Desert Solitaire

Written by Edward Abbey

Format: Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books
On Sale: January 12, 1985
Price: $7.99
ISBN: 978-0-345-32649-2 (0-345-32649-0)

Drawn from the author's journals while contemplating the desert, Desert Solitaire is a poetic study of man's happiness in dry lands. Abbey lived for three seasons in the desert at Moab, Utah, and what he discovered about the land before him, the world around him, and the heart that beat within... Read more >

Becoming Animal
An Earthly Cosmology
Written by David Abram

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 6, 2011
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-71369-9 (0-375-71369-7)

David Abram’s first book, The Spell of the Sensuous, hailed as “revolutionary” by the Los Angeles Times, as “daring” and “truly original” by Science, has become a classic of environmental literature. Now he returns with a startling exploration of our human entanglement with the rest of nature.

As the climate veers... Read more >

Moon By Whale Light
And Other Adventures Among Bats,Penguins, Crocodilians, and Whales
Written by Diane Ackerman

Format: Trade Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 29, 1992
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-74226-5 (0-679-74226-3)

In a rare blend of scientific fact and poetic truth, the acclaimed author of A Natural History of the Senses explores the activities of whales, penguins, bats, and crocodilians, plunging headlong into nature and coming up with highly entertaining treasures. Read more >

The Rarest of the Rare
Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds
Written by Diane Ackerman

Format: Trade Paperback, 208 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 14, 1997
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-77623-9 (0-679-77623-0)

Ackerman journeys in search of monarch butterflies and short-tailed albatrosses, monk seals, and golden lion tamarin monkeys: the world's rarest creatures and their vanishing habitats. She delivers a rapturous celebration of other species that is also a warning to our own. Traveling from the Amazon rain forest to a forbidding island... Read more >

Born Free
A Lioness of Two Worlds
Written by Joy Adamson

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Pantheon
On Sale: May 16, 2000
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-71438-2 (0-375-71438-3)

There have been many accounts of the return to the wild of tame animals, but since its original publication in 1960, when the New York Times hailed it as a "fascinating and remarkable book," Born Free has stood alone in its power to move us.

Joy Adamson's story of a lion cub... Read more >

In the Land of White Death

Written by Valerian Albanov
Preface by Jon Krakauer
Translated by Alison Anderson
Introduction by David Roberts

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: September 4, 2001
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-78361-9 (0-679-78361-X)

In 1912, six months after Robert Falcon Scott and four of his men came to grief in Antarctica, a thirty-two-year-old Russian navigator named Valerian Albanov embarked on an expedition that would prove even more disastrous. In search of new Arctic hunting grounds, Albanov's ship, the Saint Anna, was frozen fast in... Read more >

National Geographic Bird-watcher's Bible
A Complete Treasury
Edited by Jonathan Alderfer

Format: Hardcover, 416 pages
Publisher: National Geographic
On Sale: October 2, 2012
Price: $40.00
ISBN: 978-1-4262-0964-2 (1-4262-0964-9)

A lighthearted and broadly cultural and visual approach to learning everything there is to know about birds, bird-watching, birds in history and the arts, and life on the wing. Short narrative pieces are interspersed with sidebars, quotes, top-ten lists, and how-to instructions. Illustrated with photographs, contemporary and archival art, maps, and... Read more >

Sisters of the Earth
Women's Prose and Poetry About Nature
Written by Lorraine Anderson

Format: Trade Paperback, 496 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: December 9, 2003
Price: $17.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-3321-8 (1-4000-3321-7)

Sisters of the Earth is a stirring collection of women’s writing on nature: Nature as healer. Nature as delight. Nature as mother and sister. Nature as victim. Nature as companion and reminder of what is wild in us all. Here, among more than a hundred poets and prose writers, are Diane... Read more >

The Call of Everest
The History, Science, and Future of the World's Tallest Peak
Written by Conrad Anker, Bernadette McDonald, David Breashears and Broughton Coburn
Foreword by Thomas Hornbein

Format: Hardcover, 304 pages
Publisher: National Geographic
On Sale: May 14, 2013
Price: $35.00
ISBN: 978-1-4262-1016-7 (1-4262-1016-7)

This is the definitive book on the history, mystique, and science of Mount Everest, including how climate change is impacting the world’s tallest mountain.

In 1963, the American Mount Everest Expedition made mountaineering history. It was the first American venture to successfully scale the legendary peak and the first successful... Read more >

Shadow Mountain
A Memoir of Wolves, a Woman, and the Wild
Written by Renee Askins

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: January 6, 2004
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-385-48226-4 (0-385-48226-4)

“The wolves of North America have their Jane Goodall, and her name is Renée Askins…. An eloquent plea for nature unrestrained.” —Outside Magazine

“Delightful…fun to read. The seamless way Askins weaves the natural world into her narrative brings to mind Terry Tempest Williams’s memoir Refuge.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Demonstrates the... Read more >

The Audubon Reader

Written by John James Audubon
Edited by Richard Rhodes

Format: Hardcover, 656 pages
Publisher: Everyman's Library
On Sale: April 11, 2006
Price: $27.50
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4369-9 (1-4000-4369-7)

This unprecedented anthology of John James Audubon’s lively and colorful writings about the American wilderness reintroduces the great artist and ornithologist as an exceptional American writer, a predecessor to Thoreau, Emerson, and Melville.

Audubon’s award-winning biographer, Richard Rhodes, has gathered excerpts from his journals, letters, and published works, and has organized them... Read more >

Genetics in the Wild

Written by John C. Avise

Format: Trade Paperback, 270 pages
Publisher: Smithsonian Books
On Sale: July 6, 2010
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 978-1-58834-293-5 (1-58834-293-X)

Award-winning geneticist John C. Avise guides us on a voyage around the planet in search of answers to nature’s mysteries. He demonstrates how scientists directly examine DNA to address long-standing questions about wild animals, plants, and microbes. Through dozens of stories that span the world, nature emerges as a realm where... Read more >

Arctic Voices
Resistance at the Tipping Point
Written by Subhankar Banerjee

Format: Hardcover, 560 pages
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
On Sale: July 3, 2012
Price: $35.95
ISBN: 978-1-60980-385-8 (1-60980-385-X)

A powerful collection of voices and images from the frontlines of the war against ecological devastation in the Arctic.

World-renowned photographer, writer, and activist Subhankar Banerjee brings together first-person narratives from nearly thirty of the world’s most recognized activists, writers, and researchers who address issues of climate change, resource war, and human... Read more >

Heart Of The Land
Essays on Last Great Places
Written by Joseph Barbato and Lisa Weinerman

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 13, 1996
Price: $17.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-75501-2 (0-679-75501-2)

From Thomas McGuane on Idaho's Snake River to Louise Erdrich on the tallgrass prairies of her native North Dakota to Carl Hiaasen combing the imperiled fishing grounds of the Florida Keys, some of the country's finest writers celebrate the geography that The Nature Conservancy has designated as "Last Great Places." Read more >

Blue Revolution
Unmaking America's Water Crisis
Written by Cynthia Barnett

Format: Trade Paperback, 296 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: September 4, 2012
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0328-2 (0-8070-0328-X)

Selected for Summit County (Colorado) Reads

Americans see water as abundant and cheap: we turn on the faucet and out it gushes, for less than a penny a gallon. We use more water than any other culture in the world, much to quench what’s now our largest crop–the lawn. Yet most Americans... Read more >

Mr. Hornaday's War
How a Peculiar Victorian Zookeeper Waged a Lonely Crusade for Wildlife That Changed the World
Written by Stefan Bechtel

Format: Hardcover, 272 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: May 15, 2012
Price: $26.95
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0635-1 (0-8070-0635-1)

He was complex, quirky, pugnacious, and difficult. He seemed to create enemies wherever he went, even among his friends. A fireplug of a man who stood only five feet eight inches in his stocking feet, he began as a taxidermist and an adventurer who tracked tigers in Borneo with friendly headhunters... Read more >

On Mount Hood
A Biography of Oregon's Perilous Peak
Written by Jon Bell

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
On Sale: April 23, 2013
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-1-57061-858-1 (1-57061-858-5)

On Mount Hood is a contemporary, first-person narrative biography of Oregon’s greatest mountain, featuring stories full of adventure and tragedy, history and geology, people and places, trivia and lore. The mountain itself helps create the notorious Oregon rains and deep alpine snows, and paved the way for snowboarding in the mid... Read more >

The Great Work
Our Way into the Future
Written by Thomas Berry

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Broadway
On Sale: November 14, 2000
Price: $14.99
ISBN: 978-0-609-80499-5 (0-609-80499-5)

Thomas Berry is one of the most eminent cultural historians of our time. Here he presents the culmination of his ideas and urges us to move from being a disrupting force on the Earth to a benign presence. This transition is the Great Work — the most necessary and most ennobling... Read more >

Tibet: Culture on the Edge

Written by Phil Borges

Format: Hardcover, 208 pages
Publisher: Rizzoli
On Sale: October 4, 2011
Price: $45.00
ISBN: 978-0-8478-3691-8 (0-8478-3691-6)

Firsthand accounts and spectacular photographs combine to form a fascinating portrait of the endangered Tibetan people, their plateau, and their cultural landscape. Known as the “water tower of Asia,” the Tibetan Plateau is heating up twice as fast as the global average. These rapidly melting glaciers-along with recent unprecedented development on... Read more >

Fishes of Alabama

Written by Herbert T. Boschung
Illustrated by Joseph Tomelleri
Foreword by Edward O. Wilson

Format: Hardcover, 960 pages
Publisher: Smithsonian Books
On Sale: July 17, 2004
Price: $55.00
ISBN: 978-1-58834-004-7 (1-58834-004-X)

An enormous, superbly illustrated book that reveals the astounding diversity of Alabama’s fishes through brilliant color plates by Joseph Tomelleri and incredibly detailed information from the authors. These two leading scientists have dedicated years to documenting the diets, growth rates, reproduction, sizes, distribution, and status of Alabama’s fishes, and they present... Read more >

A Lion Called Christian
The True Story of the Remarkable Bond Between Two Friends and a Lion
Written by Anthony Bourke and John Rendall
Foreword by George Adamson

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Broadway
On Sale: March 9, 2010
Price: $13.99
ISBN: 978-0-7679-3237-0 (0-7679-3237-4)

In 2008 an extraordinary two-minute film clip appeared on YouTube and immediately became an international phenomenon. It captures the moving reunion of two young men and their pet lion Christian, after they had left him in Africa with Born Free’s George Adamson to introduce him into his rightful home in the... Read more >

Dragonflies

Written by Steve Brooks

Format: Trade Paperback, 112 pages
Publisher: Smithsonian Books
On Sale: March 17, 2003
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-1-58834-064-1 (1-58834-064-3)

Dragonflies and damselflies have lived on earth for hundreds of millions of years, and there are thousands of different species living in watery environments throughout the world. But few people will have looked beyond the flash of blue, red, green or yellow to consider the lives of dragonflies.

These masters of aerial... Read more >

Dirt Work
An Education in the Woods
Written by Christine Byl

Format: Hardcover, 256 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: April 16, 2013
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0100-4 (0-8070-0100-7)

Christine Byl first encountered the national parks the way most people 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 draws every year... Read more >

Providence of a Sparrow
Lessons from a Life Gone to the Birds
Written by Chris Chester

Format: Trade Paperback, 304 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: April 13, 2004
Price: $13.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-3385-0 (1-4000-3385-3)

“There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” —William Shakespeare, Hamlet

B fell twenty-five feet from his nest into the life of Chris Chester. The encounter was providential for both of them.

B and Chester spent hours together playing games like bottle-cap fetch or hide-and-seek. They learned “words” in each... Read more >

Agnes Chase's First Book of Grasses
The Structure of Grasses Explained for Beginners, Fourth Edition
Written by Lynn G. Clark and Richard W. Pohl

Format: Trade Paperback, 152 pages
Publisher: Smithsonian Books
On Sale: April 17, 1996
Price: $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-56098-656-0 (1-56098-656-5)

For almost seventy-five years, Agnes Chase’s First Book of Grasses has been the classic guide to the structure of this complex group of plants. Clearly written and copiously illustrated with line drawings, the book is accessible to those with little or no botanical training, yet it also is respected by botanists... Read more >