As a leader of mountaineering and field science programs, I learned that Mother Earth knows a thing or two about magic. When I see the magic of nature under attack, I have the same response as when witnessing a helpless person being bullied: I want to join the fight. As a writer, my most powerful weapons are my words. And the best use of my words is in the telling of riveting stories—that both entertain and educate—in defense of the wild.
I would suggest anything by Hillerman, but you might as well start with the first in the series. Without overtly advocating for activism to protect nature, Hillerman renders the desert southwest in such achingly beautiful detail that one can’t help but want to fight to protect it. In fact, Hillerman is where I got my start in reading/writing environmental thrillers.
Don’t miss the TV series, Dark Winds, based on the Leaphorn, Chee, & Manuelito novels, now on AMC and AMC+!
“Brilliant…as fascinating as it is original.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
From New York Times bestselling author Tony Hillerman, the first novel in his series featuring Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn & Officer Jim Chee who encounter a bizarre case that borders between the supernatural and murder
Homicide is always an abomination, but there is something exceptionally disturbing about the victim discovered in a high, lonely place—a corpse with a mouth full of sand—abandoned at a crime scene seemingly devoid of tracks or useful clues.…
Abby’s best novel is the primer, the bible, the fountainhead of fiction addressing the destruction of nature for profit. In this case, damming the Colorado River. In fact, “monkeywrenching,” as a verb defining an action in defense of nature, has a much broader current applicability thanks to Abbey’s novel.
'Revolutionary ... An extravagant, finely written tale of ecological sabotage' The New York Times
Audacious, controversial and hilarious, The Monkey Wrench Gang is Edward Abbey's masterpiece - a big, boisterous and unforgettable novel about freedom and commitment that ignited the flames of environmental activism.
Throughout the vast American West, nature is being vicitimized by a Big Government / Big Business conspiracy of bridges, dams and concrete. But a motley gang of individuals has decided that enough is enough. A burnt-out veteran, a mad doctor and a polygamist join forces in a noble cause: to dismantle the machinery of progress through…
ThePianist's Only Daughter is a frank, humorous, and heartbreaking exploration of aging in an aging expert's own family.
Social worker and gerontologist Kathryn Betts Adams spent decades negotiating evolving family dynamics with her colorful and talented parents: her mother, an English scholar and poet, and her father, a pianist…
Child’s nonfiction account reminds us that nature in her most stripped-down beauty can be found in the deserts of the American West. Childs states in his subtitle, “There are two ways to die in the desert: thirst and drowning.” Thereby skillfully capturing the striking contrasts of these unpredictable, delicate, and beautiful natural environments.
Like the highest mountain peaks, deserts are environments that can be inhospitable even to the most seasoned explorers. Craig Childs, who has spent years in the deserts of the American West - as an adventurer, a river guide, and a field instructor in natural history - has developed a keen appreciation for these forbidding landscapes: their beauty, their wonder, and especially their paradoxes. His extraordinary treks through arid lands in search of water are an astonishing revelation of the natural world at its most extreme.
“The Overstory” by Richard Powers is the best novel EVER written about trees. Full stop. But wait, I can’t stop. After ranging in the novel from the crown to the roots and from the densely forested Northeast to the giants of the Northwest, you will never take a single tree for granted again.
In fact, I’ll wager that, like me, after finishing this book you will go out and apologize to the familiar but ignored creatures that have patiently fed your soul while shading your body.
The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of-and paean to-the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers's twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours-vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see…
Pete West, a political columnist, travels to Prague to find a missing diplomat, later found murdered. He attempts to discover more about a cryptic note received from the diplomat and is immediately entangled in the secret Bilderberg Club’s strategy to form a world federation.
On a personal note, I had the great honor in the early 1960s of kayaking a wild section of the Colorado River with two young women who were the first to do it. It will come as no surprise that I loved Sevigny’s nonfiction work about Lois Jotter and Elzada Clover, the first two women to run the Colorado River and live to talk about it.
Oh, and they also collected and recorded the canyon’s botanical specimens just before much geology, archeology, and botany was sacrificed to large reservoirs held back by dams—and that brings me back to The Monkey Wrench Gang.
In the summer of 1938, botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter set off down the Colorado River, accompanied by an ambitious expedition leader and three amateur boatmen. With its churning rapids, sheer cliffs and boat-shattering boulders, the Colorado River was famed as the most dangerous river in the world. But for Clover and Jotter, it held a tantalising appeal: no one had surveyed the Grand Canyon's plants, and they were determined to be the first.
Through the vibrant letters and diaries of the two women, science journalist Melissa L. Sevigny traces their forty-three-day journey, during which they ran rapids, chased…
In my environmental thriller, Lyndall Burke, a vulnerable young scientist and free spirit, gets caught up in a battle between ecoterrorists and corrupt public officials over water in the drought-stricken desert Southwest. Lyndall's disappearance leads police officer Susan Brand and private investigator Jake Goddard to rush to her aid.
Still, abduction, deceit, and murder could lead to a cataclysmic ending, jeopardizing the entire region. In a parched and frightening future in which two-thirds of the world's population is expected to live under severe water shortages, my book is a modern allegory, shedding light on the desperate clashes over precious water and our imperiled future.
What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?
The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…
At the age of forty-nine, Laurie Woodford rents out her house, packs her belongings into two suitcases, and leaves her life in upstate New York to relocate to Seoul, South Korea. What begins as an opportunity to teach college English in Asia evolves into a nomadic adventure.
