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Best Nature Books of All Time

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Best Nature Books of All Time includes Walden and Civil Disobedience, The Voyage of the Beagle, The Origin of Species, Desert Solitaire, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There.

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Walden and Civil Disobedience

by: Henry David Thoreau, W.S. Merwin, William Howarth
Walden and Civil Disobedience
Title: Walden; or Life in the Woods.Publisher: British Library, Historical Print EditionsThe British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It is one of the world's largest research libraries holding over 150 million items in all known languages and formats: books, journals, newspapers, sound recordings, patents, maps, stamps, prints and much more. Its collections include around 14 million books, along with substantial additional collections of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 300 BC.The GENERAL HISTORICAL collection includes books from the British Library digitised by Microsoft. This varied collection includes material that gives readers a 19th century view of the world. Topics include health, education, economics, agriculture, environment, technology, culture, politics, labour and industry, mining, penal policy, and social order. ++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library Thoreau, Henry David; 1854. 8 . 10410.aaa.32.

The Voyage of the Beagle

by: Charles Darwin
The Voyage of the Beagle

Enjoy the best-selling memoir of Charles Darwin's journey of discovery aboard the HMS Beagle--now fully illustrated for the first time.

The Voyage of the Beagle is Darwin's fascinating account of his groundbreaking sea voyage that led to his writing On the Origin of Species.

When the HMS Beagle sailed out of Devonport on December 27, 1831, Charles Darwin was only twenty-two and setting off on the voyage of a lifetime. His journal reveals him to be a naturalist making patient observations concerning geology and natural history as well as people, places, and events. He witnessed and visited volcanoes in the Galapagos, saw the Gossamer spider of Patagonia, sailed through the Australasian coral reefs, and recorded the brilliance of the firefly--these recollections are found in these extraordinary writings. The insights made on the five-year voyage set in motion the intellectual currents that led to the most controversial book of the Victorian age: On the Origin of Species. An introduction on the background to Darwin's work, as well as notes, maps, appendices, and an essay on scientific geology and the Bible by Robert FitzRoy, Darwin's friend and captain of the Beagle, provide context for this incredible story.

This volume is the first fully illustrated edition of Darwin's journal and includes excerpts of On the Origin of Species so the reader can connect the author's journey with his discovery that made him famous.

The Origin of Species

by: Charles Darwin, Julian Huxley
The Origin of Species
The classic that exploded into public controversy, revolutionized the course of science, and continues to transform our views of the world.

Desert Solitaire

by: Edward Abbey
Desert Solitaire
Hailed by The New York Times as a passionately felt, deeply poetic book, the moving autobiographical work of Edward Abbey, considered the Thoreau of the American West, and his passion for the southwestern wilderness.
Desert Solitaire is a collection of vignettes about life in the wilderness and the nature of the desert itself by park ranger and conservationist, Edward Abbey. The book details the unique adventures and conflicts the author faces, from dealing with the damage caused by development of the land or excessive tourism, to discovering a dead body. However Desert Solitaire is not just a collection of one man s stories, the book is also a philosophical memoir, full of Abbey s reflections on the desert as a paradox, at once beautiful and liberating, but also isolating and cruel. Often compared to Thoreau s Walden, Desert Solitaire is a powerful discussion of life s mysteries set against the stirring backdrop of the American southwestern wilderness.

A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

by: Aldo Leopold, Charles W. Schwartz
A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
First published in 1949 and praised in The New York Times Book Review as "a trenchant book, full of vigor and bite," A Sand County Almanac combines some of the finest nature writing since Thoreau with an outspoken and highly ethical regard for America's relationship to the land.

Written with an unparalleled understanding of the ways of nature, the book includes a section on the monthly changes of the Wisconsin countryside; another part that gathers informal pieces written by Leopold over a forty-year period as he traveled through the woodlands of Wisconsin, Iowa, Arizona, Sonora, Oregon, Manitoba, and elsewhere; and a final section in which Leopold addresses the philosophical issues involved in wildlife conservation. As the forerunner of such important books as Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, and Robert Finch's The Primal Place, this classic work remains as relevant today as it was forty years ago.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

by: Annie Dillard
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia's Roanoke Valley. Annie Dillard sets out to see what she can see. What she sees are astonishing incidents of "beauty tangled in a rapture with violence."

Her personal narrative highlights one year's exploration on foot in the Virginia region through which Tinker Creek runs. In the summer, Dillard stalks muskrats in the creek and contemplates wave mechanics; in the fall, she watches a monarch butterfly migration and dreams of Arctic caribou. She tries to con a coot; she collects pond water and examines it under a microscope. She unties a snake skin, witnesses a flood, and plays King of the Meadow with a field of grasshoppers. The result is an exhilarating tale of nature and its seasons.

The Snow Leopard

by: Peter Matthiessen, Pico Iyer
The Snow Leopard
An unforgettable spiritual journey through the Himalayas by renowned writer Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014), the National Book Award-winning author of the new novel In Paradise

In 1973, Peter Matthiessen and field biologist George Schaller traveled high into the remote mountains of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and possibly glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard. Matthiessen, a student of Zen Buddhism, was also on a spiritual quest to find the Lama of Shey at the ancient shrine on Crystal Mountain. As the climb proceeds, Matthiessen charts his inner path as well as his outer one, with a deepening Buddhist understanding of reality, suffering, impermanence, and beauty. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by acclaimed travel writer and novelist Pico Iyer.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Bedside Book of Birds

by: Graeme Gibson
The Bedside Book of Birds
In this stunning assemblage of words and images, novelist and avid birdwatcher Graeme Gibson has crafted an extraordinary tribute to the venerable relationship between humans and birds.

Birds have ever been the symbols of our highest aspirations. As divine messengers, symbols of our yearning for the heavens, or avatars of glorious song and colour, they have stirred our imaginations from the moment we first looked into the sky. Whether as the Christian dove, or Quetzalcoatl—the Aztec Plumed Serpent—or in Plato's vision of the human soul growing wings and feathers, religion and philosophy have looked to birds as representatives of our better selves—that part of us not bound to the earth.

With the passion of a birdwatcher and hoarder of words, Gibson has spent fifteen years collecting the literary and artistic forms our affinity for birds has taken over the centuries. Birds appear again and again in mythology and folk tales, and in literature by writers as diverse as Ovid, Thomas Hardy, Kafka, Thoreau and T.S. Eliot. They've been omens, allegories, disguises and guides; they've been worshipped, eaten, feared and loved. Nor does Gibson forget the fascination they hold for science, as the Galapagos finches did for Darwin. Birds figure charmingly and tellingly in the work of such nature writers as Gilbert White, Peter Matthiessen, Farley Mowat and Barry Lopez.

Gorgeously illustrated, woven from centuries of human response to the delights of the feathered tribes, The Bedside Book of Birds is for anyone who is aware of birds, and for everyone who is intrigued by the artistic forms that humanity has created to represent its soul.

From The Bedside Book of Birds ~

Stevenson remembered the story of a monk who had been distracted from his copy-work by the song of a bird. He went into the garden to listen more closely, and when he returned, after what he thought were only a few minutes, he discovered that a century had gone by, that his fellow monks were dead and his ink had turned to dust. The song of the bird had given him a taste of Paradise, where an instant is as a hundred years of earthly time. Was the same true of time in hell, Stevenson asked himself.

Alberto Manguel

The Island Within

by: Richard Nelson
The Island Within
Here is Nelson's luminously wise account of his exploration of an unnamed island in the Pacific Northwest. This book revises our own relationship with nature, allowing us to observe it and also to participate in it with reverence and a sense of wonder.

The Natural History of Selborne

by: Gilbert White, Anne Secord
The Natural History of Selborne
Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne (1789) reveals a world of wonders in nature. Over a period of twenty years White describes in minute detail the behaviour of animals through the changing seasons in the rural Hampshire parish of Selborne. He notes everything from the habits of an eccentric tortoise to the mysteries of bird migration and animal reproduction, with the purpose of inspiring others to observe their own surroundings with the same pleasure and attention.

Written as a series of letters, White's book has all the immediacy and freshness of an exchange with friends, yet it is none the less crafted with compelling literary skill. His gossipy correspondence has delighted readers from Charles Darwin to Virginia Woolf, and it has been read as a nostalgic evocation of a pastoral vision, a model for local studies of plants and animals, and a precursor to modern ecology. This new edition includes contemporary illustrations and an introduction setting the work in its eighteenth-century context, as well as an appendix tracking the remarkable range of responses to the work over the last two hundred years.

The World Without Us

by: Alan Weisman
The World Without Us

Time #1 Nonfiction Book of 2007
Entertainment Weekly #1 Nonfiction Book of 2007
Finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award
Salon Book Awards 2007
Amazon Top 100 Editors' Picks of 2007 (#4)
Barnes and Noble 10 Best of 2007: Politics and Current Affairs
Kansas City Star's Top 100 Books of the Year 2007
Mother Jones' Favorite Books of 2007
South Florida Sun-Sentinel Best Books of the Year 2007
Hudson's Best Books of 2007
St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best Books of 2007
St. Paul Pioneer Press Best Books of 2007

If human beings disappeared instantaneously from the Earth, what would happen? How would the planet reclaim its surface? What creatures would emerge from the dark and swarm? How would our treasured structures--our tunnels, our bridges, our homes, our monuments--survive the unmitigated impact of a planet without our intervention? In his revelatory, bestselling account, Alan Weisman draws on every field of science to present an environmental assessment like no other, the most affecting portrait yet of humankind's place on this planet.

The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

by: Sebastian Junger
The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

There is nothing imaginary about Junger's book; it is all terrifyingly, awesomely real.--Los Angeles Times

It was the storm of the century, boasting waves over one hundred feet high—a tempest created by so rare a combination of factors that meteorologists deemed it "the perfect storm." In a book that has become a classic, Sebastian Junger explores the history of the fishing industry, the science of storms, and the candid accounts of the people whose lives the storm touched. ?The Perfect Storm? is a real-life thriller that makes us feel like we've been caught, helpless, in the grip of a force of nature beyond our understanding or control. 8 pages of illustrations

The Wild Places

by: Robert Macfarlane
The Wild Places
?An eloquent (and compulsively readable) reminder that, though we?re laying waste the world, nature still holds sway over much of the earth?s surface.?
?Bill McKibben

Are there any genuinely wild places left in Britain and Ireland? That is the question that Robert Macfarlane poses to himself as he embarks on a series of breathtaking journeys through some of the archipelago?s most remarkable landscapes. He climbs, walks, and swims by day and spends his nights sleeping on cliff-tops and in ancient meadows and wildwoods. With elegance and passion he entwines history, memory, and landscape in a bewitching evocation of wildness and its vital importance. A unique travelogue that will intrigue readers of natural history and adventure, The Wild Places solidifies Macfarlane?s reputation as a young writer to watch.

Design with Nature

by: Ian L. McHarg
Design with Nature
"In presenting us with a vision of organic exuberance and human delight, which ecology and ecological design promise to open up for us, McHarg revives the hope for a better world." --Lewis Mumford

". . . important to America and all the rest of the world in our struggle to design rational, wholesome, and productive landscapes." --Laurie Olin, Hanna Olin, Ltd.

"This century's most influential landscape architecture book." --Landscape Architecture

". . . an enduring contribution to the technical literature of landscape planning and to that unfortunately small collection of writings which speak with emotional eloquence of the importance of ecological principles in regional planning." --Landscape and Urban Planning

In the twenty-five years since it first took the academic world by storm, Design With Nature has done much to redefine the fields of landscape architecture, urban and regional planning, and ecological design. It has also left a permanent mark on the ongoing discussion of mankind's place in nature and nature's place in mankind within the physical sciences and humanities. Described by one enthusiastic reviewer as a "user's manual for our world," Design With Nature offers a practical blueprint for a new, healthier relationship between the built environment and nature. In so doing, it provides nothing less than the scientific, technical, and philosophical foundations for a mature civilization that will, as Lewis Mumford ecstatically put it in his Introduction to the 1969 edition, "replace the polluted, bulldozed, machine-dominated, dehumanized, explosion-threatened world that is even now disintegrating and disappearing before our eyes."

The Control of Nature

by: John McPhee
The Control of Nature

The Control of Nature is John McPhee's bestselling account of places where people are locked in combat with nature. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strageties and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking is his depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those attempting to wrest control from her - stubborn, sometimes foolhardy, more often ingenious, and always arresting characters.

The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons

by: John Wesley Powell, Wallace Stegner
The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons
One of the great works of American exploration literature, this account of a scientific expedition forced to survive famine, attacks, mutiny, and some of the most dangerous rapids known to man remains as fresh and exciting today as it was in 1874.

The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, recently ranked number four on Adventure magazine's list of top 100 classics, is legendary pioneer John Wesley Powell's first-person account of his crew's unprecedented odyssey along the Green and Colorado Rivers and through the Grand Canyon. A bold foray into the heart of the American West's final frontier, the expedition was achieved without benefit of modern river-running equipment, supplies, or a firm sense of the region's perilous topography and the attitudes of the native inhabitants towards whites.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Encounters with the Archdruid

by: John McPhee, Betty Crumley
Encounters with the Archdruid

The narratives in this book are of journeys made in three wildernesses - on a coastal island, in a Western mountain range, and on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. 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.

Never Cry Wolf

by: Farley Mowat
Never Cry Wolf
Hordes of bloodthirsty wolves are slaughtering the arctic caribou, and the government's Wildlife Service assigns naturalist Farely Mowat to investigate. Mowat is dropped alone onto the frozen tundra, where he begins his mission to live among the howling wolf packs and study their waves. Contact with his quarry comes quickly, and Mowat discovers not a den of marauding killers but a courageous family of skillful providers and devoted protectors of their young. As Mowat comes closer to the wolf world, he comes to fear with them on onslaught of bounty hunters and government exterminators out to erase the noble wolf community from the Arctic. Never Cry Wolf is one of the brilliant narratives on the myth and magical world of wild wolves and man's true place among the creatures of nature. "We have doomed the wolf not for what it is, but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be -- the mythological epitome of a savage, ruthless killer -- which is, in reality, no more than the reflected image of ourself." -- from the new preface to Never Cry Wolf.


From the Paperback edition.

The Call of the Wild

by: Jack London
The Call of the Wild
The Call of the Wild is a novel by Jack London published in 1903. The story is set in the Yukon during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush—a period when strong sled dogs were in high demand. The novel's central character is a dog named Buck, a domesticated dog living at a ranch in the Santa Clara valley of California as the story opens. Stolen from his home and sold into the brutal existence of an Alaskan sled dog, he reverts to atavistic traits. Buck is forced to adjust to, and survive, cruel treatments and fight to dominate other dogs in a harsh climate. Eventually he sheds the veneer of civilization, relying on primordial instincts and lessons he learns, to emerge as a leader in the wild. London lived for most of a year in the Yukon collecting material for the book. The story was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in the summer of 1903; a month later it was released in book form. The novel's great popularity and success made a reputation for London. Much of its appeal derives from the simplicity with which London presents the themes in an almost mythical form. As early as 1908 the story was adapted to film and it has since seen several more cinematic adaptations.

In the Small, Small Pond

by: Denise Fleming, Denise Fleming
In the Small, Small Pond

Denise Fleming's book gives young readers a frog's-eye view of life in a pond throughout the seasons.

In the Small, Small Pond is a 1994 Caldecott Honor Book.

National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America

by: Jon L. Dunn, Jonathan Alderfer
National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America
Birding is the fastest growing wildlife-related activity in the U.S., and even conservative estimates put the current number of U.S. birders at 50 million. According to the New York Times, some authorities predict that by 2050 there will be more than 100 million—and the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America will be the essential reference for field identification and the cornerstone of any birder's library. This is the ultimate, indispensable bird field guide—comprehensive, authoritative, portable, sturdy, and easier than ever to use.

Among the the new edition's key elements and practical improvements: Every North American species—more than 960, including a new section on accidental birds—classified according to the latest official American Ornithologists' Union checklist 4,000 full-color illustrations by the foremost bird artists at work todayand newly updated range maps that draw on the latest data New durable cover for added protection against adverse weather, plus informative quick-reference flaps that double as placemarkers New reader-friendly features like thumbtabs that make locating key sections faster and easier, and a quick-find index to direct users straight to the information they need.

Last Child in the Woods

by: Richard Louv
Last Child in the Woods
"I like to play indoors better 'cause that's where all the electrical outlets are," reports a fourth-grader. Never before in history have children been so plugged in-and so out of touch with the natural world. In this groundbreaking new work, child advocacy expert Richard Louv directly links the lack of nature in the lives of today's wired generation-he calls it nature deficit-to some of the most disturbing childhood trends, such as rises in obesity, Attention Deficit Disorder (Add), and depression. Some startling facts: By the 1990s the radius around the home where children were allowed to roam on their own had shrunk to a ninth of what it had been in 1970. Today, average eight-year-olds are better able to identify cartoon characters than native species, such as beetles and oak trees, in their own community. The rate at which doctors prescribe antidepressants to children has doubled in the last five years, and recent studies show that too much computer use spells trouble for the developing mind. Nature-deficit disorder is not a medical condition; it is a description of the human costs of alienation from nature. This alienation damages children and shapes adults, families, and communities. There are solutions, though, and they're right in our own backyards. Last child in the Woods is the first book to bring together cutting-edge research showing that direct exposure to nature is essential for healthy childhood development-physical, emotional, and spiritual. What's more, nature is a potent therapy for depression, obesity, and Add. Environment-based education dramatically improves standardized test scores and grade point averages and develops skills in problem solving, critical thinking, and decision making. Even creativity is stimulated by childhood experiences in nature.

Ring of Bright Water

by: Gavin Maxwell
Ring of Bright Water
Hailed a masterpiece when it was first published, the story of Gavin Maxwell's life with otters on the remote west coast of Scotland remains one of the most lyrical, moving descriptions of a man's relationship with the natural world. ""One of the outstanding wildlife books of all time.""-New York Herald Tribune First published 1960 by Longmans, Green & Co.

Nibble Nibble

by: Margaret Wise Brown, Wendell Minor
Nibble Nibble

Originally published in 1959, five delightful poems by Margaret Wise Brown capture the simple eloquence of the natural world and illuminate the whimsy of bunnies at play. Now the charming paintings of award-winning naturalist artist Wendell Minor will "nibble nibble nibble" their way into the hearts of a whole new generation of Margaret Wise Brown readers.

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