The story of the American West is the story of a relentless quest for a precious resource: water. It is a tale of rivers diverted and dammed, of political corruption and intrigue, of billion-dollar battles over water rights, of ecologic and economic disaster. Author Marc Reisner was an American environmentalist and writer best known for…
This was the England of Shakespeare, Johnson, and Bacon; the era of the Gunpowder Plot and the worst outbreak of the plague. Jacobean England was both more godly and less godly than the country had ever been, and the entire culture was drawn taut between these polarities. This was the world that created the King…
Author Erik Larson imbues the incredible events surrounding the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair with such drama that readers may find themselves checking the book’s categorization to be sure that ‘The Devil in the White City’ is not, in fact, a highly imaginative novel. Author Erik Larson is a former features writer for The Wall Street…
The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history. Author Erik Larson is a former features writer for The Wall Street Journal and Time. His magazine stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The…
The story of McIntosh County, a small, isolated, and lovely place on the flowery coast of Georgia–and a county where, in the 1970s, the white sheriff still wielded all the power, controlling everything and everybody. Author Melissa Greene has been a contributor to NPR, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, LIFE, Good Housekeeping,…
If you’re going to take a hike, the Appalachian Trail is probably the place to go. And Bill Bryson is surely the most entertaining guide you’ll find. He introduces us to the history and ecology of the trail and to some of the other hardy (or just foolhardy) folks he meets along the way. Author…
By the author of the highly-lauded biography of her parents, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Composing a Life uses the complex and varied lives of five women to explore the work in process, the life creatively lived. Author Mary Catherine Bateson, the author of Composing a Life, is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is Clarence…
Young heroes J., George and Harris take a boating holiday along the Thames to escape the weary workaday world and improve their health, but they are ill prepared for the various escapades, difficulties and vicissitudes that they encounter along the watery way. Author Jerome Klapka Jerome (2 May 1859 – 14 June 1927) was an…
The classic travel narrative of a Don Quixote-of-the-seas the first man to circumnavigate the world single handedly. Author Joshua Slocum was the first man to sail single-handedly around the world. He was a Nova Scotian born, naturalised American seaman and adventurer, and a noted writer. In 1900 he wrote a book about his journey ‘Sailing…
When artist, illustrator, writer, and adventurer Rockwell Kent first published N by E in a limited edition in 1930, his account of a voyage on a 33-foot cutter from New York Harbor to the rugged shores of Greenland quickly became a collectors’ item. Author Rockwell Kent (June 21, 1882 March 13, 1971) was an American…
