She chaperoned baby sea turtles on their journey to sea. She pursued bad guys on her galloping patrol horse. She jumped into rescue helicopters bound for the heart of the Grand Canyon. She won arguments with bears. She slept with a few too many rattlesnakes. Hell yeah, it was the best job in the world! Fortunately, Andrea survived it. In this graphic and yet surprisingly funny account of her and others’ extraordinary careers, Lankford unveils a world in which park rangers struggle to maintain their idealism in the face of death, disillusionment, and the loss of a comrade killed while holding that thin green line between protecting the park from the people, the people from the park, and the people from each other. Ranger Confidential is the story behind the scenery of the nation’s crown jewels—Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Great Smokies, Denali. In these iconic landscapes, where nature and humanity constantly collide, scenery can be as cruel as it is redemptive.

    Macfarlane is both a mountaineer and a scholar. Consequently we get more than just a chronicle of climbs. He interweaves accounts of his own adventurous ascents with those of pioneers such as George Mallory, and in with an erudite discussion of how mountains became such a preoccupation for the modern western imagination. The book is organised around a series of features of mountaineering--glaciers, summits, unknown ranges--and each chapter explores the scientific, artistic and cultural discoveries and fashions that accompanied exploration. The contributions of assorted geologists, romantic poets, landscape artists, entrepreneurs, gallant amateurs and military cartographers are described with perceptive clarity. The book climaxes with an account of Mallory's fateful ascent on Everest in 1924, one of the most famous instances of an obsessive pursuit. Macfarlane is well-placed to describe it since it is one he shares. MacFarlane's own stories of perilous treks and assaults in the Alps, the Cairngorms and the Tian Shan mountains between China and Kazakhstan are compelling. Readers who enjoyed Francis Spufford's masterly I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination will enjoy Mountains of the Mind. This is a slighter volume than Spufford's and it loses in depth what it gains in range, but for an insight into the moody, male world of mountaineering past and present it is invaluable. --Miles Taylor

    With a tremendous cracking and splintering of oak, it struck the ship just beneath the anchor secured at the cat-head on the port bow..." In the Heart of the Sea brings to new life the incredible story of the wreck of the whaleship Essex - an event as mythic in its own century as the Titanic disaster in ours, and the inspiration for the climax of Moby-Dick. In a harrowing page-turner, Nathaniel Philbrick restores this epic story to its rightful place in American history.In 1820, the 240-ton Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage for whales. Fifteen months later, in the farthest reaches of the South Pacific, it was repeatedly rammed and sunk by an eighty-ton bull sperm whale. Its twenty-man crew, fearing cannibals on the islands to the west, made for the 3,000-mile-distant coast of South America in three tiny boats. During ninety days at sea under horrendous conditions, the survivors clung to life as one by one, they succumbed to hunger, thirst, disease, and fear.Philbrick interweaves his account of this extraordinary ordeal of ordinary men with a wealth of whale lore and with a brilliantly detailed portrait of the lost, unique community of Nantucket whalers. Impeccably researched and beautifully told, the book delivers the ultimate portrait of man against nature, drawing on a remarkable range of archival and modern sources, including a long-lost account by the ship's cabin boy.At once a literary companion and a page-turner that speaks to the same issues of class, race, and man's relationship to nature that permeate the works of Melville, In the Heart of the Sea will endure as a vital work of American history.

    They chased away bears, marveled at giant eagles, stalked moose, and discovered a greater under-standing of family and nature. “A wonderful, addictive love song to the Alaskan wilderness.”—Charles Rangeley-Wilson, author of Silver Shoals and The Silt Road “A poet with an axe, a teacher on a river, forever learning and sharing.”—Kim Heacox, author of Jimmy Bluefeather and The Only Kayak “A tale of decades spent learning, enjoying and sharing a rare gift.”—Howard Weaver, writer and editor at the Anchorage Daily News, where he worked on both of the paper’s two Pulitzer Prize winning series “A soulful story of teacher turned student; a man bent on immersing himself in wilderness ways.”—Debra McKinney, author of Beyond the Bear “Belongs on the shelf of anyone contemplating finding their own version of the Alaska Dream.”—Tom Walker, author of Wild Shots: A Photographer’s Life in Alaska and We Live in the Alaskan Bush Eric Wade found the perfect place in the vast wilderness of interior Alaska to move his family. He climbed the river bank to walk on the firm forest floor. He wove through the trees, brushed aside rose bushes, and kicked the ground like checking a tire. The land spread before him with majestic white spruce and views of a sparkling clearwater river. His family would grow to love the landscape as much as he did . . . but over time, his dream changed, as did the land itself.

    After 30 years, Bou Meng has largely moved beyond the need for personal revenge.

    Only five survived.Journalist Andy Hall, son of the park superintendent at the time, investigates the tragedy. He spent years tracking down survivors, lost documents, and recordings of radio communications. In Denali’s Howl, Hall reveals the full story of an expedition facing conditions conclusively established here for the first time: At an elevation of nearly 20,000 feet, these young men endured an “arctic super blizzard,” with howling winds of up to 300 miles an hour and wind chill that freezes flesh solid in minutes. All this without the high-tech gear and equipment climbers use today.As well as the story of the men caught inside the storm, Denali’s Howl is the story of those caught outside it trying to save them—Hall’s father among them. The book gives readers a detailed look at the culture of climbing then and now and raises uncomfortable questions about each player in this tragedy. Was enough done to rescue the climbers, or were their fates sealed when they ascended into the path of this unprecedented storm?

    Mesmerized by the intelligence, character, and even humor of the great animals who hauled logs through the remote jungles, he became a gifted “elephant wallah.” Increasingly skilled at treating their illnesses and injuries, he also championed more humane treatment for them, even establishing an elephant “school” and “hospital.” In return, he said, the elephants made him a better man. The friendship of one magnificent tusker in particular, Bandoola, would be revelatory. In Elephant Company, Vicki Constantine Croke chronicles Williams’s growing love for elephants as the animals provide him lessons in courage, trust, and gratitude.   But Elephant Company is also a tale of war and daring. When Imperial Japanese forces invaded Burma in 1942, Williams joined the elite Force 136, the British dirty tricks department, operating behind enemy lines. His war elephants would carry supplies, build bridges, and transport the sick and elderly over treacherous mountain terrain. Now well versed in the ways of the jungle, an older, wiser Williams even added to his stable by smuggling more elephants out of Japanese-held territory. As the occupying authorities put a price on his head, Williams and his elephants faced his most perilous test. In a Hollywood-worthy climax, Elephant Company, cornered by the enemy, attempted a desperate escape: a risky trek over the mountainous border to India, with a bedraggled group of refugees in tow. Elephant Bill’s exploits would earn him top military honors and the praise of famed Field Marshal Sir William Slim.

    Half-poet and half-geologist, he recorded his experiences and reflections in Travels in Alaska, a work he was in the process of completing at the time of his death in 1914. As Edward Hoagland writes in his Introduction, “A century and a quarter later, we are reading [Muir’s] account because there in the glorious fiords . . . he is at our elbow, nudging us along, prompting us to understand that heaven is on earth—is the Earth—and rapture is the sensible response wherever a clear line of sight remains.”This Modern Library Paperback Classic includes photographs from the original 1915 edition.

    When he turned 50 he gave himself the birthday present to end all others--a trip to the end of the Earth to run his most unforgettable race.            The Coolest Race on Earth is both Hanc’s story and the story of the Antarctica Marathon, first held in 1995 and now an annual event that sells out years in advance. It’s full of humor, adventure, and inspiring characters--including a wheelchair-bound competitor, three record-breaking grandmothers, and an ex-Marine who described the race as “the hardest thing I ever did in my life, next to Vietnam.”            Muddy, cold, hilly, the race is by all accounts horrible--up and down a melting glacier twice, past curious penguins and hostile skuas, and finally to a bleak finish line. Even the best runners take longer to run the Antarctica Marathon than any other.            Yet the allure of marathon running combined with the fascinating reputation of the Last Continent has persuaded runners to brave a trip across the world’s most turbulent body of water, the Drake Passage, to a land of extinct volcanoes and craggy mountain peaks, lost explorers and isolated scientists, penguin rookeries and whale sightings, all for a chance to run those crazy 26.2 miles. The Coolest Race on Earth brings the world’s most difficult marathon to life in a book that’s not only a ripping read, but also a deeply funny meditation on what makes people run.

    When all was said and done, Gilbert Joseph Bland, Jr., had become the Al Capone of cartography. 20 illustrations throughout.

    A wilderness activist and apostate Mormon, Amy Irvine sought respite in the desert outback of southern Utah's red-rock country after her father's suicide, only to find out just how much of an interloper she was among her own people. But more than simply an exploration of personal loss, Trespass is an elegy for a dying world, for the ruin of one of our most beloved and unique desert landscapes and for our vanishing connection to it. Fearing what her father's fate might somehow portend for her, Irvine retreated into the remote recesses of the Colorado Plateau--home not only to the world's most renowned national parks but also to a rugged brand of cowboy Mormonism that stands in defiant contrast to the world at large. Her story is one of ruin and restoration, of learning to live among people who fear the wilderness the way they fear the devil and how that fear fuels an antagonism toward environmental concerns that pervades the region. At the same time, Irvine mourns her own loss of wildness and disconnection from spirituality, while ultimately discovering that the provinces of nature and faith are not as distinct as she once might have believed.

    Not only is it a fascinating insight into the life and customs of traveller people in the 1920s and 1930s, it is also a thought-provoking account of human strength and weakness, courage and cowardice, understanding and prejudice by a sensitive and entertaining writer.

    Yet, the one constant in the history of the Apache People is their constant struggle to survive in a world where they are surrounded by various enemies, including other Indian tribes, the Mexicans and finally their brutal nemesis the United States Army. Attacked, tricked, lied to and double crossed by all of those who surround and outnumber them, the Apache people continued their struggle until they were for all intent and purposes almost totally wiped out. One Apache’s name stands out in their brave yet woeful history and it is Geronimo, who at age 30 witnessed the massacre of his mother, wife and two young children.I’ve taken his recollections or accounts of the struggle of the Apache people and intertwined them with some archeological facts about this extraordinary tribe. In addition, I have searched and included some of the best photos of Apaches from that era, which I collected from Library of Congress Archives. What impressed me most about Geronimo was his brevity of words, yet his ability to take a knife to the heart of anyone who reads his verbal history. Like most Apaches, Geronimo said little, but what he did say was profound and truthful. But most powerful is what Geronimo didn’t say in his recollections. It is between this silence one can feel the pain, sorrow, pride and bravery of the Apache People. Chet DembeckPublisher of One

    This book traces the course of the river through four centuries, recounting the stories of explorers and traders, artists and writers, entrepreneurs and industrialists, ecologists and preservationists—those who have been shaped by the river as well as those who have helped shape it. Their compelling narratives attest to the Hudson River’s distinctive place in American history and the American imagination. Among those who have figured in the history of the Hudson are Benedict Arnold, Alexander Hamilton, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, the Astors and the Vanderbilts, and Thomas Cole of the Hudson River school. Their stories appear here, alongside those of such less famous individuals as the surveyor who found the source of the Hudson and the engineer who tried to build a hydroelectric plant at Storm King Mountain. Inviting us to view the river from a wider perspective than ever before, this entertaining and enlightening book is worthy of its grand subject.

    Traversing the country, he encounters a pompous Western businessman swindling his way to millions, a local vendor with a flair for painting nudes, and long ago legends of a western circus. Sensitively written and expertly researched, Greetings from Myanmar: Exploring the Price of Progress in One of the Last Countries on Earth to Open for Business is the story of a flourishing nation still very much in limbo and an answer to the hard questions that arise when tourism not only charts, but shapes a place as well.