This memoir of the author's brief sojourn working at a café and auberge in Corsica is populated with a questionable group of locals, fugitives, and escapists during the Algerian and Vietnam Wars.

Author John Hanson Mitchell recounts a marathon bicycle trek from Andalusia to the Outer Hebrides, tracing solar myths, sun cults, birds, and flowering plants all along the way.

Looking for Mr. Gilbert is an account of the quest to uncover the heretofore unknown life of Robert A. Gilbert, an African American serving man who worked for the ornithologist William Brewster. A man of many talents, Gilbert went on to become the first African American landscape photographer.

John Hanson Mitchell has long written about his garden outside of Boston, and about the plants and animals with whom he shares this land. In 2022, the United Nations and others started reporting the true severity of the climate crisis as the Earth passed a point of no return. All across the globe it was the worst year on record for climate-related disasters, including extinctions, deadly floods, massive fires, and dramatic droughts, all of which have worsened since that year. Mitchell, lik...

In 1928, Massachusetts water authorities began land takings for the largest public works project in the United States at the time, the construction of the Quabbin Reservoir, in the Swift River Valley. What the authorities did not realize was that, living in the more remote, forested tracts of the valley, there was a secretive band of mixed-race hunter-gatherers who had been subsisting, undiscovered there for more than ten generations. This book, taken from a legal deposition found at Harva...

In this second book in his Scratch Flat Chronicles, John Hanson Mitchell tells how he set out to recreate Henry David Thoreau’s two years at Walden Pond in a replica of Thoreau’s cabin. Mitchell lived off the grid, without running water or electricity, in a tiny house not half a mile from a major highway and in the shadow of a massive new computer company. Nevertheless, his contact with wildlife, the changing seasons, and the natural world equaled and even surpassed Thoreau’s. Hugely popul...

The country of Liberia, the brainchild of the American Colonization Society, was founded in the early 19th century. Members of the ACS (as the society was called) believed that Black people would have better opportunities for both freedom and prosperity in Africa than they would in the United States. Between the years of 1822 and 1861 (at the outbreak of the American Civil War), more than 15,000 free-born and freed Black individuals relocated to Liberia.These Liberian settlers, who...

For over twenty years, John Hanson Mitchell has visited Beaver Brook almost daily. This small, slow-flowing Massachusetts stream was of vital importance for early settlers and an indispensable resource for the Native peoples who lived and fished along its shores, but it has been largely forgotten in our own time. Revisiting the river's oxbows, bends, and marshes over the course of a year, Legends of the Common Stream combines a natural history of Beaver Brook with a study of the p...

Get charged up about energy! With more than 20 fun activities and experiments that will have children ages 8 to 12 enthusiastically engaged with making and using renewable energy, Michael J. Caduto takes a hands-on approach to fighting climate change. Step-by-step instructions for projects range from using the sun to make fires to charging electronic devices by peddling your bicycle. Additional energy case studies encourage kids to think about the basic tenets of resource management. Chang...

Trespassing, “a thoughtful, beautifully written addition to environmental and regional literature” (Kirkus Reviews), is a historical survey of the evolution of private ownership of land, concentrating on the various land uses of a 500-acre tract of land over a 350-year period. What began as wild land controlled periodically by various Native American tribes became British crown land after 1654, then private property under US law, and finally common land again in the late twentieth century....

Walking Towards Walden is an exploration of the sense of place, what it means, how it developed, and why it matters. Based on an eighteenth-century literary device in which a group of friends undertake a walking tour and discuss a certain subject, this wide-ranging story emerges from the author’s fifteen-mile bushwhack through woods, backyards, and marshes—from a hilltop in Westford, Massachusetts, to the town of Concord, Massachusetts—trespassing all along the way. A mock epic, complete w...

interlocking stories of lives changed by conflicts between invisible power centers in Asia and America; from the end of the war in Viet Nam to the war on terror.