Wandering Home A Long Walk Across America S Most Hopeful Landscape

The bestselling author of "The End of Nature" walks from his current home in Vermont to his former home in the Adirondacks and reflects on the two landscapes, places of diverse human habitation and pure wilderness that share a border.

"[McKibben is] a marvelous writer who has thought deeply about the environment, loves this part of the country, and knows how to be a first-class traveling companion."—Entertainment Weekly In Wandering Home, one of his most personal books, Bill McKibben invites readers to join him on a hike from his current home in Vermont to his former home in the Adirondacks. Here he reveals that the motivation for his impassioned environmental activism is not high-minded or abstract, but as tangible as the lakes and forests he explored in his twenties, the same woods where he lives with his family today. Over the course of his journey McKibben meets with old friends and kindred spirits, including activists, writers, organic farmers, a vintner, a beekeeper, and environmental studies students, all in touch with nature and committed to its preservation. For McKibben, there is no better place than these woods to work out a balance between the wild and the cultivated, the individual and the global community, and to discover the answers to the challenges facing our planet today.

The acclaimed author of The End of Nature takes a three-week walk from his current home in Vermont to his former home in the Adirondacks and reflects on the deep hope he finds in the two landscapes. Bill McKibben begins his journey atop Vermont’s Mt. Abraham, with a stunning view to the west that introduces us to the broad Champlain Valley of Vermont, the expanse of Lake Champlain, and behind it the towering wall of the Adirondacks. “In my experience,” McKibben tells us, “the world contains no finer blend of soil and rock and water and forest than that found in this scene laid out before me—a few just as fine, perhaps, but none finer. And no place where the essential human skills—cooperation, husbandry, restraint—offer more possibility for competent and graceful inhabitation, for working out the answers that the planet is posing in this age of ecological pinch and social fray.” The region he traverses offers a fine contrast between diverse forms of human habitation and pure wilderness. On the Vermont side, he visits with old friends who are trying to sustain traditional ways of living on the land and to invent new ones, from wineries to biodiesel. After crossing the lake in a rowboat, he backpacks south for ten days through the vast Adirondack woods. As he walks, he contemplates the questions that he first began to raise in his groundbreaking meditation on climate change, The End of Nature: What constitutes the natural? How much human intervention can a place stand before it loses its essence? What does it mean for a place to be truly wild? Wandering Home is a wise and hopeful book that enables us to better understand these questions and our place in the natural world. It also represents some of the best nature writing McKibben has ever done.

“The American people sees itself advance across the wilderness, draining swamps, straightening rivers, peopling the solitude, and subduing nature,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. That’s largely how we still think of nineteenth-century America today: a country expanding unstoppably, bending the continent’s natural bounty to the national will, heedless of consequence. A country of slavery and of Indian wars. There’s much truth in that vision. But if you know where to look, you can uncover a different history, one of vibrant resistance, one that’s been mostly forgotten. This Radical Land recovers that story. Daegan Miller is our guide on a beautifully written, revelatory trip across the continent during which we encounter radical thinkers, settlers, and artists who grounded their ideas of freedom, justice, and progress in the very landscapes around them, even as the runaway engine of capitalism sought to steamroll everything in its path. Here we meet Thoreau, the expert surveyor, drawing anticapitalist property maps. We visit a black antislavery community in the Adirondack wilderness of upstate New York. We discover how seemingly commercial photographs of the transcontinental railroad secretly sent subversive messages, and how a band of utopian anarchists among California’s sequoias imagined a greener, freer future. At every turn, everyday radicals looked to landscape for the language of their dissent—drawing crucial early links between the environment and social justice, links we’re still struggling to strengthen today. Working in a tradition that stretches from Thoreau to Rebecca Solnit, Miller offers nothing less than a new way of seeing the American past—and of understanding what it can offer us for the present . . . and the future.

Successfully navigate the rich world of travel narratives and identify fiction and nonfiction read-alikes with this detailed and expertly constructed guide. Just as savvy travelers make use of guidebooks to help navigate the hundreds of countries around the globe, smart librarians need a guidebook that makes sense of the world of travel narratives. Going Places: A Reader's Guide to Travel Narratives meets that demand, helping librarians assist patrons in finding the nonfiction books that most interest them. It will also serve to help users better understand the genre and their own reading interests. The book examines the subgenres of the travel narrative genre in its seven chapters, categorizing and describing approximately 600 titles according to genres and broad reading interests, and identifying hundreds of other fiction and nonfiction titles as read-alikes and related reads by shared key topics. The author has also identified award-winning titles and spotlighted further resources on travel lit, making this work an ideal guide for readers' advisors as well a book general readers will enjoy browsing.

Navigating what at she calls the " extravagantly rich world of nonfiction," renowned readers' advisor (RA) Wyatt builds readers' advisory bridges from fiction to compelling and increasingly popular nonfiction to encompass the library's entire collection. She focuses on eight popular categories: history, true crime, true adventure, science, memoir, food/cooking, travel, and sports. Within each, she explains the scope, popularity, style, major authors and works, and the subject's position in readers' advisory interviews. Wyatt addresses who is reading nonfiction and why, while providing RAs with the tools and language to incorporate nonfiction into discussions that point readers to what to read next. In easy-to-follow steps, Wyatt Explains the hows and whys of offering fiction and nonfiction suggestions together Illustrates ways to get up to speed fast in nonfiction Shows how to lead readers to a variety of books using her "read-around" and "reading map" strategies Provides tools to build nonfiction subject guides for the collection This hands-on guide includes nonfiction bibliography, key authors, benchmark books with annotations, and core collections. It is destined to become the nonfiction 'bible' for readers' advisory and collection development, helping librarians, library workers, and patrons select great reading from the entire library collection!

"Engaging hybrid - part lyrical travelogue, part investigative journalism and part jeremiad, all shot through with droll humor." --The Atlanta Journal Constitution In 1867, John Muir set out on foot to explore the botanical wonders of the South, keeping a detailed journal of his adventures as he traipsed from Kentucky southward to Florida. One hundred and fifty years later, on a similar whim, veteran Atlanta reporter Dan Chapman, distressed by sprawl-driven environmental ills in a region he loves, recreated Muir’s journey to see for himself how nature has fared since Muir’s time. Channeling Muir, he uses humor, keen observation, and a deep love of place to celebrate the South’s natural riches. But he laments that a treasured way of life for generations of Southerners is endangered as long-simmering struggles intensify over misused and dwindling resources. Chapman seeks to discover how Southerners might balance surging population growth with protecting the natural beauty Muir found so special. Each chapter touches upon a local ecological problem—at-risk species in Mammoth Cave, coal ash in Kingston, Tennessee, climate change in the Nantahala National Forest, water wars in Georgia, aquifer depletion in Florida—that resonates across the South. Chapman delves into the region’s natural history, moving between John Muir’s vivid descriptions of a lush botanical paradise and the myriad environmental problems facing the South today. Along the way he talks to locals with deep ties to the land—scientists, hunters, politicians, and even a Muir impersonator—who describe the changes they’ve witnessed and what it will take to accommodate a fast-growing population without destroying the natural beauty and a cherished connection to nature. A Road Running Southward is part travelogue, part environmental cri de coeur, and paints a picture of a South under siege. It is a passionate appeal, a call to action to save one of the loveliest and most biodiverse regions of the world by understanding what we have to lose if we do nothing.

An immersive journey into the past, present, and future of a region many consider the Northeast’s wilderness backyard. Out of all the rural areas of the United States, including those in the West, which are bigger and propped up by more pervasive myths about adventure and nation and wilderness and freedom, the Adirondacks has accumulated a well-known identity beyond its boundaries. Untouched, unspoiled, it is defined by what we haven’t done to it. Combining author Matt Dallos’s personal observations with his thorough research of primary and secondary documents, In the Adirondacks rambles through the region to understand its significance within American culture and what lessons it might offer us for how we think about the environment. In vivid prose, Dallos digs through the region’s past and present to excavate a series of compelling stories and places: a moose named Harold, a hot dog mogul’s rustic mansion, an ecological restoration on an alpine summit, a hermit who demanded a helicopter ride, and a millionaire who dressed up as a Native American to rob a stagecoach. Along the way, Dallos listens to locals and tourists, visits wilderness areas and souvenir shops, and digs through archives in museums and libraries. In the Adirondacks blends lively history and immersive travel writing to explore the Adirondacks that captivated Dallos’s childhood imagination while presenting a compelling and entertaining story about America’s largest park outside of Alaska. The result is an inquisitive journey through the region’s bogs and lakes and boreal forests and the lives of residents and tourists. Dallos turned toward the region to understand why he couldn’t shake it from his mind. What he learned is that he’s not the only one. In the Adirondacks explores the history and future of the most complicated, contested park in North America, raising important questions about the role of environmental preservation and the great outdoors in American history and culture.