Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship


Tom Ryan - 2011
    Ryan and his friend, miniature schnauzer Atticus M. Finch, would attempt to climb all forty-eight of New Hampshire’s four-thousand-foot peaks twice in one winter while raising money for charity. It was an adventure of a lifetime, leading them across hundreds of miles and deep into an enchanting but dangerous winter wonderland. At the heart of the amazing journey was the extraordinary relationship they shared, one that blurred the line between man and dog.Following Atticus is an unforgettable true saga of adventure, friendship, and the unlikeliest of family, as one remarkable animal opens the eyes and heart of a tough-as-nails newspaperman to the world’s beauty and its possibilities

One More Warbler: A Life with Birds


Victor Emanuel - 2017
    He has observed more than six thousand species during travels that have taken him to every continent. He founded the largest company in the world specializing in birding tours and one of the most respected ones in ecotourism. Emanuel has received some of birding’s highest honors, including the Roger Tory Peterson Award from the American Birding Association and the Arthur A. Allen Award from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. He also started the first birding camps for young people, which he considers one of his greatest achievements.In One More Warbler, Emanuel recalls a lifetime of birding adventures—from his childhood sighting of a male Cardinal that ignited his passion for birds to a once-in-a-lifetime journey to Asia to observe all eight species of cranes of that continent. He tells fascinating stories of meeting his mentors who taught him about birds, nature, and conservation, and later, his close circle of friends—Ted Parker, Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton, Roger Tory Peterson, and others—who he frequently birded and traveled with around the world. Emanuel writes about the sighting of an Eskimo Curlew, thought to be extinct, on Galveston Island; setting an all-time national record during the annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count; attempting to see the Imperial Woodpecker in northwestern Mexico; and birding on the far-flung island of Attu on the Aleutian chain. Over the years, Emanuel became a dedicated mentor himself, teaching hundreds of young people the joys and enrichment of birding. “Birds changed my life,” says Emanuel, and his stories make clear how a deep connection to the natural world can change everyone’s life.

Ocean Star: A Memoir


Christina Dimari - 2006
    "Ocean Star" is the story of how God found her in the midst of an abusive childhood, became the loving parent she never had, and revealed himself in tangible ways through her amazing life journey. Filled with insightful symbolism, "Ocean Star" will help Christians and non-Christians find hope, humor, and healing in a powerful true story of a broken life made new.

A Good Man with a Dog: A Game Warden's 25 Years in the Maine Woods


Roger Guay - 2016
    Inspired by this experience, as well as his love of the outdoors, Guay became a game warden and certified K9 handler, beginning a successful career that would span twenty-five years and see him establish canine units as a staple of the game warden service.Guay takes readers into the patient, watchful world of a warden catching poachers and protecting pristine wilderness, and the sometimes CSI-like reconstruction of deer- and moose-poaching scenes. Guay searches for lost hunters and hikers, estimating that over the years, he has pulled more than two hundred bodies out of Maine’s north woods. His frequent companion is a little brown lab named Reba, who can find discarded weapons, ejected shells, hidden fish, and missing people.A Good Man with a Dog explores Guay’s life as he and his canine partners are exposed to increasingly terrible events, from tracking down hostile poachers to searching for victims of violent crimes, including a year-long search for the hidden graves of two babies buried by a Massachusetts cult. He witnessed firsthand FEMA’s mismanagement of the post-Katrina cleanup efforts in New Orleans, an experience that left him scarred and disheartened. But he found hope with the support of family and friends, and eventually returned to the woods he knew and loved from the days of his youth.

Old Glory: A Voyage Down the Mississippi


Jonathan Raban - 1981
    The author of Bad Land realizes a lifelong dream as he navigates the waters of the Mississippi River in a spartan sixteen-foot motorboat, producing yet another masterpiece of contemporary American travel writing.  In the course of his voyage, Raban records the mercurial caprices of the river and the astonishingly varied lives of the people who live along its banks.  Whether he is fishing for walleye or hunting coon, discussing theology in Prairie Du Chien or race relations in Memphis, he is an expert observer of the heartyland's estrangement from America's capitals ot power and culture, and its helpless nostalgia for its lost past.  Witty, elegaic, and magnificently erudite, Old Glory is as filled with strong currents as the Mississippi itself.

Walking My Dog Jane: From Valdez to Prudhoe Bay Along the Trans-Alaska Pipeline


Ned Rozell - 2000
    WALKING MY DOG, JANE is Rozell's tribute to his adopted state and to the travel partner who carried Rozell's heart, and her own backpack, during a summer spent outdoors walking the 800-mile length of the trans-Alaska pipeline.

Among the Elephants


Iain Douglas-Hamilton - 1975
    With 16 pages of extraordinary photographs.

Life in the Valley of Death: The Fight to Save Tigers in a Land of Guns, Gold, and Greed


Alan Rabinowitz - 2007
    He has journeyed to the remote corners of the earth in search of wild things, weathering treacherous terrain, plane crashes, and hostile governments. Life in the Valley of Death recounts his most ambitious and dangerous adventure yet: the creation of the world's largest tiger preserve.The tale is set in the lush Hukaung Valley of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. An escape route for refugees fleeing the Japanese army during World War II, this rugged stretch of land claimed the lives of thousands of children, women, and soldiers. Today it is home to one of the largest tiger populations outside of India—a population threatened by rampant poaching and the recent encroachment of gold prospectors.To save the remaining tigers, Rabinowitz must navigate not only an unforgiving landscape, but the tangled web of politics in Myanmar. Faced with a military dictatorship, an insurgent army, tribes once infamous for taking the heads of their enemies, and villagers living on less than one U.S. dollar per day, the scientist and adventurer most comfortable with animals is thrust into a diplomatic minefield. As he works to balance the interests of disparate factions and endangered wildlife, his own life is threatened by an incurable disease.The resulting story is one of destruction and loss, but also renewal. In forests reviled as the valley of death, Rabinowitz finds new life for himself, for communities haunted by poverty and violence, and for the tigers he vowed to protect.

The Eye of the Elephant: An Epic Adventure in the African Wilderness


Delia Owens - 1992
    They found it in Zambia, but elephant poachers soon had them fighting for their lives when they tried to stop the slaughter. 16 pages of photos, half in color.

Alone Against the North: An Expedition into the Unknown


Adam Shoalts - 2015
    What he discovered surprised even him, and made him a media sensation.     Shoalts was no stranger to the wilderness. He had hacked his way through jungles and muskeg, had stared down polar bears and climbed mountains. But one spot on the map called out to him irresistibly: the Hudson Bay Lowlands, a trackless waste of muskeg and lonely rivers, moose and wolf, much bigger than the Amazon. Little of it has ever been explored.      Cutting through this forbidding landscape is a river no hunter, no explorer, no Native guide has left any record of paddling. It is far from any important waterways, even further from any arable land, and about as far from civilization as one can get. It was this river that Shoalts was obsessively determined to explore.      It took him several attempts, years of research, and two friendships that collapsed under the strain of Adam's single-minded thirst to explore this river. But finally, alone, he found the headwaters of the Again. He believed he had discovered what he had set out to find. But the adventure had just begun.     Paddling his way back to Hudson Bay, where a float plane would pick him up, Shoalts discovered something that seemingly shouldn't exist: a towering unmapped waterfall. He also discovered edenic islands, and braved rock-strewn rapids, but the waterfall captured both his imagination and the world's.     Adam did a single interview, with The Guardian, and once the story hit, he was a celebrity. He appeared on morning TV and was made the Explorer in Residence of the Canadian Geographic Society. What struck a chord with people was the realization that the world is bigger than we think. We assume that because we have mapped it from space, it must be exhaustively known. But it is wilder, stranger, less homogenous than we assume. We hardly know it. And, contrary to popular wisdom, it is certainly not flat. In other words, the age of exploration is not over.

American Catch: The Fight for Our Local Seafood


Paul Greenberg - 2014
    In 2005, the United States imported five billion pounds of seafood, nearly double what we imported twenty years earlier. Bizarrely, during that same period, our seafood exports quadrupled. American Catch examines New York oysters, Gulf shrimp, and Alaskan salmon to reveal how it came to be that 91 percent of the seafood Americans eat is foreign. In the 1920s, the average New Yorker ate six hundred local oysters a year. Today, the only edible oysters lie outside city limits. Following the trail of environmental desecration, Greenberg comes to view the New York City oyster as a reminder of what is lost when local waters are not valued as a food source. Farther south, a different catastrophe threatens another seafood-rich environment. When Greenberg visits the Gulf of Mexico, he arrives expecting to learn of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill’s lingering effects on shrimpers, but instead finds that the more immediate threat to business comes from overseas. Asian-farmed shrimp—cheap, abundant, and a perfect vehicle for the frying and sauces Americans love—have flooded the American market. Finally, Greenberg visits Bristol Bay, Alaska, home to the biggest wild sockeye salmon run left in the world. A pristine, productive fishery, Bristol Bay is now at great risk: The proposed Pebble Mine project could under¬mine the very spawning grounds that make this great run possible. In his search to discover why this pre¬cious renewable resource isn’t better protected, Green¬berg encounters a shocking truth: the great majority of Alaskan salmon is sent out of the country, much of it to Asia. Sockeye salmon is one of the most nutritionally dense animal proteins on the planet, yet Americans are shipping it abroad. Despite the challenges, hope abounds. In New York, Greenberg connects an oyster restoration project with a vision for how the bivalves might save the city from rising tides. In the Gulf, shrimpers band together to offer local catch direct to consumers. And in Bristol Bay, fishermen, environmentalists, and local Alaskans gather to roadblock Pebble Mine. With American Catch, Paul Greenberg proposes a way to break the current destructive patterns of consumption and return American catch back to American eaters. The Washington Post: "Americans need to eat more American seafood. It’s a point [Greenberg] makes compellingly clear in his new book, American Catch: The Fight for our Local Seafood...Greenberg had at least one convert: me.” Jane Brody, New York Times “Excellent.” The Los Angeles Times “If this makes it sound like American Catch is another of those dry, haranguing issue-driven books that you read mostly out of obligation, you needn’t worry. While Greenberg has a firm grasp of the facts, he also has a storyteller’s knack for framing them in an entertaining way.” The Guardian (UK) “A wonderful new book” Tom Colicchio: "This is on the top of my summer reading list. A Fast Food Nation for fish.”

Rare Bird: Pursuing the Mystery of the Marbled Murrelet


Maria Mudd Ruth - 2005
    This curiosity of nature, which flies like a little brown bullet at up to 100 miles an hour and lives most of its life offshore, is seen onland only during breeding season, when each female lays a single egg high on a mossy tree limb in the ancient coastal forest.Ruth traces reports of the bird back to Captain Cook’s ill-fated voyage of discovery on the Pacific Ocean in 1778, and explores the mindset of 19th- and 20th-century naturalists who — despite their best efforts — failed to piece together clues to the whereabouts of the bird’s nest. Ruth ventures to coastal meadows before dawn and onto the ocean at midnight to learn firsthand how scientists observe nature. She interviews all the major players in the drama: timber company executives and fishing fleet operators whose businesses are threatened by conservation measures, as well as the so-called cowboy scientists who are devoted to saving the marbled murrelet from extinction. And, ultimately, Ruth puts her curiosity and passion for this rare bird onto the page for readers to savor.

That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands


Mark Kenyon - 2019
    These vast expanses provide a home to wildlife populations, a vital source of clean air and water, and a haven for recreation.Since its inception, however, America’s public land system has been embroiled in controversy—caught in the push and pull between the desire to develop the valuable resources the land holds or conserve them. Alarmed by rising tensions over the use of these lands, hunter, angler, and outdoor enthusiast Mark Kenyon set out to explore the spaces involved in this heated debate, and learn firsthand how they came to be and what their future might hold.Part travelogue and part historical examination, That Wild Country invites readers on an intimate tour of the wondrous wild and public places that are a uniquely profound and endangered part of the American landscape.

A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog


Dean Koontz - 2009
    A retired service dog, Trixie was three when Dean and his wife, Gerda, welcomed her into their home. She was superbly trained, but her greatest gifts couldn’t be taught: her keen intelligence, her innate joy, and an uncanny knack for living in the moment. Whether chasing a tennis ball or protecting those she loved, Trixie gave all she had to everything she did, inspiring Dean and Gerda to trust their instincts and recapture a sense of wonder that will remain with them always. Trixie lived fewer than twelve years; in this wide world, she was a little thing. But in every way that mattered, she lived a big life.

Hiking the Continental Divide Trail: One Woman's Journey


Jennifer A. Hanson - 2011
    Foreword by Steve Dudley, Executive Director of the Continental Divide Trail Alliance.An avid outsoorswoman, West Point graduate and former Captain in the U.S. Army, Jennifer Hanson - with her husband Greg Allen - set off to thru-hike the 2,400-mile Continental Divide Trail. Together they traversed:* Arid ranchlands of New Mexico* Snow-capped mountains of Colorado* Red Desert of Wyoming* Glacier National Park of MontanaDuring their hike, Jennifer learned that she had lost her father to cancer, and, within three weeks, her husband was forced to leave the trail due to an injured nerve in his foot. Jennifer finished the last nine hundred miles of the trail - alone.Hiking the Continental Divide Trail: One Woman's Journey is the story of their incredible summer and is filled with courage, humor, stunning scenery, local personalities and the simple joys of backpacking. In addition, it is an invaluable resource for those planning their own section- or thru-hike of the CDT. Appendixes include:* Thru-hike Preparation and Timeline* Equipment and Clothing List* Food List* Itinerary and Supply Points* Map List and Sources* Complete Index