Book picks similar to
Virgin Forest: Meditations on History, Ecology, and Culture by Eric Zencey
essays
library-books
nature
non-fiction
The Good Bee: A Celebration of Bees – And How to Save Them
Alison Benjamin - 2019
These fascinating, enigmatic creatures are a key lynchpin in the working of our planet. Without them the landscape, as well as every aisle in our supermarkets would look radically different.
And we're not just talking about honey bees. There are more than 20,000 species of bee worldwide and only a handful make honey. Some live in colonies and others are solitary. We can all help protect them - and they desperately need protecting - but you can't save what you don't love. And you can't love what you don't know. The Good Bee is a celebration of this most vital and mysterious of nature's wizards. Here you'll discover the complexities of bee behaviour - as well as the bits that still baffle us - the part they play in the natural world, their relationship with us throughout history, how they are coming under threat and what we can all do about it.Beautifully produced, with hand-made illustrations throughout, it is a story for our times and a book to treasure.
Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future
Mary Robinson - 2018
Holding her first grandchild in her arms in 2003, Mary Robinson was struck by the uncertainty of the world he had been born into. Before his fiftieth birthday, he would share the planet with more than nine billion people--people battling for food, water, and shelter in an increasingly volatile climate. The faceless, shadowy menace of climate change had become, in an instant, deeply personal.Mary Robinson's mission would lead her all over the world, from Malawi to Mongolia, and to a heartening revelation: that an irrepressible driving force in the battle for climate justice could be found at the grassroots level, mainly among women, many of them mothers and grandmothers like herself. From Sharon Hanshaw, the Mississippi matriarch whose campaign began in her East Biloxi hair salon and culminated in her speaking at the United Nations, to Constance Okollet, a small farmer who transformed the fortunes of her ailing community in rural Uganda, Robinson met with ordinary people whose resilience and ingenuity had already unlocked extraordinary change.Powerful and deeply humane, Climate Justice is a stirring manifesto on one of the most pressing humanitarian issues of our time, and a lucid, affirmative, and well-argued case for hope.“As advocate for the forgotten and the ignored, Mary Robinson has not only shone a light on human suffering, but illuminated a better future for our world.” -Barack Obama
Despicable Meme: The Absurdity and Immorality of Modern Religion
D. Cameron Webb - 2012
Cameron Webb’s brief but biting assault on the wide spectrum of religiosity that dominates 21st century America, from the hateful and anti-intellectual dogma of the Christian Right to the whitewashed progressivism of religious moderates. It is also a fascinating and humbling journey into the heart of the universe's most mind-numbing wonders.Drawing on recent insights from cosmology and evolution, Despicable Meme paints a vivid portrait of a cosmos unlike anything ever imagined by the provincial, human-centered faiths of the past – a universe of countless worlds spread across unfathomable distances and times, and where, on at least one of those worlds, the slow march of time would combine with the purposeless mechanisms of chemistry and physics to create a being capable of believing that he alone is the reason for it all.With piercing intelligence and candor, Despicable Meme exposes the folly of that conceit and dispenses with the widespread but utterly improbable notion of a personal creator. But it saves its harshest criticism for the vapid accommodationism of religious liberals, those who unknowingly or uncaringly give cover to the misogynistic, racist, homophobic paranoia of the fanatics by refusing to condemn, or quietly tolerating, the outlandish and immoral doctrines that lie festering at the center of their own “moderate” faiths.Despicable Meme is not only a blistering condemnation of radical fundamentalism, it is an impassioned appeal to the rest of us to once and for all abandon the superstitions of the religion we were raised in and embrace the beauty of an endlessly wondrous, but godless, universe.Show less
Scalper: Inside the World of a Professional Ticket Broker
Clancy Martin - 2011
Underland: A Deep Time Journey
Robert Macfarlane - 2019
Traveling through the dizzying expanse of geologic time—from prehistoric art in Norwegian sea caves, to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, to a deep-sunk "hiding place" where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come—Underland takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind.Global in its geography and written with great lyricism, Underland speaks powerfully to our present moment. At once ancient and urgent, this is a book that will change the way you see the world.
Vesper Flights
Helen Macdonald - 2020
Helen Macdonald's bestselling debut H is for Hawk brought the astonishing story of her relationship with goshawk Mabel to global critical acclaim and announced Macdonald as one of this century's most important and insightful nature writers. H is for Hawk won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction and the Costa Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, launching poet and falconer Macdonald as our preeminent nature essayist, with a semi-regular column in the New York Times Magazine.In Vesper Flights Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays, along with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall asleep. Meditating on notions of captivity and freedom, immigration and flight, Helen invites us into her most intimate experiences: observing songbirds from the Empire State Building as they migrate through the Tribute of Light, watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary, seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk's poplar forests. She writes with heart-tugging clarity about wild boar, swifts, mushroom hunting, migraines, the strangeness of birds' nests, and the unexpected guidance and comfort we find when watching wildlife. By one of this century's most important and insightful nature writers, Vesper Flights is a captivating and foundational book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make sense of the world around us.
How to Think Like a Fish: And Other Lessons from a Lifetime in Angling
Jeremy Wade - 2019
Now the greatest angling explorer of his generation (Independent on Sunday) returns to delight readers with a book of an entirely different sort, the book he was always destined to write--the distillation of a life spent fishing. Thoughtful and funny, brimming with wisdom and above all, adventure, these are pitch-perfect reflections that anyone who has ever fished will identify with, for ultimately it touches on what fishing teaches us all about life.
Why Quantum Physicists Create More Abundance
Greg Kuhn - 2013
You’ll find it fun to read too - written in simple, everyday language.And, if you’re like most people, you’ll find that learning “why” the law of attraction works will pour rocket fuel into your belief in it. And attaining such a level of belief will allow you to unleash the law of attraction more powerfully than you’ve done previously. Why Quantum Physicists Create More Abundance removes your barriers of doubt and resistance concerning the law of attraction. It can be a very powerful tool for you, helping you soar past previous frustrations and manifesting a life much more closely aligned with your dreams and desires.
The Fish's Eye: Essays about Angling and the Outdoors
Ian Frazier - 2002
He sees the angler's environment all around him--in New York's Grand Central Station, in the cement-lined pond of a city park, in a shimmering bonefish flat in the Florida Keys, in the trout streams of the Rocky Mountains. He marvels at the fishing in the turbid Ohio River by downtown Cincinnati, where a good bait for catfish is half a White Castle french fry. The incidentals of the angling experience, the who and the where of it, interest him as much as what he catches and how. The essays contain sharply focused observations of the American outdoors, a place filled with human alterations and detritus that somehow remain defiantly unruined. Frazier's simple love of the sport lifts him to a straight-ahead angling description that's among the best contemporary writing on the subject. The Fish's Eye brings together twenty years of heartfelt, funny, and vivid essays on a timeless pursuit where so many mysteries, both human and natural, coincide.
This Won't Hurt Me A Bit: What it's really like to work in health care
Josh McAdams - 2019
Welcome to laughing until it hurts while covered in bodily fluids. Welcome to simple math at very high stakes. Welcome to an incredibly inappropriate sense of humor. Welcome to serving people on the most stressful days of their lives. Welcome to putting your hands in places you never imagined they'd be. Welcome to your front row seat to the ballad of life and death. That's not the welcome that this nurse was looking for, but that's the one he got. Irreverent and audacious, this brutally honest memoir covers what it’s like to come of age in an American Hospital. Welcome to a rollicking peak behind the curtain to what medical providers, and the health care system, are truly like.
The Narrowboat Lad
Daniel Mark Brown - 2013
in his home.Dan recounts the first trip day by day, the highs of being a homeowner where every room has a view that can change daily, the lows of having steam burst from below deck and an overheating engine and everything in between from the perfect natural surrounds to the long hard days of lock working.After the long trip home we are then given a view of his first year onboard as Tilly the narrowboat is transformed into a full time home and the seasons bring their own tint to boat life, particularly a winter that wont soon be forgotten.Written with honesty and humour Dan gives readers an insight into living on a boat, his own life and personality and why people in his local area instantly know who someone is referring to when they say "The Narrowboat Lad".
12 Small Acts to Save Our World: Simple, Everyday Ways You Can Make a Difference
W.W.F. - 2018
But small, easy actions, if taken by enough people, can move mountains – and save planets.Written in collaboration with leading environmental experts from WWF, this short book provides simple changes we can all make to our everyday lives, from morning to night.These aren’t the only things you can do. Nor are they things you have to do. But these 12 small acts are basic steps anybody can take, and if even one of them sticks, our children will inherit a better world.Acts like:– Turning off devices instead of leaving them on standby– Buying less cotton clothing (a T-shirt needs 2,400 litres of water to make!)– Using reusable straws when possible– Turning off the tap while you brush your teethwill take only moments, but if enough people commit to them, we can make a real difference to our planet._______________________________'Now really is the time to act. You don’t have to be a superhero – everyone can make a difference by following this book’ – Ben Fogle
Crossing The Craton
John McPhee
McPhee embarks on a fascinating journey across the basement of the continent -- the land masses forming Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and thereabouts -- with a professor and geochronologist acting as a guide.
No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference
Greta Thunberg - 2019
Her actions sparked a global movement, inspiring millions of students to go on strike for our planet, forcing governments to listen, and earning her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.No One Is Too Small to Make A Difference brings you Greta in her own words, for the first time. Collecting her speeches that have made history across the globe, from the United Nations to Capitol Hill and mass street protests, her book is a rallying cry for why we must all wake up and fight to protect the living planet, no matter how powerless we feel. Our future depends upon it.
Ask the Narcissist: The Answers to Your Questions
H.G. Tudor - 2016
The narcissist provides the direct and no-nonsense explanations and answers to the questions which matter most to you. The narcissist manages to keep a hook in you by leaving you with unanswered questions. These questions prevent you from gaining understanding, make you susceptible to the pull of the narcissist in the future and cause you untold anguish and anxiety. Not any more. A range of incisive questions covering the narcissistic spectrum of behaviours have been posed by those who have been on the receiving end of narcissistic behaviour. Real questions posed by those who know exactly what it is like to be held in the grasp of the narcissist. Real answers provided by the narcissist himself which will provide understanding, enlightenment and freedom.