A powerful chronicle of a wounded woman’s exploration of nature and selfAfter nature writer Gretel Ehrlich was struck by lightning near her Wyoming ranch and almost died, she embarked on a painstaking and visionary journey back to the land of the living. With the help of an extraordinary cardiologist and the companionship of her beloved dog Sam, she avidly explores the natural and spiritual world to make sense of what happened to her. We follow as she combs every i...

A "dazzling first novel" about Japanese Americans and their Wyoming neighbors in the era of WWII internment camps ( Chicago Tribune).A renowned chronicler of life in the West, Gretel Ehrlich turns her talents to a moment in history when American citizens were set against each other, offering "a novel full of immense poetic feeling for the internal lives of its varied characters and the sublime high plains landscape that is its backdrop" ( The New York T...

**A transcendent, lyrical meditation on life in the American West“Wyoming has found its Whitman.” —Annie Dillard**Poet and filmmaker Gretel Ehrlich went to Wyoming in 1975 to make the first in a series of documentaries when her partner died. Ehrlich stayed on and found she couldn’t leave. The Solace of Open Spaces is a chronicle of her first years on “the planet of Wyoming,” a personal journey into a place, a feeling, and a way of life.Ehrlich captures both...

Shortly after his death in 1957, The New York Times obituary of Peter Freuchen noted that "except for Richard E. Byrd, and despite his foreign beginnings, Freuchen was perhaps better known to more people in the United States than any other explorer of our time." During his lifetime Freuchen's remarkable adventures, related in his books, magazine articles, and films, made him a legend. In 1910, Freuchen and his friend and business partner, Knud Rasmussen, the renowned polar explorer, founde...

This book was written out of Gretel Ehrlich’s love for winter–for remote and cold places, for the ways winter frees our imagination and invigorates our feet, mind, and soul–and also out of the fear that our “democracy of gratification” has irreparably altered the climate.Over the course of a year, Ehrlich experiences firsthand the myriad expressions of cold, giving us marvelous histories of wind, water, snow, and ice, of ocean currents and weather cycles. From Tierra del Fuego in t...

In Cows Save the Planet, journalist Judith D. Schwartz looks at soil as a crucible for our many overlapping environmental, economic, and social crises. Schwartz reveals that for many of these problems—climate change, desertification, biodiversity loss, droughts, floods, wildfires, rural poverty, malnutrition, and obesity—there are positive, alternative scenarios to the degradation and devastation we face. In each case, our ability to turn these crises into opportunities depends on...

'Vivid, tough and funny. Wyoming has found its Whitman.'Annie Dillard 'I suspect that my original motive for coming here was to "lose myself" in new and unpopulated territory. Instead of producing the numbness I thought I wanted, life on the sheep ranch woke me up.' In 1976, Gretel Ehrlich travelled from her home in New York to Wyoming to shoot a film on sheep herders. While she was away, her partner died. Although she had never planned to stay, Ehrlich found herself unable to leave. What ...

In the spring of 1869, John Muir was looking for means of support to fund his explorations of California’s Central Valley region. A ranch owner offered him a job herding sheep in the Sierra Nevada. As he explored the region, he jotted down his keen observations of the scenic countryside, and he eventually became a guide for some of Yosemite’s most famous visitors, including Ralph Waldo Emerson. Muir documented these experiences in The Yosemite, first published in 1912. It ...

Ten essays on nature, ritual, and philosophy "that are so point-blank vital you nearly need to put the book down to settle yourself" ( San Francisco Chronicle).Gretel Ehrlich's world is one of solitude and wonder, pain and beauty, and these elements give life to her stunning prose. Ever since her acclaimed debut, The Solace of Open Spaces, she has illuminated the particular qualities of nature and the self with graceful precision.In Isl...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1975)These Pulitzer Prize-winning poems and essays by the author of No Nature range from the lucid, lyrical, and mystical to the political. All, however, share a common vision: a rediscovery of North America and the ways by which we might become true natives of the land for the first time.

The title, Regarding Wave, reflects "a half-buried series of word origins dating back through the Indo-European language: intersections of energy, woman, song and 'Gone Beyond Wisdom.'""Wild nature as the ultimate ground of human affairs"––the beautiful, precarious balance among forces and species forms a unifying theme for the new poems in this collection. The title, Regarding Wave, reflects "a half-buried series of word origins dating back through the Indo-Europe...

**A New York Times Notable BookFinalist for the National Book Critics Circle AwardA personal, lyrical narrative about storytelling and empathy, from the author of Orwell's Roses**Apricots. Her mother's disintegrating memory. An invitation to Iceland. Illness. These are Rebecca Solnit's raw materials, but The Faraway Nearby goes beyond her own life, as she spirals out into the stories she heard and read—from fairy tales to Mary Shelley's