Search results for ""Author Terry Tempest Williams""

A new edition of an exquisitely crafted homage to the Massachusetts coast In this new edition of Between Land and Sea: The Great Marsh (first published by Braziller in 2007), the award-winning, Ipswich, MA–based landscape photographer Dorothy Kerper Monnelly conveys the surprising, ever-changing drama of the vast tidal wetlands known as the Great Marsh. For over 40 years, Monnelly has come to know this region intimately, one of the last unspoiled wilderness areas in the urban Northeast. Her timeless, visionary photographs are joined in this edition by an essay from acclaimed author Terry Tempest Williams reflecting on our relationship to liminal spaces like the marsh. Although salt marshes are among the most productive ecosystems on earth, these wetlands are threatened throughout the world by human activity and have disappeared from much of the American seacoast. The Great Marsh, despite threats from development, pollution, and now rising seas, is a pristine remnant of this ancient coastal environment.

Read more less

"I am leaving you all my journals, but you must promise me you won't look at them until after I'm gone." This is what Terry Tempest Williams' mother, the matriarch of a large Mormon clan in northern Utah, told her a week before she died. It was a shock to Williams to discover that her mother had kept journals. But not as much of a shock to discover that the three shelves of journals were all blank. In fifty-four short chapters, Williams recounts memories of her mother, ponders her own Mormon faith, and contemplates the notion of absence in art and in our world. When "Women Were Birds" is a carefully crafted kaleidoscope that keeps turning around the question: What does it mean to have a voice?

Read more less

A stunning portrait of the nocturnal moths of Central and South America by famed American photographer Emmet Gowin American photographer Emmet Gowin (b. 1941) is best known for his portraits of his wife, Edith, and their family, as well as for his images documenting the impact of human activity upon landscapes around the world. For the past fifteen years, he has been engaged in an equally profound project on a different scale, capturing the exquisite beauty of more than one thousand species of nocturnal moths in Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, French Guiana, and Panama. These stunning color portraits present the insects--many of which may never have been photographed as living specimens before, and some of which may not be seen again--arrayed in typologies of twenty-five per sheet. The moths are photographed alive, in natural positions and postures, and set against a variety of backgrounds taken from the natural world and images from art history. Throughout Gowin's distinguished career, his work has addressed urgent concerns. The arresting images of Mariposas Nocturnas extend this reach, as Gowin fosters awareness for a part of nature that is generally left unobserved and calls for a greater awareness of the biodiversity and value of the tropics as a universally shared natural treasure. An essay by Gowin provides a fascinating personal history of his work with biologists and introduces both the photographic and philosophical processes behind this extraordinary project. Essential reading for audiences both in photography and natural history, this lavishly illustrated volume reminds readers that, as Terry Tempest Williams writes in her foreword, "The world is saturated with loveliness, inhabited by others far more adept at living with uncertainty than we are."

Read more less

“On a bend, I will see it, a piece of ground off to the side. I will know the feel of this place: the leaves stir slowly on the trees, dry air smells like dust, birds dart and the trails are made by beasts living free.”When award-winning author Charles Bowden died in 2014, he left behind a trove of unpublished manuscripts. Dakotah marks the landmark publication of the first of these texts, and the fourth installment in his acclaimed “Unnatural History of America.” Bowden uses America’s Great Plains as a lens—sometimes sullied, sometimes shattered, but always sharp—for observing pivotal moments in the lives of anguished figures, including himself.In scenes that are by turns wrenching and poetic, Bowden describes the Sioux’s forced migrations and rebellions alongside his own ancestors’ migrations from Europe to Midwestern acres beset by unforgiving winters. He meditates on the lives of his resourceful mother and his philosophical father, who rambled between farm communities and city life. Interspersed with these images are clear-eyed, textbook-defying anecdotes about Lewis and Clark, Daniel Boone, and, with equal verve, twentieth-century entertainers “Pee Wee” Russell, Peggy Lee, and other musicians. The result is a kaleidoscopic journey that penetrates the senses and redefines the notion of heartland. Dakotah is a powerful ode to loss from one of our most fiercely independent writers.

Read more less

This volume of John Muir's selected writings chronicles the key turning points in his life and study of the American wilderness. The Story of My Boyhood and Youth is Muir's account of his childhood on a Wisconsin farm, where his interest in nature was first piqued; in The Mountains of California, The Yosemite, and Travels in Alaska we follow him on long journeys into stunning mountain ranges and valleys, where he records native flora and fauna and finds proof of his theories of the effect of glaciers on landscape formation. These four full-length works--along with a selection of important essays also included here--helped galvanize American naturalists, leading to the founding of the Sierra Club and several national parks. In these pages, written with meticulous thoroughness and an impassioned lyricism, we witness Muir's awakening to the incredible beauty of our planet, and the honing of an eye turned as acutely toward the scientific as the spiritual.

Read more less

“But hell, I do like to write letters. Much easier than writing books.” And write letters Edward Abbey—“the Thoreau of the American West” (Washington Post)—did. At once incendiary and insightful, cantankerous and profoundly perceptive, Abbey was a singular American writer and cult hero, as famous for books like Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang as he was infamous for the persona of “Cactus Ed.” A true iconoclast with a rich sense of humor, his polemics and salvos—Wallace Stegner once likened Abbey to the “stinger of a scorpion”—were not limited to any one arena. Abbey’s postcards and letters, legendary during his lifetime, convey the fullness of the man and reveal, along with his wisdom and savage wit, a tender side seldom seen before. For readers new to Abbey, this collection is an awe-inspiring introduction to the man and his works. And for devoted fans, the letters chronicle his evolution as an authentic American voice in the wilderness.

Read more less