Although I’ve written over 50 books, the ones that have had the greatest impact are the novels that have been turned into movies. Through my books and the films based on them, I’ve had the privilege of sharing thought-provoking, life-changing stories with millions of people around the world. As a blind person, myself, I realize the absurdity of writing books I can’t read that are turned into movies I can’t watch, but a powerful story delivers life-changing lessons and endures forever.
Acres of Diamonds is a timeless tale that has impacted generations of readers including me. It reminds us that before we begin searching throughout the world for the things we think we don’t have, we need to look inside of ourselves and explore what we really do have. As an African farmer leaves his home and everything he knows to begin a frantic search for diamonds, he discovers the eternal lesson that we get what we love when we learn to love what we have.
This stirring manifesto shows how to discover everything you need to succeed-where you least expect it.
So begins one of the most famous speeches of the twentieth century, a talk that educator and minister Russell H. Conwell delivered before literally thousands of audiences before his death in 1925. In its printed version Acres of Diamonds reached millions of readers around the world. Conwell's great manifesto imparts one extraordinary lesson: All the wealth you could ever dream of, search for, or yearn after-in whatever form you wish for-exists right beneath your own feet. It is a message of determination, unconventional thinking,…
As a teenager, I visited my uncle, who farmed rice in southern Haiti. I met a community that helped me understand that food is not just about dollars and cents—it’s about belonging, it’s about identity. This experience inspired me to become an aid worker. For the last 20+ years, I have worked to mend broken food systems all over the world. If we don’t get food right, hunger will threaten the social fabric.
I found that this book offers a great overview of the issues. I appreciate how the author breaks down the complex myriad forces shaping our agri-food systems into relatable anecdotes.
The author never gets lost in the numbers and stays focused on guiding the reader through the inequalities and power relations that define our food system. I found Patel’s writing always enjoyable.
"For anyone attempting to make sense of the world food crisis, or understand the links between U.S. farm policy and the ability of the world's poor to feed themselves, Stuffed and Starved is indispensable." —Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma
It’s a perverse fact of modern life: There are more starving people in the world than ever before, while there are also more people who are overweight.
To find out how we got to this point and what we can do about it, Raj Patel launched a comprehensive investigation into the global food network. It…
Dark Emu is the history of Aboriginal Australia, before the white people came. As a settler here myself, I was astounded as chapter after chapter demolished the myth of Terra nullius and showed how comprehensively the landscape had been managed before invasion. The descriptions of the early colonialists had recorded the truth, and then it had ben buried.
I know some people who have had strong negative reactions to this work as well so it is controversial.
So you know, the author Bruce Pascoe is a Bunurong man and an award-winning Australian writer and editor. Dark Emu won the 2016 NSW Book of the Year and was a joint winner of the 2016 Indigenous Writer’s Prize.
History has portrayed Australia's First Peoples, the Aboriginals, as hunter-gatherers who lived on an empty, uncultivated land. History is wrong.
In this seminal book, Bruce Pascoe uncovers evidence that long before the arrival of white men, Aboriginal people across the continent were building dams and wells; planting, irrigating, and harvesting seeds, and then preserving the surplus and storing it in houses, sheds, or secure vessels; and creating elaborate cemeteries and manipulating the landscape. All of these behaviours were inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag, which turns out to have been a convenient lie that worked to justify dispossession.
I started to garden seriously when we had three young kids and little income. We had limited space and had to be ingenious about how and what we grew. A flock of chickens soon joined the effort, adding fresh eggs, compost-fueling manure, and plenty of entertainment. As we moved, we always had a garden, adding structures like sheds, trellises, tomato cages, fencing, and chicken coops. My work writing books and articles about backyard homesteading gave me the chance to meet resourceful people with expertise miles beyond my own. I always came away from those encounters loaded with new ideas to incorporate into next year’s garden.
Anyone intrigued by the ingenuity involved in farming will be fascinated by this time in American history when farming moved from mere subsistence to offering a marketable surplus. Initially, a farmer's concern was modest: first to “raise sufficient corn for the family and their livestock; next, to be assured of an abundant supply of pork.” But as methods improved, there was soon plenty to take to market. A flatboat traveling from Indiana to New Orleans in 1826 could boast 18 barrels of whiskey, 70 barrels of oats, 8,000 pounds of pork, and 300 barrels of corn.
Unfortunately, demand could tempt producers to abuse: Milk delivered to New York might be shamefully watered down and colored with chalk. World demand for sugar, tobacco, and cotton production fueled slavery, whose brutal conditions this book does not ignore.
Part of a series of detailed reference manuals on American economic history, this volume examines the aspects and problems of land policies and the growth in farming during the mid-1800s.
These books fall in line with my community of people who care for the Earth. They were my beginning influences to doing the work I have done over the past five decades and in the countries I have worked to teach people how to develop good stewardship practices on the land they worked. Community development is at the heart of what I do. Healing land heals us and helps us become more whole.
This book opened me up to how our food system and modern agribusiness work.
I read this while in between my studies in horticulture and agriculture. I was so taken by the book that I sought him out. I discovered that he was teaching organic horticulture at a small college down the coast near Santa Cruz. I went there and studied horticulture in his class. I gained a great deal of knowledge from him. He was a valuable resource.
I have a passion for this theme because I served as an armor officer in the U.S. Army for more than twenty years. I saw the effect of both thinking and non-thinking commanders first-hand in places like the inter-German border during the Cold War, Iraq in combat during the first Gulf War, and Bosnia in ‘operations other than war.’ My experience drove me to continue my military studies resulting in four degrees, including my PhD and my current occupation as a professor of military history. My search for understanding war and military decision-making reflects a desire to better instruct the future leaders among my college students and readers.
With unmatched research and brilliant analytical thought, Nicholas Lambert upends long-accepted explanations of a military disaster—the Gallipoli Campaign—that not only rocked Britain in World War I but reverberates in international relations to this very day. His forensic examination of the British government’s symbiotic political, diplomatic, economic, and military decision-making should be required reading for all students of those disciplines. His approach dismantles accepted histories derived from the political assignment of blame and instead gives the reader an understanding of policy decisions tortured by a wide array of then-pertinent circumstances ranging from the price of a loaf of bread to the power of a Russian Tsar. We can hear the echoes of Lambert’s analysis in today’s cable news reports regarding globalization, disruption to wheat markets, and the political impact of inflation. A timeless work indeed.
An eye-opening interpretation of the infamous Gallipoli campaign that sets it in the context of global trade.
In early 1915, the British government ordered the Royal Navy to force a passage of the Dardanelles Straits-the most heavily defended waterway in the world. After the Navy failed to breach Turkish defenses, British and allied ground forces stormed the Gallipoli peninsula but were unable to move off the beaches. Over the course of the year, the Allied landed hundreds of thousands of reinforcements but all to no avail. The Gallipoli campaign has gone down as one of the great disasters in the…
In 1972, I started an early childhood center in the Monadnock Region in New Hampshire. The focus was on child-centered education, with an emphasis on working with children outdoors. I've spent the last 50 years continuing to connect children with nature in schools, nature centers, national parks, museums, and in families. I taught graduate courses in developmental psychology, cognitive development, place-based education and have done hundreds of professional development workshops for early childhood and elementary school teachers. As a father, I focused on connecting my own children with nature. My son is a ski coach and runs an ecotourism kayaking business. My daughter is a theater director and writes grants for an environmental non-profit.
The course I took from Paul Shepard in college was one of the most thought-provoking courses I ever experienced. Find an image of the original cover of the book and you'll see what I mean—it's a strange synthesis of a post-modern bow hunter emerging from his paleo ancestor. Shepard contends that the key to understanding human happiness is recognizing that we are genetically hunters and gatherers living in a post-modern age. Reclaiming our hunting and gathering impulses will help us lead fuller lives. He does a fascinating job, in this book, of describing what hunting and gathering culture childhoods looked like and then suggesting how we should parent our children with these old genetic impulses in mind.
In what may be his boldest and most controversial book, Paul Shepard presents an account of human behavior and ecology in light of our past. In it, he contends that agriculture is responsible for our ecological decline and looks to the hunting and gathering lifestyle as a model more closely in tune with our essential nature. Shepard advocates affirming the profound and beautiful nature of the hunter and gatherer, redefining agriculture and combining technology with hunting and gathering to recover a livable environment and peaceful society.
I'm a historian of science who specializes in modern China. My professional life revolves around teaching history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and writing for academic audiences. But my not-so-secret dream has always been to write for children. I've been a regular visitor to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, where I've gorged on illustrated books for children. Encouraged by a chance meeting with a publisher’s representative attending an event at the Carle, I decided to distill my academic book, Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China, into a children’s story. I’m proud that my fans now include elementary-school students. (And at least one professional historian admitted he read the kids’ version first!)
The first chapter book I checked out from the school library when I was in third grade (in 1980) was a biography of George Washington Carver. I have always remembered how inspiring I found his story. This new picture-book biography is a beautiful addition to what is now a very large number of children’s book tributes to Carver’s legacy. Morrison’s use of light and color results in stunning images to illustrate Carver’s motto and the book’s central theme, “Regard nature. Revere Nature. Respect nature.”
The story follows Carver from childhood, when he first learned to experiment by gardening in a secret plot tucked in the woods of the farm where he grew up, to his days as a young scientist in the laboratories of Iowa Agricultural College and the Tuskegee Institute, the time he spent traveling through the southern countryside bringing new agricultural knowledge to poor farmers, and finally his…
The inspirational story of George Washington Carver and his childhood secret garden is brought to life in this picture book biography by the author-illustrator team behind Muhammad Ali: A Champion Is Born.
When George Washington Carver was just a young child, he had a secret: a garden of his own.
Here, he rolled dirt between his fingers to check if plants needed more rain or sun. He protected roots through harsh winters, so plants could be reborn in the spring. He trimmed flowers, spread soil, studied life cycles. And it was in this very place that George’s love of nature…
California’s San Joaquin Valley is so congenial to plants I thought it made me a gardener. When I got my first job in a retail nursery I quickly realized how little I knew. Twenty years in the nursery trade expanded the depth and breadth of my garden skills. I owe my horticultural education to knowledgeable colleagues, an unending stream of interesting questions from nursery customers, and especially to Ed Laivo who introduced me to an ArcticGlo nectarine that commanded my attention.
Most of us who took action on our ache to “get back to the land” gave ourselves over to a rustic bucolia we’d created in our minds. And, yes, as it turned out, it was all of that, the harmony of seasons, the deep peace, the night sky, the quail, and deer. It was other things, too, things we hadn’t reckoned on—isolation, endless labor, and the hourly rate of the well man. Readable and entertaining, Get Your Pitchfork On! eases the urban to rural transition with hard-won practical advice. It will infuse your dream, whatever its scale, with a healthy dose of preparedness to assure its best chance of success.
For hard-working office workers Kristy Athens and husband Michael, farming was a romantic dream. After purchasing farm land in Oregon's beautiful Columbia Gorge, Athens and hubby were surprised to learn that the realities of farming were challenging and unexpected. Get Your Pitchfork On! provides the hard-learned nuts-and-bolts of rural living from city folk who were initially out of their depth. Practical and often hilarious, Get Your Pitchfork On! reads like a twenty-first century Egg and I.
Get Your Pitchfork On! gives urban professionals the practical tools they need to realize their dream, with basics of home, farm, and hearth. It…
I am a rabbi, educator and author. I have had the privilege of writing many books over the course of my rabbinate. Over the past five years, I have turned the attention of my writing to children’s books. And I am especially attuned to those books that take complicated Jewish ideas and tell them in words and pictures that young children can understand. I try to do this in my own writing, as well.
This is a sweet book that focuses on the essential idea of Shabbat: rest and refraining from work.
It also teaches an idea that is part of the ancient lesson of the Sabbath—everyone rests on the Sabbath including work animals. I like this book—and its lovely illustrations—because it takes a difficult idea that is culled from rabbinic sources.
The virtues of taking a break - and of being thankful - are extolled in the gentle story of a stubborn ox, an impatient farmer, and a day of rest.
Long ago, in the hills near Jerusalem, lived a young ox. For six days each week, she and her owner would toil in the fields, and on the seventh day both would rest. Then it came to be that this young ox was sold. For six days, she toiled in her new owner's fields, and on the seventh day the farmer brought out the yoke and plough, expecting to spend…
