Here are 100 books that The Story of Vermont fans have personally recommended if you like
The Story of Vermont.
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I got caught up in the ideal of Vermont when I was a child and my family camped in the state parks. We loved the mountains, lakes, and brilliant green—and look, no litter, no billboards! Camping led to college here, where I studied literature, fell in love with Woolf and Wordsworth, and then began a life of writing and publishing. When a job opportunity presented itself, my husband and I decided to give up New York and give it a try. Twenty years later, Vermont is not only where my novel is set, but it’s where my life is set, and yet its character is one I’ll never fully fathom.
I’ve often wondered about the lives of the migrant farmworkers who come to Vermont, most often from Mexico, Guatemala, and Jamaica, but whom I only ever see in the grocery store checkout line or waiting at the service desk for cash transfers.
While it’s easy to idealize the rolling hills dotted with Holsteins, perfect for postcards and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cartons, dairy is big business in Vermont, and, like everywhere in the US, many of our farmworkers are immigrants without legal protection. Language and cultural barriers, and their very real fears of deportation, keep these workers’ lives hidden. This book, which brings together nineteen stories of personal witness, told by immigrant workers and illustrated, graphic-novel-style, by local comics artists, goes a long way to change that. While there are some common themes—the dangers of crossing the desert, longing for home, working endless shifts in all weather—the stories are…
This non-fiction comics anthology presents stories of survival and healing told by Latin American migrant farmworkers in Vermont, and drawn by New England cartoonists as part of the El Viaje Más Caro Project-a health care outreach effort of the Open Door Clinic and UVM Extension Bridges to Health aimed at addressing the overlooked mental health needs of these vulnerable immigrants. Originally distributed to farm workers as individual Spanish language comic books, this collected edition brings the lives and voices-as well as the challenges and hardships-of these workers to an English-language audience, granting insight into the experiences and lives of the…
I got caught up in the ideal of Vermont when I was a child and my family camped in the state parks. We loved the mountains, lakes, and brilliant green—and look, no litter, no billboards! Camping led to college here, where I studied literature, fell in love with Woolf and Wordsworth, and then began a life of writing and publishing. When a job opportunity presented itself, my husband and I decided to give up New York and give it a try. Twenty years later, Vermont is not only where my novel is set, but it’s where my life is set, and yet its character is one I’ll never fully fathom.
I’ve been reading Castle Freeman’s stories and novels for many years, and I always go back for more of his small-town settings, his sheriffs and loggers, and the lingering sense of menace he brings to every situation. But most of all, I go back for the dialogue, which is particularly funny, absurd, and even sometimes wise in this short, propulsive novel.
There’s something of Beckett in how these characters’ talk goes nowhere and everywhere at once. In the closed-down mill of the Dead River Chair Company, a handful of retired or otherwise unemployed men provide commentary and insight on the fast-developing plot, in which a young woman comes to them for information about a man who’s been stalking her and eluding the law.
They set her up with a couple of seemingly hapless locals, who together track him down in an abandoned logging camp in the dark woods. Freeman grew…
The Vermont hill country is the stark, vivid setting for this gripping and entertaining story of bold determination. The local villain, Blackway, is making life hellish for Lillian, a young woman from parts elsewhere. Her boyfriend has fled the state in fear, and local law enforcement can do nothing to protect her. She resolves, however, to stand her ground, and to fight back. A pair of unlikely allies – Lester, a crafty old-timer, and Nate, a powerful but naive youth – join her cause, understanding that there is no point in taking up the challenge unless you’re willing to “go…
I got caught up in the ideal of Vermont when I was a child and my family camped in the state parks. We loved the mountains, lakes, and brilliant green—and look, no litter, no billboards! Camping led to college here, where I studied literature, fell in love with Woolf and Wordsworth, and then began a life of writing and publishing. When a job opportunity presented itself, my husband and I decided to give up New York and give it a try. Twenty years later, Vermont is not only where my novel is set, but it’s where my life is set, and yet its character is one I’ll never fully fathom.
I dream of one day walking the entire Long Trail, biking the back roads, and paddling a canoe across Lake Champlain, but in the meantime, Leath Tonino has done all that and more. He brings a friendly curiosity, scrounged-up equipment, and a high tolerance, or even yearning, for discomfort and solitude as he explores “the wilderness of home.”
And because he’s also always reading books—the title comes from Aristotle, and his literary heroes are many—his perspective is a little more philosophical than you might expect from a collection of reports about often-challenging outdoor adventures. Mainly written for the magazines that helped fund his modest expeditions, these short pieces explore defunct logging camps, slippery waterfalls, ice-kayaking societies, cormorant colonies, and the little-seen railroad tracks of Vermont.
In the title selection, the native Vermonter traverses the state in seven different ways: biking, walking, swimming, skiing, hitchhiking, flying, and paddling. For Tonino, it’s…
The phrase "an animal a thousand miles miles long," attributed to Aristotle, refers to a sprawling body that cannot be seen in its entirety from a single angle, a thing too vast and complicated to be knowable as a whole.
For Leath Tonino, the animal a thousand miles long is the landscape of his native Vermont. Tonino grew up along the shores of Lake Champlain, situated between Vermont's Green Mountains and New York's Adirondacks. His career as a nature and travel writer has taken him across the country, but he always turns his eye back on his home state. "All…
This irreverent biography provides a rare window into the music industry from a promoter’s perspective. From a young age, Peter Jest was determined to make a career in live music, and despite naysayers and obstacles, he did just that, bringing national acts to his college campus atUW-Milwaukee, booking thousands of…
I got caught up in the ideal of Vermont when I was a child and my family camped in the state parks. We loved the mountains, lakes, and brilliant green—and look, no litter, no billboards! Camping led to college here, where I studied literature, fell in love with Woolf and Wordsworth, and then began a life of writing and publishing. When a job opportunity presented itself, my husband and I decided to give up New York and give it a try. Twenty years later, Vermont is not only where my novel is set, but it’s where my life is set, and yet its character is one I’ll never fully fathom.
Various poetry collections have become important to me throughout my life, but if I had to choose a favorite poet and favorite book right now, it would be Voigt and Headwaters. Something new reveals itself each time I read this collection, and it is a particular thrill that so many aspects of a place I know show up in poems of such fierce beauty—the groundhogs and winter snows, the larch and birch and owls.
Voigt moves from one line to the next with such smooth velocity—not slowed down by a single piece of punctuation—that the tumbling forth of images, moods, memories, questions, and quips can create a whiplash effect of the most pleasing kind. A poem that begins with heavy frost and hibernation moves through insomnia, deception, and the pleasure of smoking, and by the end, I find myself marveling, how did we get here?
Rash yet tender, chastened yet lush, Headwaters is a book of opposites, a book of wild abandon by one of the most formally exacting poets of our time. Animals populate its pages-owl, groundhog, fox, each with its own inimitable survival skills-and the poet who so meticulously observes their behaviors has accumulated a lifetime's worth of skills herself: she too has survived. The power of these extraordinary poems lies in their recognition that all our experience is ultimately useless-that human beings are at every moment beginners, facing the earth as if for the first time. "Don't you think I'm doing better,"…
By lucky lottery of birth, Missoula, Montana, nestled between forested mountains and sliced through by trout-filled rivers, is where I was born and raised. Public land conservation came into my consciousness naturally as clean, pine-scented air. But when I moved to overcrowded New York City in 2001 to try a career in journalism, homesickness made me begin researching conservation. Why are there public lands in the West? What forces prompted their creation? Who wants public lands, and who opposes them? Can their history teach us about our present and our future? These books began answering my questions.
This is an engrossing tour of public lands from Terry Tempest Williams, a poet and essayist who is an American treasure. From this beautiful and vivid book, I realized spiritual connections between human beings and nature, between past and future, between the soul and the earth.
America’s national parks are breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why more than 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the environmental classic Refuge and the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, returns with The Hour of Land, a literary celebration of our national parks, an exploration of what they mean to us and what we mean to them.
From the Grand Tetons in Wyoming to Acadia in Maine to Big Bend in Texas and more, Williams creates a series of lyrical portraits that…
History is my passion as well as my profession. I love a good story! When I was teaching courses in environmental history and women’s history, I kept noticing the intriguing intersections, which inspired me to write Beyond Nature’s Housekeepers. Most of my work focuses on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (1877-1920) and includes two award-winning biographies, Fighting Bob La Follette and Belle La Follette Progressive Era Reformer. I’m also the co-editor of A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and have written dozens of op-eds and give public talks (some of which can be found in the C-SPAN online library and on YouTube).
There are many general introductions to American environmental history. This one, by a pioneering leader in the field, is excellent. The comprehensive narrative provides a good mix of facts and interpretation, and Merchant provides as well a list of agencies, concepts, laws, and people, in addition to resource guides to print, film, video, archival, and electronic sources, plus bibliographies and essays on a variety of topics
By studying the many ways diverse peoples have changed, shaped, and conserved the natural world over time, environmental historians provide insight into humanity's unique relationship with nature and, more importantly, are better able to understand the origins of our current environmental crisis. Beginning with the precolonial land-use practice of Native Americans and concluding with our twenty-first century concerns over our global ecological crisis, American Environmental History addresses contentious issues such as the preservation of the wilderness, the expulsion of native peoples from national parks, and population growth, and considers the formative forces of gender, race, and class. Entries address a…
Tourists and local residents of St. Augustine will enjoy reading about the secret wonders of their ancient city that are right under their noses. Of course, that includes a few stray corpses and ghosts!
I’ve lived in San Francisco since I was 20 in 1978. I helped launch Processed World in 1981, Critical Mass in 1992, and Shaping San Francisco in 1998. I’ve been co-directing and co-curating the archive at foundsf.org since 2009, and have been fully immersed for years in gathering and presenting local history online, on bike and walking tours, during Public Talks, and most recently on Bay Cruises. I have published three books of my own and edited or co-edited seven additional volumes, much of which covers local history. The more I’ve learned the more I’ve realized how little I know!
Philip Dreyfus has written a fantastic one-stop ecological history of San Francisco that properly puts the city’s evolution into the natural systems on which it was built. Too many histories overlook the basic questions of water, topography, and climate and how human activity, that is work, has altered those over time. Dreyfus starts with an eloquent description of pre-contact life on the windy, foggy, sand-dune-covered peninsula, and methodically takes us through the sequences of urbanization, including the struggle over green spaces and parklands, water provision, and ultimately the surrounding bay itself. Few cities have benefited as much as San Francisco from the activism of previous generations that in our case, saved the bay, blocked freeway construction, and halted nuclear power.
Few cities are so dramatically identified with their environment as San Francisco - the landscape of hills, the expansive bay, the engulfing fog, and even the deadly fault line shifting below. Yet most residents think of the city itself as separate from the natural environment on which it depends. In Our Better Nature, Philip J. Dreyfus recounts the history of San Francisco from Indian village to world-class metropolis, focusing on the interactions between the city and the land and on the generations of people who have transformed them both. Dreyfus examines the ways that San Franciscans remade the landscape to…
Nature has been a source of play, exploration, community, and solace for me since I was very young – as an adult, I find myself fascinated and alarmed by our species’ relations with the living world. Nature writing gives me a way of bringing my attention to this relationship and exploring it in a very close way. I often think of that well-worn phrase: We cannot protect what we do not love; we cannot love what we do not know. Literature, it seems to me, offers one route to better knowing and loving the world.
This book charts a series of journeys along ancient tracks, holloways, and drove-roads. I found it a hugely immersive, surprisingly exhilarating read – I loved how Macfarlane brought a very detailed, lucid, and embodied mode of narration to travels that were often unexpected and strange.
As he walks, we hear stories of ghosts, pilgrims, songs, and their singers – it’s a book about people as much as places, and as I read, I gained a powerful sense of how, as humans, we’re shaped, made, and remade, by the landscapes we move through.
The acclaimed author of The Wild Places and Underland examines the subtle ways we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move
Chosen by Slate as one of the 50 best nonfiction books of the past 25 years
In this exquisitely written book, which folds together natural history, cartography, geology, and literature, Robert Macfarlane sets off to follow the ancient routes that crisscross both the landscape of the British Isles and its waters and territories beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the voices that haunt old paths and the stories our tracks tell. Macfarlane's journeys take…
I’ve loved the countryside ever since I was a child. Every year we used to stay for a week or two on a beautiful farm hidden away in a hollow of the Leicestershire wolds. I was fascinated by the wildlife and history – the old cottages and churches, local traditions and place names. It’s no accident I became a rural historian! I’m captivated by the strange power of landscape to affect us, subtly weaving itself into our sense of being, and have devoted much of my adult life to trying to understand this. I hope you find the books on the list as rewarding as I have!
Oliver Rackham is to historical landscape ecology what W.G. Hoskins is to landscape history.
More than anyone else, Rackham had the vision to understand that the pattern of woods, fields, hedges, moors, and marshes that defines the English countryside, although seemingly natural, was in fact created by a delicate and constantly shifting balance between human intervention and geological, climatological and ecological influences.
The Chiltern beechwoods I’ve enjoyed walking in since childhood, for example, exist partly because the timber was valuable for the chair-making industry that once flourished there, while the species-rich hay meadows of Swaledale that entranced me on a recent cycle tour were part and parcel of the local dairy-farming tradition, and have been put at risk by its decline.
From its earliest origins to the present day, this award-winning, beautifully written book describes the endlessly changing character of Britain's countryside.
'A classic' Richard Mabey
Exploring the natural and man-made features of the land - fields, highways, hedgerows, fens, marshes, rivers, heaths, coasts, woods and wood pastures - he shows conclusively and unforgettably how they have developed over the centuries. In doing so, he covers a wealth of related subjects to provide a fascinating account of the sometimes subtle and sometimes radical ways in which people, fauna, flora, climate, soils and other physical conditions have played their part in the…
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of…
When I first started reading about wilderness, I accepted it as an obvious thing—a place without people. That lasted a short time before I realized the enormous historical complexity of such places. Rather than places without people, without history, without politics, “wilderness” became a laboratory of American society. I tried to capture that vibrancy in my book An Open Pit Visible from the Moon where I showed all the claims various people made on one wilderness area in the North Cascades. I'm a writer, historian, and former college professor who now calls the Skagit Valley of Washington home. As much as I enjoy studying wilderness, I prefer walking through it and noticing what it teaches.
To read Trace is to go on a mesmerizing journey with the wisest of guides. Savoy searches for American identities, and her own multifaceted ones, in the history and memory of landscapes across the continent. Every turn reveals tragic histories and surprising connections and omissions with the most beautiful language. Savoy excavates the palimpsest of stories embedded in landscapes’ histories in a helpful reminder that “nature” is always entangled with the richness and complexity of human life. With each careful word, Savoy deepened my appreciation for how landscape absorbs and reflects its history—and my admiration for her unbelievable gifts as a writer. Trace is one of those books you can read each year and your respect for it grows and the insights from it enlarge your life every time.
Through personal journeys and historical inquiry, this PEN Literary Award finalist explores how America’s still unfolding history and ideas of “race” have marked its people and the land.
Sand and stone are Earth’s fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life-defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent’s past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her―paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples…
