From The Lookout

A page-turning memoir about a young woman's grueling, revelatory summers working alone in a remote lookout tower and her eyewitness account of the increasingly unpredictable nature of wildfire in the Canadian north. While growing up in Peace River, Alberta, Trina Moyles heard many stories of Lookout Observers--strange, eccentric types who spent five-month summers alone, climbing 100-foot high towers and watching for signs of fire in the surrounding boreal forest. How could you isolate yourself for that long? she wondered. "I could never do it," she told herself. Craving a deeper sense of purpose, she left northern Alberta to pursue a decade-long career in global humanitarian work. After three years in East Africa, and newly engaged, Trina returned to Peace River with a plan to sponsor her fiance, Akello's, immigration to Canada. Despite her fear of being alone in the woods, she applied for a seasonal lookout position and got the job. Thus begins Trina's first summer as one of a handful of lookouts scattered throughout Alberta, with only a farm dog, Holly--labeled "a domesticated wolf" by her former owners--to keep her company. While searching for smoke, Trina unravels under the pressure of a long-distance relationship--and a dawning awareness of the environmental crisis that climate change is producing in the boreal. Through megafires, lightning storms, and stunning encounters with wildlife, she learns to survive at the fire tower by forging deep connections with nature and with an extraordinary community of people dedicated to wildfire detection and combat. In isolation, she discovers a kind of self-awareness--and freedom--that only solitude can deliver. Lookout is a riveting story of loss, transformation, and belonging to oneself, layered with an eyewitness account of the destructive and regenerative power of wildfire in our northern forests.

This true story will keep you captivated from beginning to end. It's about my relationship with my older brother who I idolized and the influence he had on my normally gentle spirit. I will tell you stories about my unorthodox life as a kid in a small town and take you into the crazy, fascinating, world of my brother where I learned about money, expensive cars, clothes, and promiscuous women. I traveled a dangerous road by assisting my brother in his lust for easy money and excitement while developing into a young man at the hands of a group of women who loved, cared, and helped me at the top-of-the-world whorehouse. After my brother and his partner pulled off one of the most difficult and dangerous burglaries imaginable, I was left with the task of finding buried money at the Kings Ranch in the Arizona desert with the help of my lady friends. Often times frightening, this book will keep you turning the pages with a mixture of adventure, humor, and tenderness.

Presents three short stories for early readers about the misadventures of Martin Bridge.

For every summer from 1916 to 1948, Camp Meenahga, on the picturesque shoreline of Lake Michigan in Door County’s Peninsula State Park, hosted young girls and women from across the United States and Canada. From July to September each year, campers slept in canvas tents, told stories beside a massive stone fireplace, swam, canoed, sailed, hiked, rode horses, and watched the sunset from the Lookout, a gazebo with a spectacular view of the waters of Green Bay. With big ideas, little money, and no experience, Alice Orr Clark and Frances Louise “Kidy” Mabley founded Meenahga as a place for young women to refine their manners, enjoy outdoor leisure activities, and learn woodcraft. From the Lookout is an account of these experiences, a history of Camp Meenahga informed by what campers, counselors, and others left behind, including letters home, notes from Clark and Mabley, and many pages from the camp yearbook and newsletter Pack and Paddle. Brimming with nostalgia, From the Lookout brings to life the sights, sounds, and smells of an idyllic summer retreat, one that long after it closed lived on as a place of respite in the memories of those who knew and loved it best.

The Acadian Deportation is told through the eyes of twelve-year-old Fidèle, in the new English version of this Hackmatack Award-winning novel by author Diane Carmel Léger. The Lookout Tree, an English translation of the Acadian bestseller La butte à Pétard, is a testament to the will of the Acadian people, determined to not only survive the two decades of the Deportation, but reunite and rebuild afterward.

With "Lookout Cartridge," Joseph McElroy established a reputation as one of contemporary fiction's foremost innovators and deft observers into the fissures of modern society. It is a novel of dazzling intricacy, absorbing suspense, and the highest ambition: to redeem the great claim of paranoia on the American psyche. In trying to figure out just who is so threatened by an innocent piece of cinema verit? filmed in collaboration with a friend, Cartwright finds himself at the heart of a mystery stretching from New York and London to Corsica and Stonehenge. With each new fact he gathers, both the intricacy of the syndicate arrayed against him and what his search will cost him become alarmingly clear.

“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 Air Phillip Connors is a major new voice in American nonfiction, and his remarkable debut, Fire Season, is destined to become a modern classic. An absorbing chronicle of the days and nights of one of the last fire lookouts in the American West, Fire Season is a marvel of a book, as rugged and soulful as Matthew Crawford’s bestselling Shop Class as Soulcraft, and it immediately places Connors in the august company of Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Aldo Leopold, Barry Lopez, and others in the respected fraternity of hard-boiled nature writers.

Listening at Lookout Creek recounts the author's attempt to reconnect with nature at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon and back home at her family's cabin in northwest Michigan's Manistee National Forest. Weaving philosophical and spiritual interpretations of the natural world with personal, hands-on experiences of particular landed places, it will be of interest to students of environmental ethics and religion, conservationists, hunting and fishing enthusiasts, and those who work to connect children with nature.