I love field guides. I can vividly picture my first copy of Petersonâs Field Guide to Birds, tattered and weather-beaten. I also love poetry and literature, so it seemed natural to me to bring the two together in my work. Iâm from New England, but I've lived in the U.S. Southwest for over twenty years. Place is important to me: I think a lot about how we get to know and care for the places we live and call home and how we can work to be good neighbors. I worked for about a decade as a hiking guide and have also taught environmental education. I now teach geography at New Mexico State University.
This is a great book to take along on a road trip in the U.S. West. In fact, Iâve used this book multiple times on geography field courses, in which students and I camp our way across the Southwest. Wyckoff includes 100 different landscape features, including both physical and cultural landscapes. Think everything from âCacti and Joshua Treesâ to âSpanish Colonial Revival Architectureâ to âEdge Cities,â and you have a little taste of the book. Wyckoffâs âTips for Navigating Western Landscapesâ are especially useful and will help even the most experienced traveler to see and understand cultural and physical landscapes in new ways.
From deserts to ghost towns, from national forests to California bungalows, many of the features of the western American landscape are well known to residents and travelers alike. But in How to Read the American West, William Wyckoff introduces readers anew to these familiar landscapes. A geographer and an accomplished photographer, Wyckoff offers a fresh perspective on the natural and human history of the American West and encourages readers to discover that history has shaped the places where people live, work, and visit.
This innovative field guide includes stories, photographs, maps, and diagrams on a hundred landscape features across theâŚ
This atlas beautifully demonstrates how geography is crucial to making sense of patterns and relationships in the world. I sat down and read it cover to cover, though it also would work well as a coffee table book. If you dig maps and data, this book is for you. If youâre interested in design, this book is for you. If you want to really visualize how putting interesting data on a map can help you to look at the world in new ways, this book is for you. Heck, if youâre curious about the world, this book is for you.
Award-winning geographer-designer team James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti transform enormous datasets into rich maps and cutting-edge visualizations. In this triumph of visual storytelling, they uncover truths about our past, reveal who we are today, and highlight what we face in the years ahead. With their joyfully inquisitive approach, Cheshire and Uberti explore happiness levels around the globe, trace the undersea cables and cell towers that connect us, examine hidden scars of geopolitics, and illustrate how a warming planet affects everything from hurricanes to the hajj. Years in the making, Atlas of the Invisible invites readers to marvel at the promiseâŚ
Fourteen is a coming-of-age adventure when, at the age of 14, Leslie and her two sisters have to batten down the hatches on their 45-foot sailboat to navigate the Pacific Ocean and French Polynesia, as well as the stormy temper of their larger-than-life Norwegian father.
I remember talking with Laura-Gray Street when they were planning this book, and I love how it turned out! A beautiful mixture of natural history, poetry, and artwork featuring species of the Southern Appalachians. If you live in or care about Southern Appalachia, Iâd especially recommend this to you (and it makes a great gift for anyone you know who lives there).
Getting acquainted with local flora and fauna is the perfect way to begin to understand the wonder of nature. The natural environment of Southern Appalachia, with habitats that span the Blue Ridge to the Cumberland Plateau, is one of the most biodiverse on earth. A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia-a hybrid literary and natural history anthology-showcases sixty of the many species indigenous to the region.
Ecologically, culturally, and artistically, Southern Appalachia is rich in paradox and stereotype-defying complexity. Its species range from the iconic and inveterate-such as the speckled trout, pileated woodpecker, copperhead, and black bear-to the elusive andâŚ
In the introduction to this book and catalog that features map art by Zuni artists, Jim Enote writes, âthese maps are like relatives, like aunts and uncles that entrance us with narrations of places they have been to or heard about.â I love this way of thinking about maps as relational. As a non-Indigenous person viewing these maps, they help me to think about mapping and representations of place in new ways, and they challenge Western and colonial mapping traditions and cartographic practices that have often historically been put to the use of empire, land grabs, and greed.
Activating Our 12-Stranded DNA
by
Ruslana Remennikova,
In this vibrant guidebook, sound healer and former corporate scientist Ruslana Remennikova reveals how, through vibration and intention, you can shapeshift DNA from the standard double helix to its 12-stranded, dodecahedral formâunlocking your spiritual potential and opening the way for deep healing of the past, the present, and the futureâŚ
Ever since I heard about how the editors are organizing this book around âkinship clustersâ and Indigenous classification rather than Western taxonomies, Iâve been so looking forward to this book being published! If you have a connection to the Cascadia region and an interest in the environment, keep an eye out for this one.
Have you ever been so filled up with the wonder of a place that it wants to spill out as a song? Well, here is the songbook. I imagine walking through a forest and pausing to read these illuminating pages aloud to a listening cedar or a dipper. There are field guides that help us to see, and to name, and to know; Cascadia Field Guide does all of that and more. This is a guide to relationship, a gift in reciprocity for the gifts of the land. â Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass
Both literary anthology and hands-on field guide, The Sonoran Desert is a groundbreaking book that melds art and science. It captures the stunning biodiversity of the worldâs most verdant desert through words and images. More than fifty poets and writersâincluding Christopher Cokinos, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Ken Lamberton, Eric Magrane, Jane Miller, Gary Paul Nabhan, Alberto RĂos, Ofelia Zepeda, and many othersâhave composed responses to key species of this striking desert. Each creative contribution is joined by an illustration by award-winning artist Paul Mirocha and scientific information about the creature or plant authored by the bookâs editors.
From the saguaro to the mountain lion, from the black-tailed jackrabbit to the mesquite, the species represented here have evoked compelling and creative responses from each contributor.
From the author of Washingtonâs Spies, the thrilling story of two rival secret agents â one Confederate, the other Union â sent to Britain during the Civil War.
The Southâs James Bulloch, charming and devious, was ordered to acquire a clandestine fleet intended to break Lincolnâs blockade, sink NorthernâŚ
Diary of a Citizen Scientist
by
Sharman Apt Russell,
Citizen Scientist begins with this extraordinary statement by the Keeper of Entomology at the London Museum of Natural History, âStudy any obscure insect for a week and you will then know more than anyone else on the planet.â
As the author chases the obscure Western red-bellied tiger beetle across NewâŚ