From Florida to Alaska, from the white water at Ohiopyle State Park, Pennsylvania to the dunes of Pink Coral Sand Dunes, Utah, from the 6-acre Iao Valley to the 204,000-acre Baxter, these parks represent the best cultural and natural areas protected within our state parks' system. From free to affordable, the state parks appeal to the day-visitor or the weekend escapist alike. Of the state parks' 25,000 miles of trails and recreation, the authors have selected favorites for hiking and biking, horseback riding, and wildflower gazing as well as ample opportunities for the birdwatcher or rock climber, the wildlife observer or the amateur archaeologist. The guide features more than 200 gorgeous, color photographs that capture the spendor of the parks, insider tips from state parks staff that are invaluable planning tools, and 32 easy-to-use maps that highlight sites, trails and campgrounds, as well as information on recreational activities, camping, and lodging.All material, including photos and practical data such as opening fees and contact numbers, has been updated for the 2012 edition."The low profile of many state parks can make planning a trip to one a bit harder than visiting a national park. The only nationwide state park guidebook is National Geographic's Guide to the State Parks." --Money Magazine

    

    Five months and two weeks later he arrived at the Canadian border. He averaged 16 miles and half a pack of cigarettes a day... The funniest travel book I've read since Eric Newby... Tangoes of pure and brash elegance... Mr. Pern is more than a superb walker. He is a gifted writer...his book is travel writing at its best... All alone and on foot, Stephen Pern has discovered America...Reading The Great Divide is like being the companion Stephen Pern didn't take with him....Poetry and Motion... Pern is a joy to read...Amazon ReviewsIn the tradition of Least Heat Moon's 'Blue Highways' and Bryson's 'In A Sunburned Country' ... Pern takes each encounter and uses it to reflect a bit of the American psyche......spilling imagery as brilliant as the mountains he traverses. I felt his pain, I felt his joy. This is a must read.This book is hilarious at times, actually MOST of the time! I found myself laughing out loud (something very few books have been able to do to me!)......compelling reading for anyone considering backpacking even part of the trail - and anyone trying to understand rural America...DescriptionEnglishman walks from Mexico to Canada along The Great Divide. Lots of pix and maps.

    At the Boston Tea Party, colonial rebels played Indian in order to claim an aboriginal American identity. In the nineteenth century, Indian fraternal orders allowed men to rethink the idea of revolution, consolidate national power, and write nationalist literary epics. By the twentieth century, playing Indian helped nervous city dwellers deal with modernist concerns about nature, authenticity, Cold War anxiety, and various forms of relativism. Deloria points out, however, that throughout American history the creative uses of Indianness have been interwoven with conquest and dispossession of the Indians. Indian play has thus been fraught with ambivalence—for white Americans who idealized and villainized the Indian, and for Indians who were both humiliated and empowered by these cultural exercises. Deloria suggests that imagining Indians has helped generations of white Americans define, mask, and evade paradoxes stemming from simultaneous construction and destruction of these native peoples. In the process, Americans have created powerful identities that have never been fully secure.

    Ranging from pamphlets to multivolume treatments, these narratives shared a preoccupation with establishing the region as the cradle of an Anglo-Saxon nation and the center of a modern American culture. They also insisted, often in mournful tones, that New England’s original inhabitants, the Indians, had become extinct, even though many Indians still lived in the very towns being chronicled. In Firsting and Lasting, Jean M. O’Brien argues that local histories became a primary means by which European Americans asserted their own modernity while denying it to Indian peoples. Erasing and then memorializing Indian peoples also served a more pragmatic colonial goal: refuting Indian claims to land and rights. Drawing on more than six hundred local histories from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island written between 1820 and 1880, as well as censuses, monuments, and accounts of historical pageants and commemorations, O’Brien explores how these narratives inculcated the myth of Indian extinction, a myth that has stubbornly remained in the American consciousness. In order to convince themselves that the Indians had vanished despite their continued presence, O’Brien finds that local historians and their readers embraced notions of racial purity rooted in the century’s scientific racism and saw living Indians as “mixed” and therefore no longer truly Indian. Adaptation to modern life on the part of Indian peoples was used as further evidence of their demise. Indians did not—and have not—accepted this effacement, and O’Brien details how Indians have resisted their erasure through narratives of their own. These debates and the rich and surprising history uncovered in O’Brien’s work continue to have a profound influence on discourses about race and indigenous rights.

    In "Where the Lightning Strikes," Peter Nabokov offers sixteen "biographies of place" that dramatize the rich diversity of Indian cultures and their religious systems across North America. From the mountains of Maine to Tennessee's Tellico Valley, from the Black Hills of South Dakota to Rainbow Canyon in Arizona to the high country of northwestern California, each chapter explores a host of relationships between Indian cultures and their environments and describes the myths, legends, practices, and rituals that sustained them. Based on years of research and personal experience, "Where the Lightning Strikes" reveals a range of holy lands containing beneficial as well as malevolent forces and reminds us of the stubborn persistence of Indian beliefs in the sacredness of the American earth.

    A quintessential Englishman, he has since pursued several overlapping careers, bringing to each of them his trademark preoccupation with quality control and restless curiosity.In 1975, after leaving the band that made him famous he diversified into writing movie soundtracks, various audio-visual ventures, tireless charity work and supporting major peace initiatives. He also became world music’s most illustrious champion, launching the WOMAD festival and recording solo albums that featured musicians from every corner of the globe. These and several other careers make writing Peter Gabriel’s biography an unusually challenging task, but Daryl Easlea has undertaken hours of new interviews with key friends, musicians, aides and confidants to get to the very heart and soul of Peter Gabriel, his music and his complex life. The result is an extraordinary biography of an extraordinary man.

    And what would be a greater change in scenery than a renovated 1940s ocean liner called the SS Mystique? Audrey eagerly signs up, thinking all she’ll have to do is tend to wealthy passengers and their pets on a quaint old liner. Instead, she boards a ship shrouded in odd superstitions and deadly mysteries. First she must gain favor with Captain Truffles, the ship’s cat, then she needs to learn the ropes in three days flat before the SS Mystique takes on hundreds of more passengers. It wouldn’t be so bad—if not for the two bodies appearing right after the ship sets sail. Spitfire Audrey has a few ideas about who might be to blame, but a handsome Officer Gerald is determined to keep her off the trail. The SS Mystique Cozy Mystery series is fun, quirky, and exciting! If you're a fan of ocean liners, lovable pets, or grand adventures, this series offers all three!

    The explosive controversy and resulting lawsuit also raised a far more fundamental question: Who owns history? Many Indians see archeologists as desecrators of tribal rites and traditions; archeologists see their livelihoods and science threatened by the 1990 Federal reparation law, which gives tribes control over remains in their traditional territories.In this new work, Thomas charts the riveting story of this lawsuit, the archeologists' deteriorating relations with American Indians, and the rise of scientific archeology. His telling of the tale gains extra credence from his own reputation as a leader in building cooperation between the two sides.

    Mankiller's life unfolds against the backdrop of the dawning of the American Indian civil rights struggle, and her book becomes a quest to reclaim and preserve the great Native American values that form the foundation of our nation. Now featuring a new Afterword to the 2000 paperback reissue, this edition of Mankiller completely updates the author's private and public life after 1994 and explores the recent political struggles of the Cherokee Nation.

    Black Americans are fighting for civil rights, the counterculture is trying to subvert the Vietnam War, and women are fighting for their liberation. Indians were fighting, too, though it's a fight too few have documented, and even fewer remember. At the time, newspapers and television broadcasts were filled with images of Indian activists staging dramatic events such as the seizure of Alcatraz in 1969, the storming of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building on the eve of Nixon's re-election in 1972, and the American Indian Movement (AIM)-supported seizure of Wounded Knee by the Oglala Sioux in 1973. Like a Hurricane puts these events into historical context and provides one of the first narrative accounts of that momentous period.Unlike most other books written about American Indians, this book does not seek to persuade readers that government policies were cruel and misguided. Nor is it told from the perspective of outsiders looking in. Written by two American Indians, Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane is a gripping account of how for a brief, but brilliant season Indians strategized to change the course and tone of American Indian-U.S. government interaction. Unwaveringly honest, it analyzes not only the period's successes but also its failures.Smith and Warrior have gathered together the stories of both the leaders and foot soldiers of AIM, conservative tribal leaders, top White House aides, and the ordinary citizens caught up in the maelstrom of activity that would shape a new generation of political thought. Here are insider accounts of how local groups coalesced to form a national movement for change. Here, too, is a clear-eyed assessment of the period's key leaders: the fancy dance revolutionary Clyde Warrior, the enigmatic Hank Adams, and AIM leaders Dennis Banks and Russell Means. The result is a human story of drama, sacrifice, triumph, and tragedy that gives a ground-level view of events that forever changed the lives of Americans, particularly American Indians.

    In this ambitious text that ranges across Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado and eastern California, Ned Blackhawk places native peoples squarely at the centre of a dynamic and complex story as he chronicles two centuries of Indian and imperial history that profoundly shaped the American West.

    National finalist: Women’s Fiction Writers Association “Rising Star” contest. Cassandra Patton Conover is about to become an outlaw. Searching for her wayward dog in Maine’s dense woods, she finds her best friend Shannon crushed under a tree. Then she finds tracks larger than any animal she knows and a mystery only wild animals can help her solve.Before she can absorb the loss of her friend, Patton is hired to guide a surly reporter who suspects extinct wolves have returned to Maine, but the forest has too many agendas. A billionaire hopes wolves will become a save-the-forest strategy. A timber company plans to exterminate the pack. A game warden loyal to his Penobscot tribe, his attraction to Patton, and his law enforcement life, has too many tough choices, and a black ops mercenary rips open Patton’s wounded life so he can aim her at the wolves.When gold wolf eyes issue a challenge at her tent door, Patton is drawn deeper into Shannon’s mysterious murder and the wolves’ fate. To find her friend’s killer, she must find and trust the pack. To save her dog, the wolves, and her own life, she must step outside the law, sacrifice her career, and embrace a wild world.

    In the 41st volume of its award-winning guidebook series, National Geographic Traveler explores Taiwan.

    Accusing the prospective members of stealing the priceless golf relic will surely insult them and they will stomp out, thus helping the thief escape and putting the New England small town club in yet more desperate financial straits. Word might get around. No new members might apply. The club might close. Because everyone in the clubhouse’s dining room is a suspect, amateur sleuth Beatrice is going to need all the help she can get to solve the mystery, find the thief, and recover the club’s precious crystal golf ball before lunch is over. This closed-door, short cozy mini-mystery is just the beginning of Canterbury Golf Club’s problems, but it’s certainly not the last. Enjoy this quick, bite-sized nugget of mystery and the series of golf-related mayhem starring Beatrice Yates, who is a retired kindergarten teacher and the Lady Captain at the Canterbury Golf Club!