front cover of Zebra
Zebra
Christopher Plumb and Samuel Shaw
Reaktion Books, 2018
Common and exotic, glamorous and ferocious, sociable and sullen: zebras mean many things to many people. But one facet of zebras universally fascinates: their stripes. The extraordinary beauty of zebras’ striped coats has ensured their status as one of the world’s most recognizable and popular animals. Zebra print is everywhere in contemporary society—on beanbags and bikinis, car seats and pencil cases. Many zoos house a zebra or two, and they are a common feature of children’s books and films. Zebras have been immortalized in paint by artists, including George Stubbs and Lucian Freud, and they even have a road crossing named after them. But despite their ubiquity, the natural and cultural history of zebras remain a mystery to most.

Zebra is the most comprehensive and wide-ranging survey ever published of the natural and cultural history of this cherished animal, exploring its biology and cultural relevance in Africa and beyond. Few know that there are three species of zebra (plains, mountain, and Grévy's), that one of these is currently endangered, or that among the many subspecies was once found the quagga, an animal that once roamed southern Africa in large numbers before dying out in the 1880s. Drawing on a range of examples as dizzying as the zebra’s stripes, this book shows how the zebra’s history engages and intersects with subjects as diverse and rich as eighteenth-century humor, imperialism, and technologies of concealment. Including more than one hundred illustrations, many previously unpublished, Zebra offers a new perspective on this much-loved, much-depicted, but frequently misunderstood animal.
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front cover of Zion Canyon
Zion Canyon
A Storied Land
Text by Greer K. Chesher; Photographs by Michael Plyler
University of Arizona Press, 2007
Zion National Park has served as the stage set for more than twenty-five movies, including, most notably, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It is also a popular tourist destination, boasting a visitor log of more than 2.5 million every year. During the summer months, tour buses rattle their way into the park almost hourly. Sightseers crowd polished-trestle-wood and river-rock inns, buy hand-woven bags imported from Guatemala, and sip icy margaritas from the porch of an old bar with a stunning view of irrigated Mexican primroses and glowing redrock cliffs. While Zion National Park is a familiar vista to millions of day-trippers and film viewers, few ever intimately experience the unpredictable, often hostile, but always magnificent reality of this rugged frontier.

Greer K. Chesher brings us the first personal and in-depth look at Zion. In striking and elegant prose, she vividly recounts experiences that only a park ranger and resident of the region for more than two decades could have. She also lucidly explains the area’s natural and geological wonders, including the dynamics of Zion’s ecology, changes to plant and animal species wrought through human technology, and what these changes mean for the future.

Beyond the region’s amazing array of flora and fauna, she describes the landscape’s lasting imprint on settlers and current residents, and explains the politics that have long surrounded its protection. Award-winning photographer Michael Plyler, also a resident of the region, captures the allure of the park in spectacular images that illustrate the intimate details and geological wonder of the place. These exquisite photographs make this book a stunning pictorial as well as literary tribute to a place that is known to so many but about which so little is truly understood.
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front cover of Zoo World
Zoo World
Essays
Mary Quade
The Ohio State University Press, 2023
“A pocket adventure for environmentalists and those who enjoy meditative writing.” —Kirkus

We contain the elements of our world in archives, boxes, collections, mausoleums, history books, and museums, trying to stave off their eventual disappearance from our memory and from the earth in a futile attempt at redemption for our violence against them. In Zoo World, Mary Quade examines our propensity for damage, our relationships with other species, our troubling belief in our own dominion, and the reality that when you put something in a cage, it becomes your responsibility. Her subjects are as eclectic as mallard ducks, ancient churches, monarch butterflies, classrooms, tourism, street markets, zoos, and dairy cows and as global as migration, war, language, and climate change. Whatever the topic at hand, Zoo World considers how our stewardship of the earth and one another falls short, hoping that a more humble understanding of our place on the planet might lead not only to our mutual survival but also to the extinction of our hubris as human beings. Replete with Quade’s lyrical and observational gifts and refusing to let any of us off the hook in the name of inspiration or comfort, these essays are a fresh take on travel and nature writing, pushing both in thrilling new directions.
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