An essential history of a taste that shaped the world.Spices: for centuries the staple of cuisine, remedies and ritual, they have commanded the highest of prices. To this day, saffron is, per ounce, one of our most expensive commodities. For their sake, fortunes have been made and lost and new worlds discovered. Astoundingly, in the 17th-century more people died for the sake of cloves than in all the European dynastic wars of the period.Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs depict a...

Infania: Let's Go Treasure Hunting is the first in a series of novels all following the same band of oddball criminals that never manage to get anything done without a few bumps and scrapes along the way. Things only get odder when they come across a new cabin boy. What follows is a story filled with action, adventure, and everything in between, except for a well thought out plan. No one really seems to know what's going on, which happens to be part of the fun.

African American Political Thought offers an unprecedented philosophical history of thinkers from the African American community and African diaspora who have addressed the central issues of political life: democracy, race, violence, liberation, solidarity, and mass political action. Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner have brought together leading scholars to reflect on individual intellectuals from the past four centuries, developing their list with an expansive approach to politic...

How Walt Whitman’s philosophy of death prepares the soul for freedom and equalityHumans fantasize about immortality. Billionaires dabble in cryonics, politicians build monuments to themselves, and writers donate their papers to libraries. In Die Your Own Death, Jack Turner argues that the quest for immortality—literal or symbolic—is politically destructive. He does so through a meditation on the work of Walt Whitman. Whitman held that democracy prepares in...

In the heart of the Sahara, legends speak of a lost city made of gold — The Golden Citadel, where a forgotten king once trapped the power of the sun itself. When former soldier and adventurer Daniel Creed comes into possession of an ancient map, his search for fortune becomes a race against death. Pursued by ruthless treasure hunters and haunted by the desert's secrets, Daniel joins forces with Zahra Al-Mansur, a woman bound to the Citadel by blood and destiny. Together, they uncover a civ...

The writings of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) have captivated scholars, activists, and ecologists for more than a century. Less attention has been paid, however, to the author's political philosophy and its influence on American public life. Although Thoreau's doctrine of civil disobedience has long since become a touchstone of world history, the greater part of his political legacy has been overlooked. With a resurgence of interest in recent years, A Political Companion to Henry Dav...

If anything is endangered in America it is our experience of wild nature—gross contact. There is knowledge only the wild can give us, knowledge specific to it, knowledge specific to the experience of it. These are its gifts to us.How wild is wilderness and how wild are our experiences in it, asks Jack Turner in the pages of The Abstract Wild. His answer: not very wild. National parks and even so-called wilderness areas fall far short of offering the primal...

Paul Shepard is one of the most profound and original thinkers of our time. He has helped define the field of human ecology, and has played a vital role in the development of what have come to be known as environmental philosophy, ecophilosophy, and deep ecology -- new ways of thinking about human-environment interactions that ultimately hold great promise for healing the bonds between humans and the natural world. Traces of an Omnivore presents a readable and accessible introduct...

Jack Turner grew up with an image of the Tetons engraved in his mind. As a young man, he climbed the peaks of this singular range with basic climbing gear friends. Later in life, he led treks in India, Pakistan, Nepal, China, Tibet, and Peru, but he always returned to the mountains of his youth. He continues to climb the Tetons as a guide for Exum Mountain, Guides, the oldest and most prestigious guide service in America. Teewinot is his ode to forty years in the mountains that he loves.

Award-winning nature writer Jack Turner directs his attention to one of America's greatest natural treasures: the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Comprised of two national parks, three national wildlife refuges, parts of six national forests, and eleven wilderness areas, Greater Yellowstone is a vast array of differing environments and geographies.In a series of essays, Turner explores this wonderland, venturing on twelve separate trips in all seasons using various modes of travel: h...

Where and what is the place of the wild? Is the goal of preserving biodiversity across the landscape of North America compatible with contemporary Western culture?Place of the Wild brings together original essays from an exceptional array of contemporary writers and activists to present in a single volume the most current thinking on the relationship between humans and wilderness. A common thread running through the volume is the conviction that everyone concerned with the...

The election of America’s first black president has led many to believe that race is no longer a real obstacle to success and that remaining racial inequality stems largely from the failure of minority groups to take personal responsibility for seeking out opportunities. Often this argument is made in the name of the long tradition of self-reliance and American individualism. In Awakening to Race, Jack Turner upends this view, arguing that it expresses not a deep commitment to the...