Showing results for "Nature" in Biographies & Memoirs

In this gripping first installment of a trilogy by Conrad and Ford, an anonymous narrator teeters on the edge of exposure amidst a devastating breach of fiduciary trust and a looming financial scandal. As he pours his heart out in a series of poignant letters to his beloved, he grapples with despair and contemplates the unthinkable—suicide.

An abiding love of nature lies at the root of all of Rabindranath Tagore’s works. Thousands of pages have been written in appreciation of his writings on nature. However, Tagore has not commonly been considered relevant to the current environmental debate. Using the lens of ecocriticism, the author shows us how Tagore brings up important issues regarding the imbalanced relationship between man and nature, decades before the concept had been formally introduced.

In May of 1963, Seattle mountaineer Jim Whittaker stepped into world history by becoming the first American to summit Mount Everest. More than 50 years later, he is still regarded as a seminal figure in North American mountaineering, as well as an astute businessman who helped create the outdoor recreation industry. A Life on the Edge: Memoirs of Everest and Beyond is Jim's courageous, no-punches-pulled autobiography and a look at a peripatetic, sometimes difficult life.

In How to Plant a Billion Trees, Walker tries to understand why her whole life didn’t fall apart, as was predicted. As she pieces together her story, she finds that it was thanks in no small part to her mother, her sisters, her friends who did not let the sexual abuse to define her. In this candid portrayal of a young girl, Nicole Walker writes about how, thanks to her family, her friends, and the mountains of the Wasatch, Cascades, and San Francisco Peaks, she reknit herself into the fabric of a supportive culture.

On the evening of July 27, 1985, five hikers made a fateful choice to climb Yosemite's fabled Half Dome, even as the sky darkened and thunder rolled. By night's end, two would be dead from a lightning strike, three gravely wounded, and desperate EMTs would be overseeing a harrowing midnight helicopter rescue.

Madhav Gadgil was born in Pune in 1942, just as Salim Ali's superbly illustrated Book of Indian Birds was published. Influenced by his birdwatcher father, he learnt to recognize birds from their pictures even before he could read. He is an unusual combination of a person fascinated by the...

In the fall of 1978, Ray Ordorica packed everything he thought he would need into his Toyota LandCruiser and drove north to Alaska. He came to a land he had never seen, to find something he wasn't even sure existed: a wilderness cabin he could use for a year or more to live, think, relax, read, and write. Ordorica found his cabin, fixed it up, and, although it was just an un-insulated 12- by 16-foot one-room log structure, he spent three winters in it in relative comfort.

The popular and highly respected horse trainer Mark Rashid brings together Western and Eastern philosophies to demonstrate a seamless new incarnation of horse training. After years of helping "difficult" horses, Mark Rashid understands how to build the foundation of a horse's training and resolve any problems encountered along the way.

What do you do when your world ends? At 28 years old, Krista Schlyer sold almost everything she owned and packed the rest of it in a station wagon bound for the American wild. Her two best friends joined her - one a grumpy, grieving introvert, the other a feisty dog - and together they sought out every national park, historic site, forest, and wilderness they could get to before their money ran out or their minds gave in.

Few books have captured the haunting world of music and rivers and of the sport they provide as well as A River Never Sleeps. Roderick L. Haig-Brown writes of fishing not just as a sport, but also as an art. He knows moving water and the life within it - its subtlest mysteries and perpetual delights. He is a man who knows fish lore as few people ever will, and the legends and history of a great sport. Month by month, he takes you from river to river, down at last to the saltwater and the sea.

Doctor, angler, and raconteur Donald Thomas takes fishermen on a rollicking road trip through Alaska, Costa Rica, Australia, the Galapagos, and more. Fishing in oceans along the way, he enjoys the kind of adventures most people can only dream of. Each chapter includes a sidebar that gives Thomas an opportunity to riff entertainingly on a particular game fish, as well as an “At a Glance” section with both the current IGFA All-Tackle and Fly-Rod world records for that species.

In Forest Euphoria, Kaishian shows us this making of a scientist and introduces listeners to the queerness of all the life around us. Fungal species, we learn, commonly encompass more than two biological sexes—and some as many as twenty-three thousand. Some intersex slugs mutually fire calcium carbonate “love darts” at each other during courtship.

This is the true story of a journey to a seaside town and the always unpredictable torrent of dark escapades that accompany a life at sea. It's a story of a world peopled by those who often live on the frayed edges of society, who shun the world in which most people thrive. It's a story in which college students and "fish hippies" work in canneries alongside survivalists, rednecks, religious freaks, and deckhands with damning secrets in dangerous waters, driven by the need to feed an insatiable appetite for adventure.

On October 12, 1972, a plane carrying a team of young rugby players crashed into the remote, snow-peaked Andes. Out of the 45 original passengers and crew, only 16 made it off the mountain alive. For 10 excruciating weeks, they suffered deprivations beyond imagining, confronting nature head-on at its most furious and inhospitable. And to survive, these men and women not only had to keep their faith; they had to make an impossible decision: Should they eat the flesh of their dead friends?

The Durrell family returns to the island of Corfu, continuing the story begun in My Family and Other Animals. Already an ardent naturalist at the age of 10, the young Gerald lives in an unconventional and disordered household with his mother, sister, and two brothers. Convivial and open, the family plays host to a constant stream of quirky guests. But for Gerald, the main attraction is the wildlife of Corfu.

An unforgettable spiritual journey through the Himalayas... IN 1973, Peter Matthiessen and field biologist George Schaller traveled high into the remote mountains of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and possibly glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard. Matthiessen, a student of Zen...

This lyrical account of a beloved time and place celebrates a father-son relationship. In Cogan’s Woods, Ron Ellis fondly recalls annual August hunting trips with his father: heading toward the great forests of Kentucky in the passenger seat of the family Mercury, exploring the foggy woods and hills above the Ohio River.

Alone on the Wall recounts the most astonishing achievements of Honnold's extraordinary life and career, brimming with lessons on living fearlessly, taking risks, and maintaining focus even in the face of extreme danger. Now Honnold tells, for the first time and in his own words, the story of his three hours and 56 minutes on the sheer face of El Cap, which Outside called "the moon landing of free soloing.... A generation-defining climb. Bad ass and beyond words.... One of the pinnacle sporting moments of all time."

Naturalist Joe Hutto’s latest adventures in wildlife observation take him to Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains. Hutto is living in a tent at 12,000 feet, where blizzards occur in July and where human wants become irrelevant—and human needs can become a matter of life and death—to study the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep.

Emmy Award - winning filmmaker, writer, and naturalist Joe Hutto has done it again. Touching the Wild is the enchanting story about one man who has lived with a herd of mule deer in the Wind River mountains of Wyoming for almost seven years. Why, you may ask, would a person choose to do such a thing? His response: how could you not? For Joe Hutto, close proximity to wild things is irresistible. In Illumination in the Flatwoods he unveiled the secret lives of the wild turkey to great critical acclaim.