It is also a narrative of finding exotic beauty, inspiration, inner strength, and unexpected love.

    '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.

    That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all—death, sorrow, loss—is converted into what might, with patience, nourish us.

    A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnit's own life to explore the issues of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown. The result is a distinctive, stimulating, and poignant voyage of discovery.

    Having uprooted herself from a promising career in publishing in her adopted Brooklyn, Palmer embarks on a quest to determine the fate of her lost homes—and of a community that has been erased by unchecked Southern progress. Palmer's journey takes her from the ruins of kudzu-covered, airport-owned ghost towns to carefully preserved cemeteries wedged between the runways; into awkward confrontations with airport planners, developers, and even her own parents. Along the way, Palmer becomes an amateur detective, an urban historian, and a mother. Lyrically chronicling the overlooked devastation and beauty along the airport’s fringe communities in the tradition of John Jeremiah Sullivan and Leslie Jamison, Palmer unearths the startling narratives about race, power, and place that continue to shape American cities. Part memoir, part urban history, Flight Path: A Search for My Roots beneath the World's Busiest Airport is a riveting account of one young mother's attempt at making a home where there’s little home left.

    In two short weeks, that’s what workaholic Cole Jansen discovers. Still single at thirty-two, he’s more focused on managing his clients’ money and his own material success than he is with any woman who gets close, or reconciling his estranged relationship with his parents. But when his father’s ill health leads him from urban Cedar Rapids, Iowa to the tiny rural community of Harmony, Minnesota for a rare visit, his myopic life is suddenly questioned when he meets Rachel Miller, a young Amish woman committed to her church and family – and conflicted by forbidden dreams of meeting him, the man in the pictures she ritualistically dusts each week as part of her cleaning duties at his parents’ home. No sooner than such an unlikely courtship begins to flourish, a series of tragedies strike, and commitment and character must be confronted, bringing each of their paths to a crossroads and shaking the foundations of their lives. Will the threat of excommunication and career suicide be too great? Or is there hope for such an improbable love as this?My Father’s House, a love story of truth, tenderness and tragedy that will touch your heart.

    Yet man continues to live as though the various events happening to him throughout his life are random -- occurring only by "chance." This essay formally presents a Universal Law which not only incorporates all of the existing scientific laws, but also explains the underlying order which governs the conditions of our everyday lives. THE LAW OF WILL: Will power is a force nearer to us than any of the external forms of power which we utilize each day. Yet, from an analytical point of view, the power of will is perhaps the least understood. This essay constructs an unprecedented model of the will force which is used to answer questions such as: what will is, where it comes from, and how we manage to have control over this force. The analysis then turns to the age-old question of whether man really has "free will." THE LAW OF LOVE: Psychology and religion both stress that at the very essence of man's being is the yearning for love. But though we have all shared in love, very few people actually understand what is happening when love is felt, or what conditions determine the presence or absence of this force. In this essay a comprehensive model of the love force is constructd based upon the Eastern concept of the seven chakras. Around this model a thorough analysis is conducted which reveals the essential qualities of true love. This essay has been repeatedly praised as one of the clearest eplanations of what is actually going on inside when we "fall in love," as well as clearly explaining how we can consciously come into tune with this inner force.

    Modeled loosely after a medieval bestiary, these witty, playful, whipsmart essays traverse history, myth, science, and more, bringing each beast vibrantly to life.

     Desert Notebooks examines how the unprecedented pace of destruction to our environment and an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape have led us to the brink of a calamity greater than any humankind has confronted before. As inhabitants of the Anthropocene, what might some of our own histories tell us about how to confront apocalypse? And how might the geologies and ecologies of desert spaces inform how we see and act toward time--the pasts we have erased and paved over, this anxious present, the future we have no choice but to build? Ehrenreich draws on the stark grandeur of the desert to ask how we might reckon with the uncertainty that surrounds us and fight off the crises that have already begun.In the canyons and oases of the Mojave and in Las Vegas's neon apocalypse, Ehrenreich finds beauty, and even hope, surging up in the most unlikely places, from the most barren rocks, and the apparent emptiness of the sky. Desert Notebooks is a vital and necessary chronicle of our past and our present--unflinching, urgent--yet timeless and profound.

    If we really do get the government we deserve, On Mutiny might provoke a civilian rebellion.

    In an opening up of norths and souths, she traces unexpected conduits between Cambridge and the north of Scotland. Like all of Ali Smith’s work, here spot-lit by Sarah Wood’s delicate art, this is a book that will blow fresh air through the mind and set readers’ pulses racing.

    Michio Kaku. Dr. Michio Kaku, one of the most influential living scientists and a New York Times best-selling author, selects the year’s top science and nature writing from writers who balance research with humanity and, in the process, uncover riveting stories of discovery across the disciplines.

    Diane Ackerman draws from sources as diverse as meteorology, world religion, etymology, art history, and poetry in order to celebrate that moment in which the deepest arcades of life and matter become visible. From spring in Ithaca, New York, to winter in Palm Beach, Florida, Dawn Light is an impassioned call to revel in our numbered days on a turning earth.

    Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents--her exuberant, creative mother; her steady, supportive father--and of the bittersweet moments that accompany a child's transition to caregiver.And here, braided into the overall narrative, Renkl offers observations on the world surrounding her suburban Nashville home. Ringing with rapture and heartache, these essays convey the dignity of bluebirds and rat snakes, monarch butterflies and native bees. As these two threads haunt and harmonize with each other, Renkl suggests that there is astonishment to be found in common things: in what seems ordinary, in what we all share. For in both worlds--the natural one and our own--"the shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love's own twin."Illustrated by the author's brother, Billy Renkl, Late Migrations is an assured and memorable debut.

    The fire created its own weather, including hurricane-strength winds, bubbles of plasma-like glowing gas, and 200-foot-tall flames. As temperatures reached 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit, the firestorm knocked down buildings and carried flaming debris high into the sky. Two trains-one with every single car on fire-became the only means of escape. In all, more than four hundred people would die, leading to a revolution in forestry management and the birth of federal agencies that monitor and fight wildfires. A spellbinding account of danger, devastation, and courage, Under a Flaming Sky reveals the dramatic, minute-by-minute story of the tragedy and brings into focus the ordinary citizens whose lives it irrevocably marked.