The author of the popular blog Enjoying the Small Things—named The Bump’s Best Special Needs Blog and The Blog You’ve Learned the Most From in the 2010 BlogLuxe Awards—Kelle Hampton interweaves lyrical prose and stunning four-color photography as she recounts the unforgettable story of the first year in the life of her daughter Nella, who has Down syndrome. Poignant, eye-opening, and heart-soaring, Hampton’s Bloom is ultimately about embracing life and really living it.

    'Crow Planet' richly weaves Haupt's own 'crow stories' as well as scientific and scholarly research and the history and mythology of crows, culminating in a book that is sure to make readers see the world around them in a very different way.

    Cousteau, Philippe Tailliez, and the great civilian diver Frédéric Dumas, plunged into the Mediterranean with the first aqualung, co-invented by Cousteau.In this fascinating report, Cousteau and Dumas tell what it is like to be “menfish” swimming in the deep twilight zone with sharks, mantas, morays, whales, and octopi. They tell of exploring sunken ships and of the treasures they brought up. They describe ventures into an inland water cave that all but claimed their lives, and their crazy human-guinea-pig experiment with underwater explosions. Cousteau writes brilliantly of his audacious 50-fathom dive into the zone of rapture, where divers become like drunken gods; and of the 396-foot dive that took a brave companion's life.Cousteau, Dumas, and their courageous teams of divers have used their new techniques of exploration to make important discoveries in almost every branch of science. In The Silent World they share with us the greatest undersea experience men have ever had.

    By day he passed through mountains covered in nine feet of snow, hamlets burned and emptied by the Taliban, and communities thriving amid the remains of medieval civilizations. By night he slept on villagers' floors, shared their meals, and listened to their stories of the recent and ancient past. Along the way Stewart met heroes and rogues, tribal elders and teenage soldiers, Taliban commanders and foreign-aid workers. He was also adopted by an unexpected companion-a retired fighting mastiff he named Babur in honor of Afghanistan's first Mughal emperor, in whose footsteps the pair was following. Through these encounters--by turns touching, confounding, surprising, and funny--Stewart makes tangible the forces of tradition, ideology, and allegiance that shape life in the map's countless places in between.

    Her father, an ardent moonshiner when he wasn't in prison, and her mother, often showing mental illness from an earlier brain injury, raised their four children in some of the grimmest circumstances that you will ever read about. Messer eventually escaped her extreme living conditions by going to live with a family as their mother's helper outside of Washington, DC. She then moved to New York City to join her oldest sister who had fled an abusive arranged marriage when she was fifteen and left behind a young son. These two teenage girls, uneducated but determined, found freedom from their Appalachian abuse yet encountered a culture and some inhabitants who provided scars even so. Messer's memoir is told through the eyes and with the words of a barely educated child and young woman yet their meaning and her descriptions are clear as a mountain stream. Messer changed the names of many people and places she wrote about to protect her still living family members and herself as well. In the final chapter, Messer shares one legacy from her father....he even taught the infamous "Popcorn" Sutton of Maggie Valley how to be a moonshiner when Popcorn was a teenager. The moonshiner's daughter did survive and ultimately thrive. This is her story. You won't be able to put it down.

    But as a new century approached, appetites broadened, and David Fairchild, a young botanist with an insatiable lust to explore and experience the world, set out in search of foods that would enrich the American farmer and enchant the American eater.Kale from Croatia, mangoes from India, and hops from Bavaria. Peaches from China, avocados from Chile, and pomegranates from Malta. Fairchild's finds weren't just limited to food: From Egypt he sent back a variety of cotton that revolutionized an industry, and via Japan he introduced the cherry blossom tree, forever brightening America's capital. Along the way, he was arrested, caught diseases, and bargained with island tribes. But his culinary ambition came during a formative era, and through him, America transformed into the most diverse food system ever created.

    For over thirty years, Kim DeLozier acted as a referee in the wild, trying to protect millions of park visitors from one of the densest populations of wild black bears in America -- and the bears from tourists who get too close.Written with 3-Time Wall Street Journal bestselling author Carolyn Jourdan who has several highly-regarded #1 Amazon bestsellers about the Smoky Mountains and Appalachia. Her other books are "Heart in the Right Place," "Medicine Men," and "Out on a Limb."

    So one day he hit the road to trek from one end of the country to the other with little more than the clothes on his back and without a single penny in his pocket.Through his travels, he found varying degrees of kindness in strangers from all walks of life--and discovered more about people and values and life on the road in America than he'd ever thought possible.The gifts of food and shelter he received along the way were outweighed only by the touching gifts of the heart--the willingness of many he met to welcome a lonely stranger into their homes...and the discovery that sometimes those who give the most are the ones with the least to spare."A truly heartening book, one that restores one's faith not just in the road, but in the openness and humanity of the people of this country."--Salon"A superb writer...Something about McIntyre and his quest makes people want to feed him, pray for him, reveal their innermost torments to him."--Los Angeles Times"Captivating."--San Jose Mercury News"An incredible journey."--CBS News

    ""One of the outstanding wildlife books of all time.""-New York Herald Tribune First published 1960 by Longmans, Green & Co.

    National Parks. Written as a series of emails to their friends, Bob and Sue, they describe their sense of awe in exploring our national parks, and share humorous and quirky observations. The national parks are among the most stunning places in America - pristine wilderness, geologic wonders, and magnificent wildlife - places everyone should put on their must-see-before-I-die list. Matt and Karen take you along as they visit them all. Unlike a traditional guidebook, this is one couple's perspective on the joys and challenges of traveling together. This is a story of discovery and adventure: chased by a grizzly, pushed off the trail by big horn sheep, they even survived a mid-air plane collision. Dear Bob and Sue is the next best thing to visiting all the parks in person.Note: Dear Bob and Sue was previously published as two separate volumes. This version contains all the content from those first two volumes plus additional stories from the final parks Matt and Karen visited.

    With no hiking experience to draw on, they embarked on a journey of physical challenge, discovering just how far they could push themselves. For Nathan a parallel journey took him inside himself. Having grown up in the shadow of a famous father, Richard J. Foster, author of Celebration of Discipline, Nathan had a lot of questions about who his father really was. Would hiking open the door for him to get to know this distant figure? As the one-time experiment evolved into a decade of challenging hikes up Colorado's 14,000-foot peaks, the Fourteeners, Nathan navigated his twenties--finishing college, choosing a career, a possible cross-country move, the early years of marriage and a major personal crisis. Along the way he would discover exactly what his father could offer him. This book also includes an afterword by Richard J. Foster, author of Celebration of Discipline and coauthor of Longing for God.

    From the author whose books inspired the BBC series "All Creatures Great and Small", this first volume of unforgettable memoirs chronicles James Herriot's first years as a country vet, with the signature storytelling magic that has made him a favourite the world over. Here is a book for all those who find laughter and joy in animals, and who know and understand the magic of wild places and beautiful countryside.

    Working as a writer and an endangered-species biologist, he became convinced that returning grass-fed, free-roaming buffalo to the grasslands of the northern plains would return natural balance to the region and reestablish the undulating prairie lost through poor land management and overzealous farming. In 1998 he bought his first buffalo and began the task of converting a little cattle ranch into an ethically run buffalo ranch. Wild Idea is a book about how good food choices can influence federal policies and the integrity of our food system, and about the dignity and strength of a legendary American animal. It is also a book about people: the daughter coming to womanhood in a hard landscape, the friend and ranch hand who suffers great tragedy, the venture capitalist who sees hope and opportunity in a struggling buffalo business, and the husband and wife behind the ranch who struggle daily, wondering if what they are doing will ever be enough to make a difference. At its center, Wild Idea is about a family and the people and animals that surround them—all trying to build a healthy life in a big, beautiful, and sometimes dangerous land.

    The Last Empty Places is one man’s love letter to the enduring American wild, where our country’s character was forged and its destiny set in motion.Memories of growing up in a log cabin in the Wisconsin woods inspired writer Peter Stark to seek out untouched tracts of the American wilderness. What he discovered in these “blank spots” on the U.S. map is that these places are actually teeming with the rich history of our nation.Stark journeys into the great wild to four of the emptiest expanses he can find—northern Maine, central Pennsylvania, the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico, and southeast Oregon—and in so doing weaves together a majestic and dramatic tale of frontiersmen and fighters, naturalists and philosophers, émigrés and natives. But he also goes beyond that, acknowledging to some of the great minds that first framed our relationship to the wilderness that would become our home—passionate thinkers and writers including Thoreau, Emerson, and John Muir.The result is a narrative that blends nature and history in a vivid new way, a tale that provides an unforgettable window into our country’s past and present.From the Hardcover edition.

    In Without My Mum, Leigh Van Der Horst shares her own honest, heartfelt story of losing her beloved mother to cancer in 2008. She invites us on a journey that is at times heartbreaking and others heartwarming, yet is ultimately comforting and inspiring. With genuine warmth and candor, Leigh tells of her transformative passage through devastating grief to rediscover and redefine her own identity. Without My Mum reveals the sisterhood amongst motherless mothers. Featuring stories from mothers around the world, Without My Mum offers resounding reassurance that no motherless mother is ever alone. Leigh Van Der Horst further reaches out to her motherless ‘sisters’ supported by contributions of motherly wisdom from a collection of encouraging mothers world wide together with a host of inspiring popular personalities such as Jools Oliver, Amanda de Cadenet and Megan Gale. The motherless mother’s heart needs to know that she can and will move through grief to reclaim a fulfilling, grateful and loving life. Without My Mum addresses this need by providing a definitive source of emotional and practical resources specifically for women dealing with the loss of their mum.