Zak Podmore sets out to explore exploited Western rivers-and some of the most pressing environmental justices of our time. After losing his river-running mother to cancer, Podmore disappears into the American West's iconic canyon country to heal. He kayaks down a rare release of water in the Colorado River Delta, investigates uranium tailings on Ute Mountain lands near San Juan River, ans interrogates the treatment of asylum seekers crossing the Rio...

"Throughout personal essays spiked with humor and natural science, archaeologist R. E. Burrillo widens his range beyond his popular Behind the Bears Ears. After an upstate New York childhood and a bartending stint in New Orleans' French Quarter, seasonal resort work led R. E. Burrillo to the desert Southwest, whose redrock landscapes were a source of stability through mental and physical illness. In The Backwoods of Everywhere, archaeologist Burrillo...

“In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.” So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of literature....

"The gripping articles collected in Classic Krakauer--originally published in magazines such as The New Yorker, Outside, and Smithsonian--show why he is considered a standard-bearer of modern journalism. Spanning an extraordinary range of subjects and locations, these pieces take us from a horrifying avalanche on Mount Everest to a volcano poised to obliterate a big chunk of Seattle; from a wilderness teen-therapy program run by apparent sadists to...

From armoring the windows with LP covers to protect the house from neurotic songbirds to the awkwardness of having a lozenge fall from your mouth into the lap of a sleeping fellow passenger on a plane, David Sedaris uses life's most bizarre moments to reach new heights in understanding love and fear, family and strangers. Culminating in a brilliantly funny account of his venture to Tokyo in order to quit smoking, Sedaris' sixth essay collection will...

"A collection that includes seven essays and two pieces of short fiction captures both the small moments of daily existence and times when life and death hang in the balance, including the title work about a searing journey through India."--Provided by publisher.

More than thirty-five years ago, when the weather allowed, Wendell Berry began spending his sabbaths outdoors, walking and wandering around familiar territory, seeking a deep intimacy only time could provide. These walks arranged themselves into poems and each year since he has completed a sequence dated by the year of its composition. Many of these poems are drawn from the view from a small porch in the woods, a place of stillness and reflection,...

"A charmingly idiosyncratic look at writing, creativity, and the author's own novels. Haruki Murakami's myriad fans will be delighted by this unique look into the mind of a master storyteller. In this engaging book, the internationally best-selling author and famously reclusive writer shares with readers what he thinks about being a novelist; his thoughts on the role of the novel in our society; his own origins as a writer; and his musings on the...

"Author Ross Gay spent a year writing almost-daily essays about the things, large and small, that delight him"--

Bringing his cosmic perspective to civilization on Earth, Neil deGrasse Tyson shines new light on the crucial fault lines of our time―war, politics, religion, truth, beauty, gender, and race―in a way that stimulates a deeper sense of unity for us all. In a time when our political and cultural views feel more polarized than ever, Tyson provides a much-needed antidote to so much of what divides us, while making a passionate case for the twin chariots...