Name: Death Watch
Brand: Gerald Stern
Price: 18.95 USD
Availability: InStock

Gerald Stern

Death Watch

$18.95

In Death Watch, the National Book Award-winning poet Gerald Stern uses powerful prose to sift through personal and prophetic history and contemplate his own mortality. Characteristically audacious, uncompromising, funny, and iconoclastic, Stern looks back at his life and forward in time to how his story will play out. Wrestling with his identity in Judaism, he explores how his name was uprooted from its origins, as so much of his life will be willfully disrupted from the expectations of his parents and the norms of a predictable path.

Stern recounts his life, itself a grand digression,” which takes him from Pittsburgh, to the Army, to Paris on the GI Bill, and back to the United States, where he immerses himself in the literary culture around him. Stern’s early and traumatic loss of his older sister provides the occasion to imagine what her life might have been, and he revels in his past love affairs, the many women beloved in his life. He recollects books that occupy his recent readingthe work of W.G. Sebald, Blaise Cendrars, and Louis-Ferdinand Célineand how memory is always at the heart of literary accomplishment and what creates the staying power of great literature.

Death Watch is as an account of a beloved poet's final journey; a vivid, passionate, and, at times, whimsical look at the gamble of living life to its fullest, choosing the life of a poet, philosopher, prophet, lover, radical, and perpetual troublemaker.

Char Miller

Not So Golden State

$17.95

In Not So Golden State, leading environmental historian Char Miller looks below the surface of California's ecological history to expose some of its less glittering conundrums. In this necessary book, he asks the tough questions as we stand on the edge of a human-induced natural disaster in the region and beyond. He details policy steps and missteps in public land management, examines the impact of recreation on national forests, parks, and refuges, and assesses efforts to restore wild land habitat, riparian ecosystems, and endangered species.

Why, during a devastating five-year drought, Miller asks, is the Central Valley’s agribusiness still irrigating its fields as if it's business as usual? Why are northern counties rich in groundwater selling it off to make millions while draining their aquifers toward eventual mud? Why, when contemporary debate over oil and gas drilling questions reasonable practices, are extractive industries targeting Chaco Canyon National Historic Park and its ancient sites, which are of inestimable value to Native Americans? How do we begin to understand local,” a concept of hope for modern environmentalism?

To inhabit a place requires placed-based analyses, whatever the geographic scopeexaminations that are rooted in a precise, physical reality. To make a conscientious life in a suburb, floodplain, fire zone, or coastline requires a heightened awareness of these landscapes’ past so we can develop an intensified responsibility for their present condition and future prospects.

Miller explores these issues and more in Not So Golden State, and understanding them will be critical in our creation of more resilient, habitable, and equitable communities for California's future.

Lewis F. Fisher

San Antonio's Spanish Missions

$28.95

This elegant coffee-table volume displays more than 100 color photographs by architectural photographer Mike Osborne, providing a distinctive contemporary portrait of the five mission complexes, now partly restored, partly still in ruins. One, better known as the Alamo, is a memorial to its defenders in 1836. The four others comprise San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. Each section begins with a dramatic 19th-century image. Osborne’s color photographs range from interior views of the Alamo to a mariachi mass at San José to a composite of rifle portholes in Espada’s bastion, with other dramatic views of the missions and related landmarks in between.

Jim Peyton

Classic Tex-Mex Cooking

$17.95

Tex-Mex, barbecue, and chili are important aspects of a culinary culture in Texas that has developed organically over many years of trial and error by thousands of remarkable cooks on both sides of the border. Tex-Mex cuisine, a melding of regional American and interior Mexican, has become enormously popular not just in the Lone Star State but nationwide and, increasingly, throughout the world.

In Classic Tex-Mex Cooking, the book that Texas Monthly called "the 101 on Texas’s superlative cookin’," chef and Southwest food expert Jim Peyton carefully selects nearly one hundred of the cuisine's outstanding dishes and treats them comprehensively, simplifying each technique and recipe. From the basics of the Mexican table like pico de gallo and guacamole to fused dishes like tacos, fajitas, enchiladas, chili, and barbecue, the melding of Texas fire-cooked culture with Mexico's vast medley of flavors has never tasted so good.

Jonathan White

Tides

$18.95

In Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean, writer, sailor, and surfer Jonathan White takes readers across the globe to discover the science and spirit of ocean tides. In the Arctic, White shimmies under the ice with an Inuit elder to hunt for mussels in the dark cavities left behind at low tide; in China, he races the Silver Dragon, a twenty-five-foot tidal bore that crashes eighty miles up the Qiantang River; in France, he interviews the monks that live in the tide-wrapped monastery of Mont Saint-Michel; in Chile and Scotland, he investigates the growth of tidal power generation; and in Panama and Venice, he delves into how the threat of sea level rise is changing human culturethe very old and very new. Tides combines lyrical prose, colorful adventure travel, and provocative scientific inquiry into the elemental, mysterious paradox that keeps our planet’s waters in constant motion. Photographs, scientific figures, line drawings, and sixteen color photos dramatically illustrate this engaging, expert tour of the tides.

Gerald Stern

What I Can't Bear Losing

$17.95

Gerald Stern’s poetry has been variously praised for its visionary quality, its scope and passion, but most especially for its wholehearted embrace of life. Stern’s special manner of joie de vivre is immediately evident in his prose pieces as well. In this collection of personal essays, Stern speaks to the reader on subjects closest to his heart family, justice, Jewishness, ecstasy, loss, and love, as well as Andy Warhol, Paris, and getting shot in the neck. He ranges from passionate literary discussions to buoyant anecdotes about "borrowing" William Carlos Williams’ hat from the writer’s historic home. With seven new pieces, What I Can’t Bear Losing celebrates a writer passionately engaged with life in America after World War II and gives a glimpse of the poetic processes of one of today’s most beloved literary voices.

Christopher Merrill

Self-Portrait with Dogwood

$15.95

In the course of researching dogwood trees, beloved poet and essayist Christopher Merrill realized that a number of formative moments in his life had some connection to the tree namedaccording to one writerbecause its fruit was not fit for a dog. As he approached his sixtieth birthday, Merrill began to compose a self-portrait alongside this tree whose lifespan is comparable to a human’s and that, from an early age, he’s regarded as a talisman.

Dogwoods have never been far from Merrill’s view at significant moments throughout his life, helping to shape his understanding of place in the great chain of being; entwined in his experience is the conviction that our relationship to the natural world is central to our walk in the sun. The feeling of a connection to nature has become more acute as his life has taken him to distant corners of the earth, often to war zones where he has witnessed not only humankind’s propensity for violence and evil but also the enduring power of connections that can be forged across languages, borders, and politics. Dogwoods teach us persistence humility and wonder.

Self-Portrait with Dogwood is no ordinary memoir, but rather the work of a traveler who has crisscrossed the country and the globe in search of ways to make sense of his time here. Merrill provides new ways of thinking about personal history, the environment, politics, faith, and the power of the written word. In his descriptions of places far and near, many outside of the average American’s purviewa besieged city in Bosnia, a hidden path in a Taiwanese park, Tolstoy’s country house in Russia, a castle in Slovakia, a blossoming dogwood at daybreak in Seattlethe reader’s understanding of the world will flourish as well.

Paul Mariani

Dream Song

$34.95

Dream Song is the story of John Berryman, one of the most gifted poets of a generation that included Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and Dylan Thomas. Using Berryman's unpublished letters and poetry, as well as interviews with those who knew him intimately, Paul Mariani captures Berryman's genius and the tragedy that dogged him, while at the same time illuminating one of the most provocative periods in American letters. Here we witness Berryman's struggles with alcohol and drugs, his obsession with women and fame, and his friendships with luminary writers of the century. Mariani creates an unforgettable portrait of a poet who, by the time of his suicide at age fifty-seven, had won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.

William deBuys

The Walk

$15.95

In The Walk, William deBuys writes about personal loss and the power of the landscape to nurture the recovery of hope. The book consists of three interrelated essays that move from a period of strife in the author’s life to a kind of limbo and eventually to a place of peace. The setting is deBuys’ small farm in New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Each morning, he takes the same walk through the woods, arriving, as he describes in the first essay, at a clarity that comes from looking at the same vantage point for years. The middle essay, Geranium,” takes its name from a mare deBuys had to put down, and whose remains become one with the forest. In the final essay, deBuys reflects on drought, the loss of a friend, and the resurgence of land and hope. Contemplative, compassionate, and quietly humorous, The Walk is nature writing at its finest.

Harry J. Shafer

Painters in Prehistory

$55.00

Painters in Prehistory is a revised update of the book Ancient Texans: Rock Art and Lifeways along the Lower Pecos, edited by Harry Shafer with photographs by Jim Zintgraff, and published by the Witte Museum, in conjunction with a permanent exhibition in 1986. The Witte Museum is known for its focus on natural history, science, and the history and culture of South Texas, and the scholarly and artistic pieces collected in the book are the result of years of research and dedication to the story of the ancient canyon dwellers along the Rio Grande.

The remnants of prehistoric Lower Pecos people reveal lifeways unlike those anywhere else in the world. The people who inhabited the land in what is now Texas left a unique series of narratives in their shelters, including art on rock walls, pictographs, and organic residue and trash. These narratives are tantalizing in their noveltythey provide information about almost 12,000 years of existence, the last 7,000 of which are still astoundingly evident.

This updated edition features significant research by new scholars who have deepened the understanding of rock art interpretation, scientific analysis of artifacts and coprolites, and the lifeways of prehistoric Lower Pecos people. Contributors include Megan Biesele, Stephen L. Black, Carolyn E. Boyd, Vaughn M. Bryant Jr., J. Phil Dering, Peter T. Furst, Margaret Greco, Thomas R. Hester, Elton R. Prewitt, Roberta McGregor, Shirley Boteler Mock, and Marvin W. Rowe.

Mark Louis Rybczyk

San Antonio Uncovered

$18.95

San Antonio is in the national spotlight as one of the fastest growing and most dynamic emerging major cities in America. Yet local lore has it that every Texan has two hometownshis own and San Antonio. The Alamo City's charm, colorful surroundings, and diverse cultures combine to make it one of the most interesting places in Texas and the nation. In San Antonio Uncovered, Mark Rybczyk examines some of the city's internationally known legends and lore (including ghost stories) and takes a nostalgic look at landmarks that have disappeared. He also introduces some of the city’s characters and unusual features, debunks local myths, and corrects common misconceptions.

Rybczyk embraces San Antonio's peculiarities by chronicling the cross-country journey of the World’s Largest Boots to their home in front of North Star Mall; the origins of the Frito corn chip and chewing gum; the annual Cornyation of King Anchovy; and Dwight Eisenhower's stint as the football coach at St Mary’s University.

This completely updated, new edition of San Antonio Uncovered highlights San Antonio as a modern, thriving city with the feel of a small town that sees beauty in the old and fights to save it, even something as seemingly insignificant as an old Humble Oil Station; and its diverse inhabitants as those who appreciate the blending of the old and the new at the Tobin Center and fight to save what’s left of the Hot Wells Hotel.

Joe Holley

Quotable Texas

$15.95

Every Texan has an opinion. And everyone else has an opinion about Texas. Quotable Texas is where these two factions meet to form a rich repository of the piquant thoughts, curious notions, and memorable ideas that have been expressed about Texas through the years.

Texans are people of the word written, spoken, sung. That’s not the stereotype, of course. Texans are doers, men and women of action. They’re Davy Crockett swinging Ol’ Betsy as the Alamo falls, Texas Rangers nabbing desperados in the South Texas brush country, cowboys riding rip-snortin’ Brahma bulls on the West Texas prairie, hell-for-leather oilmen punching holes in the earth until they hit the big one. Texas is all those things, but it is also the birthplace and incubator of thoughtful humorists, outlandish artists, outspoken politicians, soulful musicians, history-making athletes, and history-changing scholars. Whether it’s Sam Houston excoriating his political rivals, the late Molly Ivins satirizing the state legislature or memoirist Mary Karr recounting the eccentricities of small-town life in East Texas, the denizens of the Lone Star State have no compunction about expressing themselves.

Quotable Texas is a collection of some of the most memorable lines, regretful remarks, and soulful sayings ever muttered about the Lone Star State or by one of its descendants. Quotes cover most of the nearly 300,000 square miles of America's second largest state, from the stark landscape of Big Bend to the great lakes of Austin to the towering pine forests of Houston. From early explorers like Cabeza de Vaca and Frederick Law Olmstead to famed writers like Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx to artists and celebrities like Richard Linklater, Georgia O’Keeffe, Oprah Winfrey, and Beyonce, everyone who's anyone has had something to say. Don't mess with Texas. Everything’s bigger in Texas. And above all else, remember the Alamo.

Jonathan White

Talking on the Water

$17.95

During the 1980s and 90s, the Resource Institute, headed by Jonathan White, held a series of "floating seminars" aboard a sixty-five-foot schooner featuring leading thinkers and writers from an array of disciplines. Over ten years, White conducted interviews, gathered in this collection, with the writers, scientists, and environmentalists who gathered on board to explore our relationship to the wild.

White describes the conversations as the roots of an integrated community: "While at first these roots may not appear to be linked, a closer look reveals that they are sustained in common ground."

Beloved fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin discusses the nature of language, microbiologist Lynn Margulis contemplates Darwin's career and the many meanings of evolution, and anthropologist Richard Nelson sifts through the spiritual life of Alaska's native people. Rounding out the group are writers Gretel Ehrlich, Paul Shepard, and Peter Matthiessen, conservationists Roger Payne and David Brower, theologian Matthew Fox, activist Janet McCloud, Jungian analyst James Hillman, poet Gary Snyder, and ecologist Dolores LaChapelle.

By identifying the common link between these conversations, Talking on the Water takes us on a journey in search of a deeper understanding of ourselves and the environment.

Matt Donovan

A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape

$17.95

The title cloud of Matt Donovan’s A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape refers to the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius that in 79 AD buried the city of Pompeii under twenty feet of ash. It’s no surprise, then, that Donovan found the sacred ruins a site of inspiration and power, using their legacy to form the beginning of this extraordinary nonfiction debut. Donovan pursues the image of the cloud throughout these 15 spell-binding essays on ruin and redemption.

A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape is about the flawless connections between antiquity and the present, personal experience to historical events, architecture to art installation to literature. The redemptive power of beauty hovers over this spectacular work, reminding us that darkness and light make an inextricable pattern over our lives and form the delicate balance of what ultimately makes life worthwhile, what gives meaning to the sorrow and joy of being human.

Mihaela Moscaliuc

Insane Devotion

$29.95

Gerald Stern has been a significant presence and an impassioned and idiosyncratic voice in twentieth and twenty-first-century American poetry. Insane Devotionis a retrospective of his career and features fourteen writers, critics, and poets examining the themes, stylistic traits, and craft of a poet who has shaped and inspired American verse for generations.

The essays and interviews in Insane Devotion paint a broad picture of a man made whole by the influence of the written word. They touch on the contentious and nuanced stance of Judaism in the breadth of Stern’s work and explore Stern’s capacious memory and his use of personal history to illuminate our common humanity. What is revealed is a poet of complexity and heart, often tender, often outraged. As Philip Levine writes in his lyrical foreword to the volume, Stern is both sweet and spiky, a born teacher who can teach me to see the universe in an acorn and hear the music of the lost in an empty Pepsi can.” Contributors include Contributors J. T. Barbarese, Dara Barnat, Lucy Biederman, Michael Broek, Darla Himeles, Edward Hirsch, Tony Leuzzi, Laura McCullough, Alicia Ostriker, Lia Purpura, Ira Sadoff, Michael Waters, Judith Vollmer, and Dean Young.

Brooke Williams

Open Midnight

$16.95

Open Midnight weaves two parallel stories about the great wildernessBrooke Williams’s year alone with his dog ground truthing wilderness maps of southern Utah, and that of his great-great-great-grandfather, who in 1863 made his way with a group of Mormons from England across the wilderness almost to Utah, dying a week short. The book is also about two levels of historypersonal, as represented by William Williams, and collective, as represented by Charles Darwin, who lived in Shrewsbury, England, at about the same time as Williams.

As Brooke Williams begins researching the story of his oldest known ancestor, he realizes that he has few facts. He wonders if a handful of dates can tell the story of a life, writing, If those points were stars in the sky, we would connect them to make a constellation, which is what I’ve made with his life by creating the parts missing from his story.” Thus William Williams becomes a kind of spiritual guide, a shamanlike consciousness that accompanies the author on his wilderness and life journeys, and that appears at pivotal points when the author is required to choose a certain course.

The mysterious presence of his ancestor inspires the author to create imagined scenes in which Williams meets Darwin in Shrewsbury, sowing something central in the DNA that eventually passes to Brooke Williams, whose life has been devoted to nature and wilderness.

Brooke Williams’s inventive and vivid prose pushes boundaries and investigates new ways toward knowledge and experience, inviting readers to think unconventionally about how we experience reality, spirituality, and the wild. The author draws on Jungian psychology to relate how our consciousness of the wild is culturally embedded in our psyche, and how a deep connection to the wild can promote emotional and psychological well-being.

Williams's narrative goes beyond a call for conservation, but in the vein of writers like Joanna Macy, Bill Plotkin, David Abram, the author argues passionately for the importance of wildness is to the human soul. Reading Williams's inspired prose provides a measure of hope for protecting the beautiful places that we all need to thrive.

Open Midnight is grounded in the present by Williams’s descriptions of the Utah lands he explores. He beautifully evokes the feeling of being solitary in the wild, at home in the deepest sense, in the presence of the sublime. In doing so, he conveys what Gary Snyder calls a practice of the wild” more completely than any other work.

Williams also relates an insider’s view of negotiations about wilderness protection. As an advocate working for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, he represents a minority in meetings designed to open wilderness lands to roads and hunting. He portrays the mindset of the majority of Utah’s citizens, who argue passionately for their rights to use their lands however they wish.

The phrase open midnight,” as Williams sees it, evokes the time between dusk and dawn, between where we’ve been and where we’re going, and the unconscious where all possibilities are hidden.

Paul Mariani

William Carlos Williams

$34.95

William Carlos Williams (18831963) emerged alongside Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Frost, and Yeats as one of the foremost poets of the 20th century. Paterson, Williams's epic masterpiece, raised everyday American speech to the highest levels of poetic imagination. A finalist for the national Book Award and a New York Times Notable Book, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked is a remarkable, rich blend of art and scholarship. From a small-town doctor who delivered more than 3,000 babies to an extraordinary revolutionary, Paul Mariani unfolds Williams' life and times while simultaneously letting the reader inside the poet's mind and language in this definitive masterwork.

Julie Dunlap

Coming of Age at the End of Nature

$18.95

Coming of Age at the End of Nature explores a new kind of environmental writing. This powerful anthology gathers the passionate voices of young writers who have grown up in an environmentally damaged and compromised world. Each contributor has come of age since Bill McKibben foretold the doom of humanity’s ancient relationship with a pristine earth in his prescient 1988 warning of climate change, The End of Nature.

What happens to individuals and societies when their most fundamental cultural, historical, and ecological bonds weakenor snap? In Coming of Age at the End of Nature, insightful millennials express their anger and love, dreams and fears, and sources of resilience for living and thriving on our shifting planet.

Twenty-two essays explore wide-ranging themes that are paramount to young generations but that resonate with everyone, including redefining materialism and environmental justice, assessing the risk and promise of technology, and celebrating place anywhere from a wild Atlantic island to the Arizona desert, to Baltimore and Bangkok. The contributors speak with authority on problems facing us all, whether railing against the errors of past generations, reveling in their own adaptability, or insisting on a collective responsibility to do better. Contributors include Blair Braverman, Jason Brown, Cameron Conaway, Elizabeth Cooke, Amy Coplen, Ben Cromwell, Sierra Dickey, Ben Goldfarb, CJ Goulding, Bonnie Frye Hemphill, Lisa Hupp, Amaris Ketcham, Megan Kimble, Craig Maier, Abby McBride, Lauren McCrady, James Orbesen, Alycia Parnell, Emily Schosid, Danna Staaf, William Thomas, and Amelia Urry.

Annick Smith

Crossing the Plains with Bruno

$17.95

Dogs, like humans, have memories, instincts, fears, and loyalties. But, as far as we know, dogs do not get swept up in nostalgia, speculation, or self-analysis. Although they have hopes, they are not driven by regrets. In Crossing the Plains with Bruno, Annick Smith weaves together a memoir of travel and relationship, western history and family history, human love and animal love centering around a two week road trip across the Great Plains she and her 95 pound chocolate lab, Bruno, took in the summer of 2003. It is a chain of linked meditations, often triggered by place, about how the past impinges on the present and how the present can exist seemingly sans past.

Traveling from her rural homestead in Montana to pick up her nearly 100-year-old mother from her senior residence on Chicago’s North Side and bring her to the family’s beach house on a dune overlooking Lake Michigan, Smith often gets lost in memory and rambling contemplation. Bruno’s constant companionship and ever present needs force her to return to the actual, reminding her that she, too, is an animal whose existence depends on being alert to the scents, sights, hungers, and emotions of the moment.

Passing through wide open spaces, dying ranch towns, green cornfields, and Midwestern hamlets, Annick is immersed in memories of her immigrant Hungarian Jewish family, her childhood days in Chicago, her early marriage, and ultimate immigration west. Triggered by random encounters along the way, she’s taken back to life as a young mother, her career as a writer and filmmaker who produced the classic A River Runs Through It, the death of her husband, and the thrill of a late romance. A lifetime of reflection played out one mile at a time.

Crossing the Plains with Bruno is a story narrated by a woman beset by the processes of aging, living with the imminent reality of a parent’s death, but it is the dog that rides shotgun, like Sancho Panza to Don Quixote, that becomes the reminder of the physical realities outside our own imaginations.

Kurt Caswell

Getting to Grey Owl

$18.95

Writer, teacher, and adventurer Kurt Caswell has spent his adult life canoeing, hiking, and pedaling his way toward a deeper understanding of our vast and varied world. Getting to Grey Owl: Journeys on Four Continents chronicles over twenty years of Caswell’s travels as he buys a rug in Morocco, rides a riverboat in China, attends a bullfight in Spain, climbs four mountains in the United Kingdom, and backpacks a challenging route through Iceland’s wild Hornstrandir Peninsula. Writing in the tradition of such visionary nomads as Hermann Hesse, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux, Pico Iyer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, Caswell travels through wild and urban landscapes, as well as philosophical and ideological vistas, championing the pleasures of a wandering life. Far from the trappings of the everyday, he explores a range of ideas: the meaning of roads and pathways, the story of Cain and Abel, nomadic life and the evolution of the human animal, the role of agriculture in the making of the modern world, and the fragility of love.

William deBuys

River of Traps

$24.95

New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo mountains are a place where two cultures Hispanic and Anglo meet. They're also the place where three men meet: William deBuys, a young writer; Alex Harris, a young photographer; and Jacobo Romero, an old farmer. When Harris and deBuys move to New Mexico in the 1970s, Romero is the neighbor who befriends them and becomes their teacher. With the tools of simple labor shovel and axe, irony and humor he shows them how to survive, even flourish, in their isolated village. A remarkable look at modern life in the mountains, River of Traps also magically evokes the now-vanished world in which Romero tended flocks on frontier ranges and absorbed the values of a society untouched by cash or Anglo America. His memories and wisdom, shared without sentimentality, permeate this absorbing story of three men and the place that forever shaped their lives.

Mark Menjivar

The Luck Archive

$24.95

Artist Mark Menjivar was in an antique bookshop in Fort Wayne, Indiana, when he found 4 four-leaf clovers pressed between the yellowed pages of an aged copy of 1000 Facts Worth Knowing. Their discovery beguiled Menjivar so much that he began a multiyear exploration into the concept of luck and its intersections with belief, culture, superstition, and tradition in people’s lives.

Menjivar has spent hours and days engaging people in airplanes, tattoo shops, bingo halls, international grocery stores, public parks, baseball stadiums, and voodoo shopsand out on the streets and in their homes. Along the way he documented his findings to create a physical archive that contains hundreds of objects (rings, underwear, food items, clovers, horses, pigs, herbs, rainbows, lottery strategies, seeds, day trader insights, statues, patches, crystals, spices) and the stories and pictures that go with them.

Through photographs and first person accounts, The Luck Archive takes the best of these ideas, thoughts, and objects and gives readers a glimpse into the cultures and superstitions of a colorful array of humanity.

Dale Peterson

The Jane Effect

$18.95

In her nearly 60-year career as a groundbreaking primatologist and a passionate conservationist, Jane Goodall has touched the hearts of millions of people. The Jane Effect: Celebrating Jane Goodall is a collection of testimonies by her friends and colleagues honoring her as a scientific pioneer, an inspiring teacher, a devoted friend, and an engaging spirit whose complex personality tends to break down usual categories. Jane Goodall is the celebrity who transcends celebrity. The distinguished scientist who's open to nonscientific ways of seeing and thinking. The human who has lived among non-humans. She is a thoughtful adult with depth and sobriety who also possesses a child’s psychological immediacy and sense of wonder. She is a great scientific pioneer, and yet her pioneering work goes far beyond producing advances in scientific knowledge. The more than 100 original pieces included in this inspirational collection give us a sense of her amazing reach and the power of the Jane effect.”

Gary Snyder

Nobody Home

$17.95

In this thoughtful, affectionate collection of interviews and letters spanning three decades, beloved poet Gary Snyder talks with South African writer and scholar Julia Martin. Over this period many things changed decisivelyglobally, locally, and in their personal livesand these changing conditions provide the back story for a long conversation. It begins in the early 1980s as an intellectual exchange between an earnest graduate student and a generous distinguished writer, and becomes a long-distance friendship and an exploration of spiritual practice.

At the project’s heart is Snyder’s understanding of Buddhism. Again and again, the conversations return to an explication of the teachings. Snyder’s characteristic approach is to articulate a direct experience of Buddhist practice rather than any kind of abstract philosophy. In the version he describes here, this practice finds expression not primarily as an Asian import or a monastic ideal, but in the specificities of a householder’s life as lived creatively in a particular location at a particular moment in history. This means that whatever topic” a dialogue explores, there is a sense that all of it is about practicethe spiritual-social practice of a contemporary poet.

San Antonio Express-News

San Antonio

$39.95

On Sept. 27, 1865, the San Antonio Express-News made its debut. And from the beginning, there was plenty to write about. The Civil War had just concluded, and it was only twenty-nine years after the fall of the Alamo. The Chisholm Trail, the high road of the Cattle Kingdom, began in San Antonio, which was the largest and among the most diverse cities in Texas. Spanish, German, and English were commonly spoken. The politics were lively and sometimes divisive, as the city was full of Unionist sympathizers in a state that was an anchor of the Confederacy. Today, 150 years later, San Antonio is America’s fastest-growing big city and still making history. San Antonio is a richly illustrated compilation of more than 150 years of coverage on the history and culture of the city, as told in the pages of the San Antonio Express-News. From local politics to news stories on the military, energy, water use, the border and immigration that reverberate nationally and internationally, to the recent naming of San Antonio’s five Spanish missions as a World Heritage site, the city has always been a place where the American identity is forged. This book tracks the city's past from 1865 until 2015 and is full of evocative pictures and compelling accounts culled from the Express-News archives.

The collection celebrates companies that shaped the city, such as Frost Bank, which began extending credit in 1867; the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, founders in 1869 of what is now the Christus Santa Rosa Health System and subsequently their namesake university; and H-E-B grocery. This is not a standard civic history or a straightforward march through the decades. Loosely organized by theme, the stories in the collection are often quite often surprising, just like San Antonio itself. As anyone who has spent time in the city knows, this is a place with a soul.

Rebecca Solnit

The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

$25.95

The incomparable Rebecca Solnit,author of more than a dozen acclaimed books of nonfiction, brings the same dazzling writing to the twenty-nine essays in The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness. As the title suggests, the territory of Solnit’s concerns is vast, and in her signature alchemical style she combines commentary on history, justice, war and peace, and explorations of place, art, and community, all while writing with the lyricism of a poet to achieve incandescence and wisdom. Gathered here are celebrated iconic essays along with little-known pieces that create a powerful survey of the world we live in. In its encyclopedic reach and its generous compassion, Solnit’s collection charts a way through the thickets of our complex social and political worlds. Like the women who've pioneered before herSontag, Didion, and Dillardher essays are a beacon.

The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

Sheryl St. Germain

Words without Walls

$19.95

Writing programs in prisons and rehabilitation centers have proven time and again to be transformative and empowering for people in need. Halfway houses, hospitals, and shelters are all fertile ground for healing through the imagination and can often mean the difference for inmates and patients between just simply surviving and truly thriving. It is in these settings that teachers and their students need reading that nourishes the soul and challenges the spirit.

Words without Walls is a collection of more than seventy-five poems, essays, stories, and scripts by contemporary writers that provide models for successful writing, offering voices and styles that will inspire students in alternative spaces on their own creative exploration. Created by the founders of the award-winning program of the same name based at Chatham University, the anthology strives to challenge readers to reach beyond their own circumstances and begin to write from the heart.

Each selection expresses immediacywriting that captures the imagination and conveys intimacy on the pagerevealing the power of words to cut to the quick and unfold the truth. Many of the pieces are brief, allowing for reading and discussion in the classroom, and provide a wide range of content and genre, touching on themes common to communities in need: addiction and alcoholism, family, love and sex, pain and hope, prison, recovery, and violence.

These inspirational pieces act as models for beginning writers and offer a vehicle to examine their own painful experiences. Words without Walls demonstrates the power of language to connect people; to reflect on the past and reimagine the future; to confront complicated truths; and to gain solace from pain and regret.

Words without Walls is a creative partnership between graduate students from Chatham University’s MFA program in creative writing and a number of nontraditional classrooms, including the Allegheny County Jail, Sojourner House, a recovery center for women and their children, and other facilities. Students from Chatham teach creative writing courses to male and female inmates at the jail and elsewhere, organize readings of their work, facilitate community workshops after their release, and publish their work in an annual anthology.

Barry Lopez

Outside

$18.95

The six stories in Outside showcase Barry Lopez’s majestic talent as a fiction writer. Lopez writes in spare prose, but his narratives resonate with an uncanny power. With a reverence for our exterior and interior landscapes, these stories offer profound insight into the relationships between humans and animals, creativity and beauty, and, ultimately, life and death. Again and again, whether describing a Navajo rug possessing the essence of its maker, a boy who can change places with his half-coyote dog (named Leaves), or a teacher whose presence brings into question the meaning of friendship, Lopez portrays elemental and sacred places. His prose transcends its simplicity to enter spaces of wonder and mystery. As James Perrin Warren says in his compelling introduction, Lopez’s narrators bear witness to extraordinary patterns and purposes . . . The storyteller is vital to the community and to a healthy landscape, but the vital relationship is also reciprocal. . . . We participate, along with Lopez, in the long history of storytelling. We become part of the atmosphere in which wisdom shows itself.”

Donald Culross Peattie

Green Laurels

$24.95

In Green Laurels, Donald Culross Peattie combines his extensive knowledge of history's foremost naturalists with his personal observations about the subject to form what the New York Herald Tribune calls "a delightful book...one would not wish to miss on any account." This piece is accurate and precise but according to Nation, "there is not a line which is not dramatically vivid and entertaining." Peattie’s enthusiasm and enlightened curiosity make Green Laurels appealing to readers of all backgrounds.

Donald Culross Peattie

An Almanac for Moderns

$19.95

An Almanac for Moderns contains a short essay for each day of the year that contemplates a unique but factual aspect of unbridled nature. According to a review in Nation, this collection of essays manages to appeal to the ordinary lover of nature . . . but the turn of Peattie’s mind is poetic and speculative.” The New York Times calls this book a fine and subtle perception . . . rising at times to an intense lyric beauty . . . a book which the reader will deeply treasure, and to which he will repeatedly return.”

Donald Culross Peattie

The Road of a Naturalist

$19.95

The Road of a Naturalist is a fascinating autobiographical wonder written by one of America's most beloved naturalists at the height of his fame. A scientist, a philosopher, and a poet, Donald Culross Peattie takes us on an confessional journey across the landscape of his life. Told in flashbacks of years past and interspersed with impressions of a journey by motorcar across the American West, it is intensely personal. It is American in the best sense of the word. From saying goodbye to the trees at his childhood home on Lake Michigan to a man formed via Harvard and New York City, finally discovering a belief in the nature of things in a cabin in the Grand Tentons, it is not told as as linear life story but rather an adventure in living, in science, in thought.

Linda Pace

Dreaming Red

$29.95

Since its founding in 1993 by the late Pace Foods heiress Linda Pace, Artpace has become one of the premiere foundations for contemporary art. An artist residency program based in San Antonio, Texas, Artpace's goal is to give artists time and space to imagine new ways to work. Each year, nine artists (three from Texas, three from other areas of the United States, and three from abroad) are invited to the foundation to create new work. Selected by guest curators like Robert Storr and Okwui Enwezor, the artists who have undertaken residencies is impressive, prescient, and diverse, including Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Annette Messager, Tracey Moffatt, Xu Bing, Nancy Rubins, Cornelia Parker, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Glenn Ligon, Kendell Geers, Carolee Schneemann, Mona Hatoum, Isaac Julien, Arturo Herrera, and Christian Jankowski.

Dreaming Red includes images of all the works created at Artpace since its inception; an essay by art historian Eleanor Heartney; short essays on selected artists by guest curators, including Cuauhtémoc Medina, Lynne Cooke, Chrissie Iles, and Judith Russi Kirshner; and a lengthy essay on the personal history of the foundation and its founder.

Donald Culross Peattie

A Book of Hours

$19.95

A Book of Hours contains 24 essays, one for each hour of the day, that seek to bridge the gap between definitive scientific philosophy and the sheer unadulterated beauty that Donald Culross Peattie envisioned within everyday life. The Boston Transcript referred to this collection as science, in sheer poetry,” and the Chicago Daily Tribune mused that it leaves one a better man for having read it” and offers the inevitableness of natural laws and the truth of beauty, if one cares to seek it.”

Donald Culross Peattie

A Gathering of Birds

$24.95

A Gathering of Birds is an anthology containing selected prose about birds by nineteen famous authors, such as Hudson, Audubon, and Thoreau, and includes brief biographical information about each. The New York Times called the collection a delightful gathering’ that Mr. Peattie has presented, and his own contributions to the book make it something new and valuable in this field.”

Char Miller

On the Edge

$17.95

On the Edge grew out of a lifetime spent living and traveling across the American Southwest, from San Antonio to Los Angeles. Char Miller examines this borderland region through a native's eyes and contemplates its considerable conflicts. Internal to the various US states and Mexico's northern tier, there are struggles over water, debates over undocumented immigrants, the criminalizing of the border, and the region's evolution into a no-man's land.

The book investigates how we live on this contested land --how we make our place in its oft-arid terrain; an ecosystem that burns easily and floods often and defies our efforts to nestle in its foothills, canyons, and washes.

Exploring the challenges in the Southwest of learning how to live within this complex natural system while grasping its historical and environmental frameworks. Understanding these framing devices is critical to reaching the political accommodations necessary to build a more generous society, a more habitable landscape, and a more just community, whatever our documented status or species.

Donald Culross Peattie

Diversions of the Field

$19.95

Diversions of the Field contains a collection of essays tackling the subjects of hunting, fishing, game animals, and wildlife throughout different regions of the country. The Atlantic called it a refreshing animal book,” and The New York Times praised Peattie’s work, contending that it is written by a naturalist, who is at heart a poet, to the land that bore him.”

Vincent Scully

The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods

$34.95

When The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods first appeared in 1962, it was hailed by the critics for it erudition, historical imagination and boldness. Subsequently, this comprehensive study of Greek temples and site-planning has been widely accepted as a landmark of architectural history, for it offers an inspired and arresting insight into nature and function of Greek sacred architecture. Vincent Scully, one of America's most brilliant and articulate scholars, understands the temples as physical embodiment of the gods in landscapes that had for the Greeks divine attributes and sacred connotations. He explores the meanings inherent in the calculated interaction between man-made sculptural forces and the natural landscape, and he relates this interaction to our understanding of Greek culture from the pre-Greek Aegean to the Hellenistic period.

Years of research and travel were devoted to The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods. Scores of sites were restudied on the spot, including many lesser-known sanctuaries throughout the Hellenic world. The study includes reconstruction drawings, plans, and maps along with its richly illustrated, detailed discussions of major sites.

Madeleine Budnick

Black & Blanco!

$7.95

With ArteKids, children discover the world of art and learn English and Spanish at the same time. Introduce your child to the fundamentals of contrasting colors while connecting them to the world of art in a unique, fun, and colorful way. The book incorporates artwork found in the collections of the San Antonio Museum of Art with phrases and words in English and Spanish to make bilingual learning and art exciting for eager young learners and their teachers and parents.

Madeleine Budnick

Colores Everywhere!

$7.95

This book is a partnership between the San Antonio Museum of Art, the San Antonio Public Library Foundation, and Trinity University Press. All organizations are located in San Antonio, TX.

Donald Culross Peattie

Cargoes and Harvests

$19.95

Cargoes and Harvests, famed naturalist Donald Culross Peattie’s first book, eloquently explores agriculture and trade within America’s past using thoughtful language that is well ahead of its time. Originally published in 1926, Peattie takes readers on a compelling adventure through the socioeconomic histories of staples such as tea, coffee, cocoa, potatoes and tobacco. Starting with the seeds and roots of the American landscape, Cargoes and Harvests illustrates where we’ve been and how far we’ve come. By considering the relationship between a nation and its goods, Peattie unearths countless reflective implications that still resonate within the field of American agriculture today.

Madeleine Budnick

Animal Amigos!

$7.95

This book is a partnership between the San Antonio Museum of Art, the San Antonio Public Library Foundation, and Trinity University Press. All organizations are located in San Antonio, TX.

Ann Fisher-Wirth

The Ecopoetry Anthology

$27.95

Definitive and daring, The Ecopoetry Anthology is the authoritative collection of contemporary American poetry about nature and the environment--in all its glory and challenge. From praise to lament, the work covers the range of human response to an increasingly complex and often disturbing natural world and inquires of our human place in a vastness beyond the human.

To establish the antecedents of today's writing,The Ecopoetry Anthology presents a historical section that includes poetry written from roughly the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Iconic American poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are followed by more modern poets like Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and even more recent foundational work by poets like Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, and Muriel Rukeyser. With subtle discernment, the editors portray our country's rich heritage and dramatic range of writing about the natural world around us.

Bob Shacochis

Domesticity

$18.95

Bob Shacochis, author of the critically acclaimed novel The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, and National Book Award winning-author of such books as Swimming in the Volcano, Easy in the Islands, and The Next New World, hones his nonfiction skills in this tour de force romp through the worlds of eating and eroticism. Domesticity is an irreverent exploration of the sweet and sour evolution of the enduring romance between author and lover. In this relationship, Shacochis stays at home and cooks, all the while reflecting on the ups and downs of a romantic partnership, the connection between heart and stomach, and how the crazed lust of youth evolves into inevitably settling down and, well, simply making dinner.

Shacochis's delectable musings on monogamy, emotional and physical separations, dogs, career changes, the stress of the holidays, the aesthetics of food, moving, sex and seafood, friendships, writings and the angst over who is going to do the dishes are deftly folded into seventy-five recipes, half of them of the author's own creation. Guilelessly hilarious, and ever entertaining, Domesticity is a celebration of a life spent in proximity to the boiling point, a "prose stew" of audacious candor, a culinary valentine for lovers of literature.

Cary Clack

Clowns and Rats Scare Me

$16.95

San Antonians love Cary Clack for the sparkle of wit and wisdom he brings to them in his column in the San Antonio Express-News. But his style and sensibility make his work equally popular far beyond that city. He offers pithy, probing coverage of national issues such as terrorism, racism, and child abuse, but his keen sense of humor often turns to the stuff of everyday life such as the inexplicable power of Krispy Kreme doughnuts and his terror of clowns. The columns collected here sample the best of 13 years' worth of Clack's amusing and thoughtful commentaries, and begin with an enlightening foreword by noted poet Naomi Shihab Nye.

Kim Stafford

100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do

$16.95

Bret and Kim Stafford, the oldest children of the poet and pacifist William Stafford, were pals. Bret was the good son, the obedient public servant, Kim the itinerant wanderer. In this family of two parent teachers, with its intermittent celebration of talking recklessly,” there was a code of silence about hard things: Why tell what hurts?” As childhood pleasures ebbed, this reticence took its toll on Bret, unable to reveal his troubles. Against a backdrop of the 1960s puritan in the summer of love, pacifist in the Vietnam era Bret became a casualty of his interior war and took his life in 1988. 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do casts spells in search of the lost brother: climbing the water tower to stand naked under the moon, cowboys and Indians with real bullets, breaking into church to play a serenade for God, struggling for love, and making bail. In this book, through a brother’s devotions, the lost saint teaches us about depression, the tender ancestry of violence, the quest for harmonious relations, and finally the trick of joy.

Becky Crouch Patterson

The Ranch That Was Us

$29.95

Braiding strands of earthen insight with uproarious storytelling, Texas Hill Country legendary author Becky Patterson recreates the history of the Steiler Hill Ranch in twenty-four anecdotal chapters interspersed with original artwork. The result is a mixture of memoir and montage, treasure chest and tableau vivant of a world that’s beautiful, brash, and wonderfully heartbreaking. Patterson -- the daughter of Texas folk hero and self-proclaimed mayor of Luckenbach, Hondo Crouch -- has big shoes to fill and she does so successfully in this colorful collection of Hill Country and Texas ranch vignettes.

Foreman and general cowboy guru Raymond Kuhlmann tells stories of the Goat King and German drinking songs, the buzzard traps and Mexican corridos that filled the nighttime pastures. First-person accounts and vivid historical narratives evoke the ranch’s past, overlaid with Patterson’s breathless personal histories of afternoons spent rescuing a doe in a nightgown, or saving a porcupine from a pack of dogs.

This is a book that will connect you to whatever patch of earth you hold dear. It is poignant reminder of the landscapes we’ve forgotten to keep close, of the land that does not belong to us but simply is who we are. The Ranch That Was Us is an affectionate reminder to go outside and touch the earth that is you.

Madeleine Budnick

Hello, Círculos!

$7.95

What better way to learn shapes than with eye-catching works of art? With art from across Latin America and beyond, children will become armchair world travelers and art connoisseurs. This bilingual edition introduces early readers, and even earlier listeners, to shapes in both English and Spanish.

One in a series of bilingual board books called Arte Kids that also includes 1, 2, 3, Si! (an artistic exploration of numbers) and Colores Everywhere! (featuring colors in the arts).

Art for this book was selected from the collection of the San Antonio Museum of Art, one of the leading art museums in the United States with a collection spanning a broad range of history and world cultures.

Pamela Frierson

The Burning Island

$19.95

Westernersfrom early missionaries to explorers to present-day artists, scientists, and touristshave always found volcanoes fascinating and disturbing. Native Hawaiians, in contrast, revere volcanoes as a source of spiritual energy and see the volcano goddess Pele as part of the natural cycle of a continuously procreative cosmos. Volcanoes hold a special place in our curiosity about nature.

The Burning Island is an intimate, multilayered portrait of the Hawaiian volcano regiona land marked by a precarious tension between the harsh reality of constant geologic change, respect for mythological traditions, and the pressures of economic exploitation. Pamela Frierson treks up Mauna Loa, the world’s largest active volcano, and Kilauea to explore how volcanoes work, as well as how their powerful and destructive forces reshape land, cultures, and history. Her adventures reveal surprising archeological ruins, threatened rainforest ecosystems, and questionable real estate development of the islands. Now a classic of nature writing, Frierson’s narrative sets the stage for a larger exploration of our need to take great care in respecting and preserving nature and tradition while balancing our ever-expanding sense of discovery and use of the land.

Tom Kayser

Baseball in the Lone Star State

$19.95

In short episodic chapters, Kayser and King create a history of this storied minor league, providing a broad picture of the shifting character of baseball operations over the past century or so. Portrayed are the many and varied and often colorful owners, managers, and players who did so much to give this league a powerful place in Texas culture.

Accompanying the text are dozens of B&W photos, dating to the founding of the league, and an appendix of baseball statistics, essential information for the true aficionado.

With nine teams in states from Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma, the Texas League has brought America's favorite sport to local fans for more than 100 summers. Baseball in the Lone Star State chronicles those games, their players, and will delight the legions of diehard fans of teams like the San Antonio Missions or El Paso Diablos or the Midland Rock Hounds who devotedly cheer loudly and boo lustily.

William L. Fox

Terra Antarctica

$26.95

How does the human mind transform space into place, or land into landscape? For more than three decades, William L. Fox has looked at empty landscapes and the role of the arts to investigate the way humans make sense of space. In Terra Antarctica, Fox continues this line of inquiry as he travels to the Antarctic, the largest and most extreme desert on earth.” This contemporary travel narrative interweaves artistic, cartographic, and scientific images with anecdotes from the author's three-month journey in the Antarctic to create an absorbing and readable narrative of the remote continent. Through its images, history, and firsthand experiencessnowmobile trips through whiteouts and his icy solo hikes past the edge of the mapped worldFox brings to life a place that few have seen and offers us a look into both the nature of landscape and ourselves.

Pamela Frierson

The Last Atoll

$16.95

Far from the beach-towelcovered sands of Waikiki there is a hidden Hawaii: remote islands and atolls that are some of the wildestand at the same time most vulnerableplaces on earth.

In The Last Atoll, Pamela Frierson chronicles a decade of travels to this wildlife-teeming outback of the Hawaiian archipelago. Spanning 1200 miles, the Northwestern Islands are home to some of the world’s rarest species, including the Hawaiian monk seal, the Laysan duck, and the Nihoa millerbird. The vast surrounding reefs are one of the last intact Pacific ecosystems, dominated by the big predators: giant jacks, groupers, and sharks.

But according to Frierson this far-flung region is both pristine and plundered.” In a series of arduous journeys she uncovers a history of use and abuse. At Midway Atoll she watches the politics of clean-up as a naval facility shuts down, and learns about clandestine Cold War activities. At Laysan Island she finds a legacy of guano mining and bird feather hunting that led to the extinction of three endemic landbirds. In a compelling adventure tale, this award-wining Pacific writer explores lives both human and wild at one of the extreme edges of the world.

Cover image for The Last Atoll, isbn: 9781595341303

Peter Turchi

Maps of the Imagination

$29.95

In Maps of the Imagination, Peter Turchi posits the idea that maps help people understand where they are in the world in the same way that literature, whether realistic or experimental, attempts to explain human realities. The author explores how writers and cartographers use many of the same devices for plotting and executing their work, making crucial decisions about what to include and what to leave out, in order to get from here to there, without excess baggage or a confusing surplus of information. Turchi traces the history of maps, from their initial decorative and religious purposes to their later instructional applications. He describes how maps rely on projections in order to portray a three-dimensional world on the two-dimensional flat surface of paper, which he then relates to what writers do in projecting a literary work from the imagination onto the page.

Carl N. McDaniel

Wisdom for a Livable Planet

$17.95

The author profiles the work of eight visionaries who have dedicated their lives to various environmental issues. Each story provides a portrait of an individual's valiant and inspiring campaign to improve the conditions for life on our planet. Taken together, the work of these people points the way toward creating an ecologically centered civilization in which a brighter future for all life, including human, is possible.
*Terri Swearingen takes on one of the world's largest hazardous waste incinerators burning toxic waste next door to an elementary school.
*Stephen Schneider establishes the scientific basis for climate change
*Herman Daly advocates a dynamic steady-state economy that respects the laws of nature and human behavior.
*David Orr champions educational reform to make universities a place where students learn how to be environmentally aware citizens
*Werner Fornos works toward empowering every person with the knowledge and means to decide when and how many children to have
*Helena Norberg-Hodge champions local living with appropriate technologies to enhance our spiritual and ecological well-being.
*Wes Jackson promotes sustainable agriculture based on local ecology and community values
*Dave Foreman leads the effort to rewild almost half of North America with wolves, mountain lions, jaguars, falcons, and others to restore functional ecosystems and preserve biodiversity.

Gregory McNamee

Aelian's On the Nature of Animals

$15.95

Not much can be said with certainty about the life of Claudius Aelianus, known to us as Aelian. He was born sometime between A.D. 165 and 170 in the hill town of Praeneste, what is now Palestrina, about twenty-five miles from Rome, Italy. He grew up speaking that town’s version of Latin, a dialect that other speakers of the language seem to have found curious, butsomewhat unusually for his generation, though not for Romans of earlier timeshe preferred to communicate in Greek. Trained by a sophist named Pausanias of Caesarea, Aelian was known in his time for a work called Indictment of the Effeminate, an attack on the recently deceased emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who was nasty even by the standards of Imperial Rome. He was also fond of making almanac-like collections, only fragments of which survive, devoted to odd topics such as manifestations of the divine and the workings of the supernatural.

His De Natura Animalium (On the Nature of Animals) has a similar patchwork quality, but it was esteemed enough in his time to survive more or less whole, and it is about all that we know of Aelian’s work today. A mostly randomly ordered collection of stories that he found interesting enough to relate about animalswhether or not he believed themAelian’s book constitutes an early encyclopedia of animal behavior, affording unparalleled insight into what ancient Romans knew about and thought about animalsand, of particular interest to modern scholars, about animal minds.

If the science is sometimes sketchy, the facts often fanciful, and the history sometimes suspect, it is clear enough that Aelian had a fine time assembling the material, which can be said, in the most general terms, to support the notion of a kind of intelligence in nature and that extends human qualities, for good and bad, to animals. His stories, which extend across the known world of Aelian’s time, tend to be brief and to the point, and many return to a trenchant question: If animals can respect their elders and live honorably within their own tribes, why must humans be so appallingly awful?

Aelian is as brisk, as entertaining, and as scholarly a writer as Pliny, the much better known Roman natural historian. That he is not better known is simply an accident: he has not been widely translated into English, or indeed any European language. This selection from his work will introduce readers to a lively mind and a witty writer who has much to tell us.

Mark Tredinnick

The Land's Wild Music

$24.95

The Land's Wild Music explores the home terrains and the writing of four great American writers of place—Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams, and James Galvin. In their work and its relationship with their home places, Tredinnick, an Australian writer, searches for answers to such questions such as whether it’s possible for a writer to make an authentic witness of a place; how one captures the landscape as it truly is; and how one joins the place in witness so that its lyric becomes one’s own and enters into one’s own work. He asks what it might mean to enact an ecological imagination of the world and whether it might be possible to see the work—and the writer—as part of the place itself. The work is a meditation on the nature of landscape and its power to shape the lives and syntax of men and women. It is animated by the author’s encounters with Lopez, Matthiessen, Williams, and Galvin, by critical readings of their work, and by the author’s engagement with the landscapes that have shaped these writers and their writing—the Cascades, Long Island, the Colorado Plateau, and the high prairies of the Rocky Mountains. Tredinnick seeks “the spring of nature writing deep in the nature of a place itself, carried in a writer’s wild self inside and resonated over and over again at the desk until it is a work in which the place itself sings.”

Kathleen Dean Moore

Moral Ground

$19.95

Moral Ground brings together the testimony of over 80 visionaries theologians and religious leaders, scientists, elected officials, business leaders, naturists, activists, and writers to present a diverse and compelling call to honor our individual and collective moral responsibilities to our planet. In the face of environmental degradation and global climate change, scientific knowledge alone does not tell us what we ought to do. The missing premise of the argument and much-needed centerpiece in the debate to date has been the need for ethical values, moral guidance, and principled reasons for doing the right thing for our planet, its animals, its plants, and its people. This book encourages a newly discovered, or rediscovered, commitment to consensus about our ethical obligation to the future and why it’s wrong to wreck the world.

Contributors include: Fred W. Allendorf, Bartholomew I, Mary Catherine Bateson, Thomas Berry, Wendell Berry, Marcus J. Borg, J. Baird Callicott, Courtney S. Campbell, F. Stuart Chapin III, Robin Morris Collin, Michael M. Crow, Dalai Lama, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Brian Doyle, David James Duncan, Massoumeh Ebtekar, Jesse M. Fink, Dave Foreman, Thomas L. Friedman, James Garvey, Thich Nhat Hanh, Paul Hawken, Bernd Heinrich, Linda Hogan, bell hooks, Dale Jamieson, Derrick Jensen, John Paul II, Martin S. Kaplan, Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley, Stephen R. Kellert, Robin W. Kimmerer, Barbara Kingsolver, Shepard Krech III, Ursula K. Le Guin, Hank Lentfer, Carly Lettero, Oren Lyons, Wangari Maathai, Sallie McFague, Bill McKibben, Katie McShane, Curt Meine, Ming Xu, N. Scott Momaday, Kathleen Dean Moore, Hylton Murray-Philipson, Gary Paul Nabhan, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Michael P. Nelson, Barack Obama, Ernest Partridge, John Perry, Edwin P. Pister, Carl Pope, Robert Michael Pyle, David Quammen, Daniel Quinn, Kate Rawles, Tri Robinson, Libby Roderick, Holmes Rolston III, Deborah Bird Rose, Jonathan F. P. Rose, Carl Safina, Scott Russell Sanders, Lauret Savoy, Nirmal Selvamony, Ismail Serageldin, Peter Singer, Sulak Sivaraksa, Gary Snyder, James Gustave Speth, Brian Swimme, Bron Taylor, Paul B. Thompson, George Tinker, Joerg Chet Tremmel, Quincy Troupe, Mary Evelyn Tucker, José Galizia Tundisi, Brian Turner, Desmond Tutu, Steve Vanderheiden, John A. Vucetich, Kimberly A. Wade-Benzoni, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Alan Weisman, Terry Tempest Williams, E. O. Wilson, and Xin Wei.

Kurt Caswell

In the Sun's House

$19.95

In the year he spent teaching at Borrego Pass, a remote Navajo community in northwest New Mexico, Kurt Caswell found himself shunned as persona non grata. His cultural missteps, status as an interloper, and white skin earned him no respect in the classroom or the communitythose on the reservation assumed he would come and go like so many teachers had before. But as Caswell attempts to bridge the gap between himself and those who surround him, he finds his calling as a teacher and develops a love for the rich landscape of New Mexico, and manages a hard-won truce between his failings and successes.

Lynn Domina

Poets on the Psalms

$19.95

Reverential, celebratory, antagonistic, and even erotic, this remarkable collection of essays interprets the Psalms as a collection of poetry. Written by 14 acclaimed poets, the essays approach the Psalms from a personal, often autobiographical perspective, demonstrating how relevant they remain for today’s readers. Alicia Ostriker examines the Psalms’ glory and their terror in a moving essay that revels in their moods of joy while acknowledging the brutality they invoke, linking their violence to events such as 9/11, the Palestinian uprisings, and the Rwandan massacres. Weaving autobiographical anecdotes with scholarly introspection, Enid Dame provides a Jewish explanation of Psalm 22, while editor Lynn Domina contemplates the pastoral life as she connects the everyday with phrases from the Psalms. From a former nun to a self-described left-wing Jew, from a Midrashic scholar to a Texas rancher, the contributors mirror the wide swath of humanity interested in, and affected by, the Psalms. Contributors include Robert A. Ayres, David Citino, Enid Dame, Madeline DeFrees, Lynn Domina, Jill Alexander Essbaum, Angie Estes, Diane Glancy, Janet McCann, Alicia Ostriker, Carl Phillips, Pattiann Rogers, Catherine Sasanov, and Daniel Tobin.