological Change
Since 1849
by George E. Gruell
(Paperback -- October )
The
Amazon River Forest: A Natural History of Plants, Animals, and People
by Nigel J. H. Smith
(Paperback -- January )
Urban
Forestry: Planning and Managing Urban Greenspaces
by Robert W. Miller
(Hardcover -- June 28, )
Trees and Shrubs for Northern Gardens: New and Revised Edition
by Leon C. Snyder, et al
Listed under Trees
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