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After he was handed an old broken-down bamboo fly rod, Frank Soos waited several years before he cautiously undertook its restoration. That painstaking enterprise becomes the central metaphor and the unifying theme for the captivating personal essays presented here.
With sly wit and disarming candor, Soos recounts fly-fishing adventures that become points of departure for wide-ranging ruminations on the larger questions that haunt him. Coming to...
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Pandora's Garden profiles invasive or unwanted species in the natural world and examines how our treatment of these creatures sometimes parallels in surprising ways how we treat each other. Part essay, part nature writing, part narrative nonfiction, the chapters in Pandora's Garden are like the biospheres of the globe; as the successive chapters unfold, they blend together like ecotones, creating a microcosm of the world in which we sustain nonhuman...
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Charles Darwin (1809-82) changed the world forever with the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Charles Darwin: A Celebration of His Life and Legacy is an anthology of critical writings that grew out of a lecture series, hosted by Auburn University, held on the occasion of the two hundredth anniversary of Darwin's birth and the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the first edition of his most famous book. Ideas...
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With Let Us Build Us a City Tracy Daugherty considers the principles of literary art in a series of essays that focus on the nature of artistic vision and the creative individual's relationship to the world. The book reads like a master class on writing as practice, while performing a deep reading of art and life and looking to discern why liberal education matters so much to our society.
At its core, Let Us Build Us a City is a work of cultural...
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After Dale Short moved away (reluctantly) from his hometown of Shanghi [sic] in Walker County, Alabama, he wrote home every week -- by means of a newspaper column in The Daily Mountain Eagle, where he held his first writing job in the late 1960s. The columns -- a homesick country boy's reflections on the comforts, conflicts, and absurdities of living in the modern world -- have become a consistent favorite of Walker County readers, and have been honored...
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In The Art of Touch: Prose and Poetry from the Pandemic and Beyond, the unique voices of thirty-nine of some of the most creative thinkers of our times have been brought together to consider the profound impact of one of our five main senses: touch.
Psychologists, healers, massage therapists, academics, creative writers, and others reflect on or tell personal stories about what it means to be able to touch or experience touch, or to have to go without...
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Bioregionalism is an innovative way of thinking about place and planet from an ecological perspective. Although bioregional ideas occur regularly in ecocritical writing, until now no systematic effort has been made to outline the principles of bioregional literary criticism and to use it as a way to read, write, understand, and teach literature.
The twenty-four original essays here are written by an outstanding selection of international scholars....
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The Long Devotion is a collection of poems, essays, and writing prompts that celebrates motherhood and creates a space, as poet Molly Spencer has written, to "tell an unlovely truth about family life and not have to take it back."
The poets in this book represent and describe a wide range of experiences. They write about encountering the world anew through their children; intersections of parenting and race; single parenting; adoptive, foster,...
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At age fifty, when many hope to slow down, and what's left, as the poet Kobayashi Issa once wrote, is "clear profit," John Griswold was starting over, again, in a position he had worked decades to achieve. His family moved down the Mississippi Valley, expecting to create a good life with new friends.
What they found instead was a society "organized tightly by race, church attendance, and family name," which in its corruption, laissez-faire corporatism,...
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The technology boom of recent years has given kids numerous reasons to stay inside and play, while parents' increasing safety concerns make it tempting to keep children close to home. But what is being lost as fewer kids spend their free time outdoors? Deprived of meaningful contact with nature, children often fail to develop a significant relationship with the natural world, much less a sense of reverence and respect for the world outside their doors....
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A seventy-year-old Northwestern journalism professor, Loren Ghiglione, and two twenty-something Northwestern journalism students, Alyssa Karas and Dan Tham, climbed into a minivan and embarked on a three-month, twenty-eight state, 14,063-mile road trip in search of America's identity. After interviewing 150 Americans about contemporary identity issues, they wrote this book, which is part oral history, part shoe-leather reporting, part search for America's...
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Music, said Zen patriarch Hui Neng, "is a means of rapid transformation." It takes us home to a natural world that functions outside of logic, where harmony and dissonance, tension and release work in surprising ways. Weaving memoir, travelogue, and philosophical reflection, Sudden Music presents a musical way of knowing that can closely engage us with the world and open us to its spontaneity.
Improvisation is everywhere, says David Rothenberg,...
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Barbara Hurd's Listening to the Savage weaves rich explorations of science, history, mythology, literature, and music. The listening of the book delineates and champions a kind of attentiveness to what is not easily heard and is written in language that is as precise as it is poetic, providing original ways of engagement in the natural world.
As in Hurd's other books, the previously unknown or the barely known become less mysterious but still retain...
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The questions that drive Priscilla Long's Fire and Stone are the questions asked by the painter Paul Gauguin in the title of his 1897 painting: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? These questions look beyond everyday trivialities to ponder the essence of our origins.
Using her own story as a touchstone, Long explores our human roots and how they shape who we are today. Her personal history encompasses childhood as an identical...
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In The Small Heart of Things, Julian Hoffman intimately examines the myriad ways in which connections to the natural world can be deepened through an equality of perception, whether it's a caterpillar carrying its house of leaves, transhumant shepherds ranging high mountain pastures, a quail taking cover on an empty steppe, or a Turkmen family emigrating from Afghanistan to Istanbul. The narrative spans the common-and often contested-ground that supports...
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Waveform celebrates the role of women essayists in contemporary literature. Historically, women have been instrumental in moving the essay to center stage, and Waveform continues this rich tradition, further expanding the dynamic genre's boundaries and testing its edges. With thirty essays by thirty distinguished and diverse women writers, this carefully constructed anthology incorporates works ranging from the traditional to the experimental.
Waveform...
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Learning from Thoreau is an intimate intellectual walk with America's most edgy and original environmentalist. The thrust of the book consists not in learning "about" Thoreau from an intermediary but, as the title suggests, in learning "from" Thoreau along with the author-whose lifelong engagement with this "genius of the natural world" leads him to examine the process of learning from an admired model.
Using both images and text, Andrew Menard...
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New to living and gardening in Philadelphia, Sharon White begins a journey through the landscape of the city, past and present, in Vanished Gardens. In prose now as precise and considered as the paths in a parterre, now as flowing and lyrical as an Olmsted vista, White explores Philadelphia's gardens as a part of the city's ecosystem and animates the lives of individual gardeners and naturalists working in the area around her home.
In one section...
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Uprooting ourselves and putting down roots elsewhere has become second nature. Americans are among the most mobile people on the planet, moving house an average of nine times in adulthood. Mobile Home explores one family's extreme and often international version of this common experience. Inspired by Megan Harlan's globe-wandering childhood-during which she lived in seventeen homes across four continents, ranging in location from the Alaskan tundra...
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With its thirty-three essays, This Impermanent Earth charts the course of the American literary response to the twentieth century's accumulation of environmental deprivations. Arranged chronologically from 1974 to the present, the works have been called from The Georgia Review, long considered an important venue for nonfiction among literary magazines published in the United States.
The essays range in subject matter from twentieth-century examples...
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