In this informed and lyrical collection of interwoven essays, Lisa Knopp explores the physical and cultural geography of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte, rivers she has come to understand and cherish. At the same time, she contemplates how people experience landscape, identifying three primary roles of environmental perception: the insider, the outsider, and the outsider seeking to become an insider. Viewing the waterways through these approaches, she searches for knowledge and meani...

In Ravelings, Lisa Knopp takes up an older, opposing meaning of the verb “ravel”—“to entangle”—as she explores the deaths and departures of loved ones and the rituals by which we mourn and honor them, while contemplating her relationships with writing, spirituality, sense of home, aging, desire, and the relationship between body and mind. Entangled in these losses and changes, Knopp experiences wonder, joy, connectivity, and wholeness.In these nimble and companionable essa...

When she was 54, Lisa Knopp’s weight dropped to a number on the scale that she hadn’t seen since seventh grade. The severe food restricting that left her thin and sick when she was 15 and 25 had returned. This time, she was determined to understand the causes of her malady and how she could heal from a condition that is caused by a tangle of genetic, biological, familial, psychological, cultural, and spiritual factors. This compelling memoir, at once a food and illness narrative, explores ...

When Lisa Knopp visited Nebraska's death row with other death penalty abolitionists in 1995, she couldn't have imagined that one of the inmates she met that day would become a dear friend. For the next twenty-three years, through visits, phone calls, and letters, a remarkable, platonic friendship flourished between Knopp, an English professor, and Carey Dean Moore, who'd murdered two Omaha cab drivers in 1979 and for which he was executed by lethal injection in 2018. From Your Friend, Care...

Part autobiography, part natural history, Bird Cloud is the glorious story of the American West landscape and building a home there by Annie Proulx, winner of a PEN/Faulker Award, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award and author of the short story “Brokeback Mountain.”“Bird Cloud” is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and four-hundred-foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she...

“Simon Winchester never disappoints, and The Men Who United the States is a lively and surprising account of how this sprawling piece of geography became a nation. This is America from the ground up. Inspiring and engaging.” —Tom BrokawSimon Winchester, acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Atlantic and The Professor and the Madman, delivers his first book about America: a fascinating popular history that illuminates the men who toiled fearlessly to discover, connect, and ...

**“I’ve been thinking a lot about Cadillac Desert in the past few weeks, as the rain fell and fell and kept falling over California, much of which, despite the pouring heavens, seems likely to remain in the grip of a severe drought. Reisner anticipated this moment. He worried that the West’s success with irrigation could be a mirage — that it took water for granted and didn’t appreciate the precariousness of our capacity to control it.” – Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times...

**The “engaging” (New Yorker), New York Times best-selling story of how coyotes took over North America—and are now taking over South America as wellFinalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award"A masterly synthesis of scientific research and personal observation."—Wall Street Journal**Legends don’t come close to capturing the incredible survival story of the coyote. In the face of centuries of annihilation campa...

This may be hard to believe but it is very likely that more people live in closer proximity to more wild animals, birds and trees in the eastern United States today than anywhere on the planet at any time in history. For nature lovers, this should be wonderful news -- unless, perhaps, you are one of more than 4,000 drivers who will hit a deer today, your child’s soccer field is carpeted with goose droppings, coyotes are killing your pets, the neighbor’s cat has turned your bird feeder into...

An ode to our national parks, timed for the centennial, by the beloved author of When Women Were Birds.Longlisted for an Andrew Carnegie Medal for ExcellenceA Washington Post Notable Book of the YearAmerica's national parks are breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why more than 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the e...

Join Uncle John as he treks through every one of America’s National Parks!If you like the great outdoors, you’re going to love this book. We’re plunging into every national park, monument, site, and trail (more than 150 in all!) in true Uncle John fashion and uncovering some unique stories behind all of them. You’re sure to find hidden facets of each national park that you never imagined. Read about...* Yosemite’s firefall and why it came to a sudden end

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author Timothy Egan masterfully weaves together history, anthropology, and politics in this captivating exploration of the Pacific Northwest."A celebration of natural bounty, a warning that too much has been lost...Egan is a worthy spokesman for his homeland, a fluent and crafty writer." —Los Angeles TimesJourney through lush landscapes and vibrant cultures, from breathtaking salmon fisheries to ...