Encounters with the Archdruid


John McPhee - 1971
    The four men portrayed here have different relationships to their environment, and they encounter each other on mountain trails, in forests and rapids, sometimes with reserve, sometimes with friendliness, sometimes fighting hard across a philosophical divide.

Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools


Jonathan Kozol - 1991
    National Book Award-winning author Jonathan Kozol presents his shocking account of the American educational system in this stunning "New York Times" bestseller, which has sold more than 250,000 hardcover copies."An impassioned book, laced with anger and indignation, about how our public education system scorns so many of our children." -- New York Times Book Review

Cascade Summer: My Adventure on Oregon's Pacific Crest Trail


Bob Welch - 2012
    To reconnect with his past. And to better understand the 19th-century Cascade Range advocate John Waldo, the state's answer to California's naturalist John Muir. Despite great expectations, near trails end Welch finds himself facing an unlikely challenge. Laughs. Blisters. And new friends from literally around the world-his PCT adventure offered it all. But he never foresaw the bittersweet ending.

On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape


Jared Farmer - 2008
    Timpanogos beckons the urban populace of utah. And yet no 'Indian' legend graced the mount until Mormon settlers conjured it - once they had displaced the native Indians from their actual landmark, Utah lake. This study looks at this curious shift.

Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest


Richard K. Nelson - 1986
    His chronicle of that visit represents a thorough and elegant account of the mystical connection between Native Americans and the natural world."—Outside "This admirable reflection on the natural history of the Koyukon River drainage in Alaska is founded on knowledge the author gained as a student of the Koyukon culture, indigenous to that region. He presents these Athapascan views of the land—principally of its animals and Koyukon relationships with those creatures—together with a measured account of his own experiences and doubts. . . . For someone in search of a native American expression of 'ecology' and natural history, I can think of no better place to begin than with this work."—Barry Lopez, Orion Nature  Quarterly "Far from being a romantic attempt to pass on the spiritual lore of Native Americans for a quick fix by others, this is a very serious ethnographic study of some Alaskan Indians in the Northern Forest area. . . . He has painstakingly regarded their views of earth, sky, water, mammals and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. He does admire their love of nature and spirit. Those who see the world through his eyes using their eyes will likely come away with new respect for the boreal forest and those who live with it and in it, not against it."—The Christian Century "In Make Prayers to the Raven Nelson reveals to us the Koyukon beliefs and attitudes toward the fauna that surround them in their forested habitat close to the lower Yukon. . . . Nelson's presentation also gives rich insights into the Koyukon subsistence cycle through the year and into the hardships of life in this northern region. The book is written with both brain and heart. . . . This book represents a landmark: never before has the integration of American Indians with their environment been so well spelled out."—Ake Hultkrantz, Journal of Forest History

The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull


Robert M. Utley - 1993
    By the author of The Last Days of the Sioux. 35,000 first printing. $35,000 ad/promo. History Bk Club Main. BOMC. QPB.

The Popol Vuh


Anonymous
    Then come the twin heroes Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Wielding blowguns, they begin a journey to hell and back, ready to confront the folly of false deities as well as death itself, in service to the world and to humanity.This is the story of the Mayan Popol Vuh, "the book of the woven mat," one of the only epics indigenous to the Americas. Originally sung and chanted, before being translated into prose--and now, for the first time, translated back into verse by Michael Bazzett--this is a story of the generative power of language. A story that asks not only Where did you come from? but How might you live again? A story that, for the first time in English, lives fully as "the phonetic rendering of a living pulse."

No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith


Fawn M. Brodie - 1945
    Was he a genuine prophet, or a gifted fabulist who became enthralled by the products of his imagination and ended up being martyred for them? 24 pages of photos. Map.

The North American Indian: The Complete Portfolios


Edward S. Curtis - 1972
    The photographs are accompanied by a selection of Curtis's texts.

City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago


Gary Krist - 2012
    Modernizers had an audacious, expensive plan to turn the city from a brawling, unglamorous place into "the Metropolis of the World." But just as the dream seemed within reach, pandemonium broke loose and the city's highest ambitions were suddenly under attack by the same unbridled energies that had given birth to them in the first place.It began on a balmy Monday afternoon when a blimp in flames crashed through the roof of a busy downtown bank, incinerating those inside. Within days, a racial incident at a hot, crowded South Side beach spiraled into one of the worst urban riots in American history, followed by a transit strike that paralyzed the city. Then, when it seemed as if things could get no worse, police searching for a six-year-old girl discovered her body in a dark North Side basement.Meticulously researched and expertly paced, City of Scoundrels captures the tumultuous birth of the modern American city, with all of its light and dark aspects in vivid relief.

The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan


Rafia Zakaria - 2015
    Benazir Bhutto, the country’s former prime minister and the first woman ever to lead a Muslim country, had been assassinated at a political rally just outside Islamabad. Back in Karachi—Bhutto’s birthplace and Pakistan’s other great metropolis—Rafia Zakaria’s family was suffering through a crisis of its own: her Uncle Sohail, the man who had brought shame upon the family, was near death. In that moment these twin catastrophes—one political and public, the other secret and intensely personal—briefly converged.    Zakaria uses that moment to begin her intimate exploration of the country of her birth. Her Muslim-Indian family immigrated to Pakistan from Bombay in 1962, escaping the precarious state in which the Muslim population in India found itself following the Partition. For them, Pakistan represented enormous promise. And for some time, Zakaria’s family prospered and the city prospered. But in the 1980s, Pakistan’s military dictators began an Islamization campaign designed to legitimate their rule—a campaign that particularly affected women’s freedom and safety. The political became personal when her aunt Amina’s husband, Sohail, did the unthinkable and took a second wife, a humiliating and painful betrayal of kin and custom that shook the foundation of Zakaria’s family but was permitted under the country’s new laws. The young Rafia grows up in the shadow of Amina’s shame and fury, while the world outside her home turns ever more chaotic and violent as the opportunities available to post-Partition immigrants are dramatically curtailed and terrorism sows its seeds in Karachi.   Telling the parallel stories of Amina’s polygamous marriage and Pakistan’s hopes and betrayals, The Upstairs Wife is an intimate exploration of the disjunction between exalted dreams and complicated realities.

What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia


Elizabeth Catte - 2018
    Journalists flocked to the region to extract sympathetic profiles of families devastated by poverty, abandoned by establishment politics, and eager to consume cheap campaign promises. What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia is a frank assessment of America’s recent fascination with the people and problems of the region. The book analyzes trends in contemporary writing on Appalachia, presents a brief history of Appalachia with an eye toward unpacking Appalachian stereotypes, and provides examples of writing, art, and policy created by Appalachians as opposed to for Appalachians. The book offers a must-needed insider’s perspective on the region.

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.

The Most Defining Moments in Black History According to Dick Gregory


Dick Gregory - 2017
    Martin Luther King, Jr. and Medgar Evers, and the forebear of today’s popular black comics, including Larry Wilmore, W. Kamau Bell, Damon Young, and Trevor Noah, Dick Gregory has been a provocative and incisive cultural force for more than fifty years. As an entertainer, he has always kept it indisputably real about race issues in America, fearlessly lacing laughter with hard truths. As a leading activist against injustice, he marched at Selma during the Civil Rights movement, organized student rallies to protest the Vietnam War; sat in at rallies for Native American and feminist rights; fought apartheid in South Africa; and participated in hunger strikes in support of Black Lives Matter.In this collection of thoughtful, provocative essays, Gregory charts the complex and often obscured history of the African American experience. In his unapologetically candid voice, he moves from African ancestry and surviving the Middle Passage to the creation of the Jheri Curl, the enjoyment of bacon and everything pig, the headline-making shootings of black men, and the Black Lives Matter movement. A captivating journey through time, The Most Defining Moments in Black History According to Dick Gregory explores historical movements such as The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance, as well as cultural touchstones such as Sidney Poitier winning the Best Actor Oscar for Lilies in the Field and Billie Holiday releasing Strange Fruit.An engaging look at black life that offers insightful commentary on the intricate history of the African American people, The Most Defining Moments in Black History According to Dick Gregory is an essential, no-holds-bar history lesson that will provoke, enlighten, and entertain.

Joseph Smith's Kirtland: Eyewitness Accounts


Karl Ricks Anderson - 1989
    Anderson. 1996, Deseret Book.