front cover of Walking on the Wild Side
Walking on the Wild Side
Long-Distance Hiking on the Appalachian Trail
Fondren, Kristi M
Rutgers University Press, 2015
Received the 2016 Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt Award for Excellence in Recreation and Park Research from the National Recreation and Park Association

The most famous long-distance hiking trail in North America, the 2,181-mile Appalachian Trail—the longest hiking-only footpath in the world—runs along the Appalachian mountain range from Georgia to Maine. Every year about 2,000 individuals attempt to “thru-hike” the entire trail, a feat equivalent to hiking Mount Everest sixteen times. In Walking on the Wild Side, sociologist Kristi M. Fondren traces the stories of forty-six men and women who, for their own personal reasons, set out to conquer America’s most well known, and arguably most social, long-distance hiking trail.
 
In this fascinating in-depth study, Fondren shows how, once out on the trail, this unique subculture of hikers lives mostly in isolation, with their own way of acting, talking, and thinking; their own vocabulary; their own activities and interests; and their own conception of what is significant in life. They tend to be self-disciplined, have an unwavering trust in complete strangers, embrace a life of poverty, and reject modern-day institutions. The volume illuminates the intense social intimacy and bonding that forms among long-distance hikers as they collectively construct a long-distance hiker identity. Fondren describes how long-distance hikers develop a trail persona, underscoring how important a sense of place can be to our identity, and to our sense of who we are. Indeed, the author adds a new dimension to our understanding of the nature of identity in general.
 
Anyone who has hiked—or has ever dreamed of hiking—the Appalachian Trail will find this volume fascinating. Walking on the Wild Side captures a community for whom the trail is a sacred place, a place to which they have become attached, socially, emotionally, and spiritually.
[more]

front cover of Warblers in Your Pocket
Warblers in Your Pocket
A Guide to Wood-Warblers of the Upper Midwest
Dana Gardner
University of Iowa Press, 2016
Robins may be the official harbingers of spring, but the arrival of the wood-warbler signifies the real beginning of the season. These brightly colored songsters, most of whom have migrated extremely long distances to reach their summer nesting grounds, appear like animated jewels from treetops to shrubs to ground throughout the Midwest. Adult males in fresh spring plumage are particularly striking: the buttery yellow of the commonly seen yellow warbler; brilliant orange of the Blackburnian and bright gold of the prothonotary; rich chestnut of the Cape May, bay-breasted, and chestnut-sided; the blue of the northern parula, cerulean, and black-throated blue make these birds a joy to encounter.

This newest addition to Iowa’s popular series of laminated guides—the twenty-eighth in the series—illustrates the thirty-eight species of warblers that occur in the Upper Midwest states of Minnesota, Illinois, Nebraska, Kansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. For each species, artist Dana Gardner provides length, range, and habitat; he illustrates male, female, and immature birds where plumage varies; and he includes birds similar to warblers such as kinglets and vireos.

For all their brilliance, warblers can be hard to identify, particularly in the fall—the phrase “confusing fall warblers” was coined for a reason—and when they are in immature plumage. Quick-moving and often found in treetops, they can be challenging even in spring, and the drabber colors of the young birds of the season and of many fall adults can make identification difficult. The illustrations and descriptions in Warblers in Your Pocket will be a most welcome reference for bird watchers throughout the Midwest. 
[more]

logo for University of Pittsburgh Press
Watching the River Run
A Photographic Journey Down the Youghiogheny
Tim Palmer
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025

front cover of Water-Efficient Landscaping in the Intermountain West
Water-Efficient Landscaping in the Intermountain West
A Professional and Do-It-Yourself Guide
Heidi Kratsch
Utah State University Press, 2011

This working manual provides complete information on the technical aspects of designing, building, and maintaining waterwise landscapes in the Mountain West. Written particularly for professionals, including landscape designers, architects, contractors, and maintenance and irrigation specialists, it has an attractive, well-illustrated, user-friendly format that will make it useful as well to DIY homeowners and to educators, plant retailers, extension agents, and many others.

The manual is organized according to landscape principles that are adapted to the climate of the intermountain region. Beginning with planning and design, the topical principles proceed through soil preparation, appropriate plant selection, practicalities of turfgrass, use of mulch, and irrigation planning, winding up with landscape maintenance. Designed for onsite, handy use, the book is illustrated with color images of landscapes, plants, and materials. Tables, charts, diagrams, landscape plans, plant lists, checklists, and other graphic resources are scattered throughout the manual, which is written in an accessible but information-rich style. Water-Efficient Landscaping in the Intermountain West answers, more comprehensively than any other single book, the need for professional information that addresses both growing awareness of the necessity for water conservation and the desire for beautiful, healthy yards and properties.

[more]

front cover of Weathering Winter
Weathering Winter
A Gardener's Daybook
Carl H. Klaus
University of Iowa Press, 2003
In winter, when the only things growing seem to be icicles and irritability, what pleasures exist for a gardener or for anyone who lives in a northern climate? In his distinctive daybook, Weathering Winter, Carl Klaus reminds readers that the season of brown twigs and icy gales is just as much a part of the year as when tulips open, tomatoes thrive, and pumpkins color the brown earth. From the first cold snap of late December 1994 to the first outdoor planting of onion sets and radish seeds in mid-March 1995, Klaus kept track of snow falling, birds flocking, soups simmering, gardening catalogs arriving, buds swelling, and seed trays coming to life.
Gardeners, lovers of the out-of-doors, and weather watchers will recognize themselves in the ways in which Klaus has come to terms with the harsh climate and chilly truths that winter embodies. His constant, careful checks on the temperature and on the geraniums overwintering in the attic, his contentment in the basil- and garlic-flavored tomato sauce he cooked up from last season's crops, and his walks with his wife in the bitter chill of starry January nights reflect the pull between indoors and out, the contrast between the beauty and the cruelty of the season.
[more]

front cover of A Week in Yellowstone's Thorofare
A Week in Yellowstone's Thorofare
A Journey Through the Remotest Place
Michael J. Yochim
Oregon State University Press, 2016
The remotest place in the country, outside of Alaska, is a region in Yellowstone National Park ironically named the Thorofare, for its historic role as a route traversed by fur trappers. A Week in Yellowstone’s Thorofare is a history and celebration of this wild place, set within a week-long expedition that the author took with three friends in 2014.
 
Drawing upon the first-person accounts of rangers who have patrolled the area, archival documents, and Michael Yochim’s personal experiences over almost three decades, A Week in Yellowstone’s Thorofare distinguishes between the notions of wildness and wilderness. Through historic vignettes, descriptions of natural resources, and the author’s own experiences, it argues that wildness is the most precious, and easily lost, attribute of wilderness.
 
The Thorofare is remote not only from roads, but also largely unexplored in the vast body of wilderness literature. A Week in Yellowstone’s Thorofare aims to fill that void. Recognizing both the value and the fragility of wildness, the rangers who manage the area have struggled through many eras to preserve it. This book chronicles many of the struggles through which it has remained protected for visitors today.
 
Yochim offers poignant insight into the passions that motivate those who manage, defend, and journey through the Thorofare. His story demonstrates the importance of wild places for touching and understanding a fundamental part of the human experience. Part history, memoir, travelogue, natural history, and reflection, the book will appeal to readers interested in preservation, the wilderness movement, the history of National Parks, or the natural treasures of Yellowstone.
[more]

front cover of Whispers and Shadows
Whispers and Shadows
A Naturalist’s Memoir
Jerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2015
In these times of technological innovation and fast-paced electronic communication, we often take nature for granted—or even consider it a hindrance to our human endeavors. In Whispers and Shadows: A Naturalist’s Memoir, Jerry Apps explores such topics as the human need for wilderness, rediscovering a sense of wonder, and his father’s advice to “listen for the whispers” and “look in the shadows” to learn nature’s deepest lessons.
 
Combining his signature lively storytelling and careful observations of nature, Apps draws on a lifetime of experiences, from his earliest years growing up on a central Wisconsin farm to his current ventures as gardener, tree farmer, and steward of wetlands, prairies, and endangered Karner blue butterflies. He also takes inspiration from the writings of Aldo Leopold, Annie Dillard, Henry David Thoreau, Sigurd Olson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, Barbara Kingsolver, Wendell Berry, Richard Louv, and Rachel Carson. With these eloquent essays, Jerry Apps reminds us to slow down, turn off technology, and allow our senses to reconnect us to the natural world. For it is there, he writes, that “I am able to return to a feeling I had when I was a child, a feeling of having room to stretch my arms without interfering with another person, a feeling of being a small part of something much larger than I was, and I marvel at the idea.”
[more]

front cover of Who Is the City For?
Who Is the City For?
Architecture, Equity, and the Public Realm in Chicago
Blair Kamin
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A vividly illustrated collaboration between two of Chicago’s most celebrated architecture critics casts a wise and unsparing eye on inequities in the built environment and attempts to rectify them.
 
From his high-profile battles with Donald Trump to his insightful celebrations of Frank Lloyd Wright and front-page takedowns of Chicago mega-projects like Lincoln Yards, Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic Blair Kamin has long informed and delighted readers with his illuminating commentary. Kamin’s newest collection, Who Is the City For?, does more than gather fifty-five of his most notable Chicago Tribune columns from the past decade: it pairs his words with striking new images by photographer and architecture critic Lee Bey, Kamin’s former rival at the Chicago Sun-Times. Together, they paint a revealing portrait of Chicago that reaches beyond its glamorous downtown and dramatic buildings by renowned architects like Jeanne Gang to its culturally diverse neighborhoods, including modest structures associated with storied figures from the city’s Black history, such as Emmett Till.
 
At the book’s heart is its expansive approach to a central concept in contemporary political and architectural discourse: equity. Kamin argues for a broad understanding of the term, one that prioritizes both the shared spaces of the public realm and the urgent need to rebuild Black and brown neighborhoods devastated by decades of discrimination and disinvestment.  “At best,” he writes in the book’s introduction, “the public realm can serve as an equalizing force, a democratizing force. It can spread life’s pleasures and confer dignity, irrespective of a person’s race, income, creed, or gender. In doing so, the public realm can promote the social contract — the notion that we are more than our individual selves, that our common humanity is made manifest in common ground.” Yet the reality in Chicago, as Who Is the City For? powerfully demonstrates, often falls painfully short of that ideal.
[more]

front cover of Wild Delicate Seconds
Wild Delicate Seconds
29 Wildlife Encounters
Charles Finn
Oregon State University Press, 2012

In Wild Delicate Seconds, Charles Finn captures twenty-nine chance encounters with the everyday—and not so everyday—animals, birds, and insects of North America.

There are no maulings or fantastic escapes in Finn's narratives—only stillness and attentiveness to beauty. With profundity, humor,  and compassion, Finn pays homage to the creatures we share our  world with —from black bears to bumble bees, mountain lions to muskrats—and, in doing so, touches on what it means to be human.
 

[more]

front cover of Wildflowers of the Mountain West
Wildflowers of the Mountain West
Richard M. Anderson, Jay Dee Gunnell, Jerry L. Goodspeed
Utah State University Press, 2012

Many recreational hikers have stopped along the trail to admire a wildflower only to wonder what, exactly, they are looking at. Wildflowers of the Mountain West is a useful field guide that makes flower identification easy for the general outdoor enthusiast.

Many available plant guides are too technical or cumbersome for non-specialists to embrace. Covering New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Nevada and Oregon, this book is perfect for the enthusiasts who has little botanical knowledge but would like to know more about the wildflowers they are seeing. Organized by flower color for easy reference, plant records include the common and scientific names, a description of typical characteristics, habitat information and distribution maps, look-alike species, color photographs, and informative commentary. In addition, the book provides a useful introduction to the Mountain West region, along with line drawings to illustrate basic flower parts, shapes, and arrangements; a glossary of common botanical terms; a quick search key; and an index.

The book is spiral-bound, making it easy to bring along while hiking, backpacking, or biking, and stunning full color photographs make visual confirmation of flower type simple and straightforward.
 

[more]

logo for University of Pittsburgh Press
William Bartram's Visual Wonders
The Drawings of an American Naturalist
Elizabeth A. Athens
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024

front cover of William Maxwell
William Maxwell
A Literary Life
Barbara A. Burkhardt
University of Illinois Press, 2004

Known as a beloved, longtime fiction editor at The New Yorker, William Maxwell worked closely with such legendary writers as Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Mary McCarthy, and John Cheever. His own novels include They Came Like Swallows and the American Book Award-winning So Long, See You Tomorrow, and many consider him to be one of the twentieth century's most important writers. Barbara Burkhardt's William Maxwell: A Literary Life represents the first major critical study of this Illinois writer's life and work.

Writing with an economy and elegance befitting her subject, Burkhardt addresses Maxwell's highly autobiographical fiction by skillfully interweaving his biography with her own critical interpretations. She contextualizes his fiction in terms of events including his mother's early death from influenza, his marriage, and the role of his psychoanalysis under the guidance of Theodor Reik. Drawing on a wide range of previously unavailable material, Burkhardt includes letters Maxwell received from authors such as Eudora Welty and Louise Bogan, excerpts from his unpublished manuscripts and correspondence, and her own interviews with Maxwell and key figures from his life, including John Updike, Roger Angell, New Yorker fiction editor Robert Henderson, and Maxwell's family and friends.

[more]

front cover of William Strickland and the Creation of an American Architecture
William Strickland and the Creation of an American Architecture
Robert Douglass Russell
University of Tennessee Press, 2017

William Strickland (1788–1854) was, in his day, among the most notable architects in the United States. An erstwhile student of Benjamin Henry Latrobe and a contemporary of Robert Mills, Strickland first entered the world of architecture at a young age in Philadelphia. But given that many of Strickland’s buildings have not survived, and considering the sparse and dispersed collection of primary sources Strickland left upon his death, little contemporary scholarship has appeared concerning Strickland’s significant contributions to the built environment of the early nineteenth century.

In William Strickland and the Creation of an American Architecture, Robert Russell does much to rectify this underrepresentation of Strickland’s notable architectural contributions in contemporary scholarship. In this first monograph detailing Strickland’s life and works since 1950 Russell examines the architectural production of Strickland during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Russell begins with the well-known Second Bank of the United States (Philadelphia)—the project that launched Strickland onto the national stage—eventually bringing his analysis to the south with an examination of the Tennessee State Capitol Building (Nashville). These two monuments bookended the American Greek Revival of the nineteenth century. Russell’s careful descriptions and insightful analyses of William Strickland’s work highlight the architect’s artistic skills and contributions to American material culture over the course of fifty years.

Ornamenting his examination with more than one hundred illustrations, Russell takes readers on a comprehensive journey through Strickland’s architecture. Part biography, part architectural history, William Strickland and the Creation of an American Architecture is an invaluable resource for scholars and artists alike, illustrating Strickland’s critical role in American architectural history and celebrating the icon behind buildings in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and beyond that are still admired and appreciated today.

[more]

front cover of Wisconsin Agriculture
Wisconsin Agriculture
A History
Jerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2015

"I'm embarrassed to say I thought I knew anything substantial about Wisconsin agriculture or its history before I read this book. 'Wisconsin Agriculture' should be required reading in history classes from high school to the collegiate level. It makes me thankful that Jerry Apps has such a sense of commitment to Wisconsin's agricultural heritage--and to getting the story right." --Pam Jahnke, Farm Director, Wisconsin Farm Report Radio

Wisconsin has been a farming state from its very beginnings. And though it's long been known as "the Dairy State," it produces much more than cows, milk, and cheese. In fact, Wisconsin is one of the most diverse agricultural states in the nation.

The story of farming in Wisconsin is rich and diverse as well, and the threads of that story are related and intertwined. In this long-awaited volume, celebrated rural historian Jerry Apps examines everything from the fundamental influences of landscape and weather to complex matters of ethnic and pioneer settlement patterns, changing technology, agricultural research and education, and government regulations and policies. Along with expected topics, such as the cranberry industry and artisan cheesemaking, "Wisconsin Agriculture" delves into beef cattle and dairy goats, fur farming and Christmas trees, maple syrup and honey, and other specialty crops, including ginseng, hemp, cherries, sugar beets, mint, sphagnum moss, flax, and hops. Apps also explores new and rediscovered farming endeavors, from aquaculture to urban farming to beekeeping, and discusses recent political developments, such as the 2014 Farm Bill and its ramifications. And he looks to the future of farming, contemplating questions of ethical growing practices, food safety, sustainability, and the potential effects of climate change.

Featuring first-person accounts from the settlement era to today, along with more than 200 captivating photographs, "Wisconsin Agriculture" breathes life into the facts and figures of 150 years of farming history and provides compelling insights into the state's agricultural past, present, and future.

[more]

front cover of Woman Of The River
Woman Of The River
Georgie White Clark, Whitewater Pioneer
Richard Westwood
Utah State University Press, 1997

Georgie White Clark-adventurer, raconteur, eccentric--first came to know the canyons of the Colorado River by swimming portions of them with a single companion. She subsequently hiked and rafted portions of the canyons, increasingly sharing her love of the Colorado River with friends and acquaintances. At first establishing a part-time guide service as a way to support her own river trips, she went on to become perhaps the canyons' best-known river guide, introducing their rapids to many others-on the river, via her large-capacity rubber rafts, and across the nation, via magazine articles and movies. Georgie Clark saw the river and her sport change with the building of Glen Canyon Dam, enormous increases in the popularity of river running, and increased National Park Service regulation of rafting and river guides. Adjusting, though not always easily, to the changes, she helped transform an elite adventure sport into a major tourist activity.

[more]

front cover of The Writings of Norman Maclean
The Writings of Norman Maclean
Seeking Truth amid Tragedy
Timothy P. Schilling
University of Nevada Press, 2024
With a foreword by John N. Maclean, son of Norman Maclean

The Writings of Norman Maclean: Seeking Truth amid Tragedy provides the first critical reassessment of this celebrated author’s work in more than a decade. In his study, Timothy P. Schilling focuses on Maclean’s attempt, in A River Runs through It and Other Stories and Young Men and Fire, to come to grips with the tragic side of human existence. From the 1938 death of his brother Paul to the 1949 deaths of thirteen firefighters in Montana’s Mann Gulch wildfire, Maclean is driven by a desire to discover ultimate meaning—the truth—in the face of haunting tragedy. Through careful analysis of all of Maclean’s published works, Schilling highlights the audaciousness of Maclean’s quest to wrest free an answer from “the universe.” 

Ever open to scientific, literary, philosophical, and theological ways of viewing reality, Maclean found ambiguity, paradoxically, to be an essential tool for probing the truth. Beyond exploring Maclean’s use of this tool, Schilling breaks new ground by considering Maclean’s invocation of the Transcendentals in “A River Runs through It,” noting the sly homage Maclean pays to Izaak Walton, examining Maclean’s often-neglected “Other Stories,” assessing Robert Redford’s film adaptation of “A River Runs through It,” and providing the most thorough exploration of Young Men and Fire yet available.

With this book, Schilling offers a current and complete analysis of Maclean—one of the most iconic figures in Western American literature.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter