A Long Time In The Wilderness

From Moses to Jesus, so many heroes of the Bible had to endure some type of wilderness season in their life, a time of testing that was painful to endure but ultimately brought glory to God. In Wilderness Skills for Women, rising author/speaker Marian Jordan sees the same thing happening today as she and her friends still find themselves going through periods of isolation, temptation, sorrow, and waiting. Whether it’s relationship drama, the constant pull of our sinful nature, a health issue, or any variety of unmet dreams, Jordan turns readers to God’s Word as the ultimate wilderness survival guide. Conversational and self-deprecatingly confessional in her delivery, this young writer finds ways to have fun with delicate subject matters, using wilderness analogies to great effect in chapters titled "Drink Plenty of Water," "Seek Shelter," and "Don’t Eat the Red Berries."

Despite warnings from her family and her own common sense, in the year 1905, Neva Walters, a pretty southern farm girl and traveling organ teacher, hastily married Neal Larkin, a mysterious stranger who crashed her party. Savagely beaten on her wedding night, Neva soon learned she was a captive in the male dominated Larkin family where unusual circumstances ruled escape not an option. Effie, Neal's mother, nursed Neva back to health and became her mentor through her journey as a Larkin Woman. Neva, despite a future of pain, depravation and near helplessness strived to liberate the women and children from the grip of the Larkin men. Neva was truly a long time in the wilderness and her struggle leads the reader on many unexpected twists and turns to a surprising end.

Melissa Walker set out on a journey that many women of her generation have mapped only in their dreams. Like many American chroniclers before her who have surrendered to the aimless pleasures of the road, Walker had no geographical destination in mind, but she did have two definite goals—one personal, one political—for her journey. She was looking for the peace and solitude of the backcountry, certainly, but she also wanted to learn the dynamics of preserving wild places and to devote herself to that cause. In the Sky Islands of southern Arizona, on the banks of the Popo Agie River and the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming, in Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Rocky Mountain, and Olympic National Park, in Gila and Glacier Peak Wilderness, she encountered the hazards of wild animals and extreme weather, and she began to reassess what parts of her life she could control. Living on Wilderness Time is a book for those who have visited wild places and want to return, and for others whose overcommitted urban lives make them long for land where time is measured differently and human beings are scarce. Above all it is a call to join those who, like Aldo Leopold, see wilderness as vital to the human community. Melissa Walker is vice president of National Wilderness Watch, chair of the Georgia chapter of Wilderness Watch, serves on the Southern Appalachian Council of the Wilderness Society, and is the author of Reading the Environment and Down from the Mountaintop. She has been Professor of English at the University of New Orleans and Mercer University and a fellow of Women’s Studies at Emory University. Walker lives with her husband in Atlanta, Georgia.

We do our best to avoid the wilderness, but the man Jesus considered the greatest embraced an entire life in the wilderness. Are we too driven by non-biblical definitions of success to follow the ancient paths? If you are satisfied with influence, popularity, comfort, and success, you can avoid the wilderness. However, there are simply some encounters with God that are found only in the wilderness. Crowds are seducing, but the wilderness is where the fire burns, the burning bush appears, and God speaks. Many people use the words "wilderness season" only to describe a period of time that feels difficult or unproductive, so it has become common to call people to endure the wilderness and look forward to a time of greater fulfillment outside the wilderness. However, it is time to issue a new call: it is time to challenge a generation to embrace an entire life in the wilderness. The call to the wilderness is not a call to isolation. It is not a call to abandon our families or shirk our responsibilities, and for most, it is not a call to leave the place where the Lord has placed them. The call to the wilderness is an invitation to choose a life before the Lord that is not possible as long as we continue to give place and time to competing distractions and alternative affections. Jesus considered John the Baptist among the greatest of all human beings, but how many have carefully examined John's life to discover Jesus' definition of greatness? While many people avoid the wilderness, John's life will force you to answer a question: Will you choose the wilderness?

Count your nights by stars, not shadows. Count your life with smiles, not tears. 1961. After a longtime resident at Nashville's historic Maxwell House Hotel suffers a debilitating stroke, Audrey Whitfield is tasked with cleaning out the reclusive woman's room. There, she discovers an elaborate scrapbook filled with memorabilia from the Tennessee Centennial Exposition. Love notes on the backs of unmailed postcards inside capture Audrey's imagination with hints of a forbidden romance . . . and troubling revelations about the disappearance of young women at the exposition. Audrey enlists the help of a handsome hotel guest as she tracks down clues and information about the mysterious "Peaches" and her regrets over one fateful day, nearly sixty-five years earlier. 1897. Outspoken and forward-thinking Priscilla Nichols isn't willing to settle for just any man. She's still holding out hope for love when she meets Luca Moretti on the eve of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition. Charmed by the Italian immigrant's boldness, Priscilla spends time exploring the wonderous sights of the expo with Luca--until a darkness overshadows the monthslong event. Haunted by a terrible truth, Priscilla and Luca are sent down separate paths as the night's stars fade into dawn.

A Washington Post, NPR, and Buzzfeed Best Book of the Year • Shortlisted for the Booker Prize “More than timely, the novel feels timeless, solid, like a forgotten classic recently resurfaced — a brutal, beguiling fairy tale about humanity. But at its core, The New Wilderness is really about motherhood, and about the world we make (or unmake) for our children.” — Washington Post "5 of 5 stars. Gripping, fierce, terrifying examination of what people are capable of when they want to survive in both the best and worst ways. Loved this."— Roxane Gay via Twitter Margaret Atwood meets Miranda July in this wildly imaginative debut novel of a mother's battle to save her daughter in a world ravaged by climate change; A prescient and suspenseful book from the author of the acclaimed story collection, Man V. Nature. Bea’s five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away, consumed by the smog and pollution of the overdeveloped metropolis that most of the population now calls home. If they stay in the city, Agnes will die. There is only one alternative: the Wilderness State, the last swath of untouched, protected land, where people have always been forbidden. Until now. Bea, Agnes, and eighteen others volunteer to live in the Wilderness State, guinea pigs in an experiment to see if humans can exist in nature without destroying it. Living as nomadic hunter-gatherers, they slowly and painfully learn to survive in an unpredictable, dangerous land, bickering and battling for power and control as they betray and save one another. But as Agnes embraces the wild freedom of this new existence, Bea realizes that saving her daughter’s life means losing her in a different way. The farther they get from civilization, the more their bond is tested in astonishing and heartbreaking ways. At once a blazing lament of our contempt for nature and a deeply humane portrayal of motherhood and what it means to be human, The New Wilderness is an extraordinary novel from a one-of-a-kind literary force.

THE OFFICIAL NORTH AMERICAN EDITION "Beguiling, audacious... rises to its own challenges in engaging intellectually as well as wholeheartedly with its questions about gender, genre and the concept of wilderness. The novel displays wide reading, clever writing and amusing dialogue." —The Guardian This is a new kind of nature writing — one that crosses fiction with science writing and puts gender politics at the center of the landscape. Erin, a 19-year-old girl from middle England, is travelling to Alaska on a journey that takes her through Iceland, Greenland, and across Canada. She is making a documentary about how men are allowed to express this kind of individualism and personal freedom more than women are, based on masculinist ideas of survivalism and the shunning of society: the “Mountain Man.” She plans to culminate her journey with an experiment: living in a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness, a la Thoreau, to explore it from a feminist perspective. The book is a fictional time capsule curated by Erin, comprising of personal narrative, fact, anecdote, images and maps, on subjects as diverse as The Golden Records, Voyager 1, the moon landings, the appropriation of Native land and culture, Rachel Carson, The Order of The Dolphin, The Doomsday Clock, Ted Kaczynski, Valentina Tereshkova, Jack London, Thoreau, Darwin, Nuclear war, The Letters of Last Resort and the pill, amongst many other topics. "Refreshingly outward-looking in a literary culture that turns ever inward to the self, although it still has profound moments of introspection. Uplifting, with a thirsty curiosity, the writing is playful and exuberant. Riffing on feminist ideas but unlimited in scope, Andrews focuses our attention on our beautiful, doomed planet, and the astonishing things we have yet to discover." —Ruth McKee, The Irish Times

The Book of Jasher is an apocryphal book that was taken out of the Old Testament in The Bible. It covers the early period presented in Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua in more detail.