Houston’s story has always been one of war waged relentlessly against water.“Houston spread like a glass of milk spilled on the wobbling table of Texan plains,” Micah Fields writes in this unique and poetic blend of reportage, history, and memoir. Developed as the commercial hub of the Texas cotton and sugarcane industries, Houston was designed for profit, not stability. Its first residents razed swamplands into submission to construct a maze of highways and suburb...

Developed as the commercial hub of the Texas cotton and sugarcane industries, Houston was designed for profit, not stability. Its first residents razed swamplands into submission to construct a maze of highways and suburbs, giving the city a sprawling, centerless energy as storms and floods rattled coastal Texas.When Hurricane Harvey made landfall in 2017, Fields set off from his home in Iowa back to the battered city of his childhood to rescue his mother. Fields tracks the devasta...

• Winner of the BC National Award for Non-Fiction• Nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and the 2011 Hilary Weston Writer's Trust Award.During Charlotte Gill’s 20 years working as a tree planter she encountered hundreds of clear-cuts, each one a collision site between human civilization and the natural world, a complicated landscape presenting geographic evidence of our appetites. Charged with sowing the new forest...

"Clever. . . magical. . . beautifully crafted. Kingsolver spins you around the philosophic world a dozen times." — Milwaukee Sentinel"Kingsolver's essays should be savored like quiet afternoons with a friend." —New York Times Book ReviewIn this brilliant essay collection, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Kingsolver turns to her favored literary terrain to explore themes of family, community, and the natural wo...

Whether navigating the backroads of Louisiana or Thuringia, exploring the snowy Quebec woods, or performing onstage at Rush concerts, Neil Peart has stories to tell. His first volume in this series, Far and Away, combined words and images to form an intimate, insightful narrative that won many readers.Now Far and Near brings together reflections from another three years of an artist’s life as he celebrates seasons, landscapes, and characters, travels roads and tra...

" Fire Season both evokes and honors the great hermit celebrants of nature, from Dillard to Kerouac to Thoreau—and I loved it."—J.R. Moehringer, author of The Tender Bar"[Connors's] adventures in radical solitude make for profoundly absorbing, restorative reading."—Walter Kirn, author of Up in the AirPhillip Connors is a major new voice in American nonfiction, and his remarkable debut, Fire Season, is destined to become a mo...

The man-eating proclivities of Komodo dragons. The complicated art of being a cowgirl. A picaresque ramble with a merry band of tree-cleaners. The big-wave crusaders of the world's best surfers. For the past twenty years, Outside magazine has set the standard for original and engaging reports on travel, adventure, sports, and the environment.Along the way, many of America's best journalists and storytellers--including such writers as Jon Krakauer, Tim Cahill, E. Annie Proulx, Edwar...

A lively and lyrical account of one woman’s unlikely apprenticeship on a national-park trail crew and what she discovers about nature, gender, and the value of hard workChristine Byl first encountered the national parks the way most of us do: on vacation. But after she graduated from college, broke and ready for a new challenge, she joined a Glacier National Park trail crew as a seasonal “traildog” maintaining mountain trails for the millions of visitors Glacier dr...

**NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2021 BY THE NEW YORKER AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY“[Warmth] is lyrical and erudite, engaging with science, activism, and philosophy . . . [Sherrell] captures the complicated correspondence between hope and doubt, faith and despair—the pendulum of emotional states that defines our attitude toward the future.” —The New Yorker“Beautifully rendered and bracingly honest.” —Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing...

When the struggle to save oil-soaked birds and restore blackened beaches left him feeling frustrated and helpless, John Francis decided to take a more fundamental and personal stand—he stopped using all forms of motorized transportation. Soon after embarking on this quest that would span two decades and two continents, the young man took a vow of silence that endured for 17 years. It began as a silent environmental protest, but as a young African-American man, walking across the country in...

This extraordinary and utterly moving memoir captures one family’s spirit—and their losses—in a harsh landscape that has been shaped and exploited over hundreds of years. Miracle Country chronicles Atleework’s journey as she realizes that there’s nowhere else in America, no matter how green and welcoming, that feels like home.Kendra Atleework grew up in the Owens Valley of the Eastern Sierra Nevada in California, where annual rainfall averages five inches and in dr...

Whatever you call it, every Canadian summer home needs at least one copy of Charles Gordon's wry, affectionate, and very funny study of our national obsession with that special summer place.