Results by title

3 books match the query 'Holleman, Marybeth'

cover of Among Wolves: Gordon Haber's Insights into Alaska's Most Misunderstood Animal

Among Wolves

Gordon Haber's Insights into Alaska's Most Misunderstood Animal

Gordon Haber and Marybeth Holleman

University of Alaska Press, 2013

Alaska’s wolves lost their fiercest advocate, Gordon Haber, when his research plane crashed in Denali National Park in 2009. Passionate, tenacious, and occasionally brash, Haber, a former hockey player and park ranger, devoted his life to Denali’s wolves.

He weathered brutal temperatures in the wild to document the wolves and provided exceptional insights into wolf behavior. Haber’s writings and photographs reveal an astonishing degree of cooperation between wolf family members as they hunt, raise pups, and play, social behaviors and traditions previously unknown. With the wolves at risk of being destroyed by hunting and trapping, his studies advocated for a balanced approach to wolf management. His fieldwork registered as one of the longest studies in wildlife science and had a lasting impact on wolf policies.

Haber’s field notes, his extensive journals, and stories from friends all come together in Among Wolves to reveal much about both the wolves he studied and the researcher himself. Wolves continue to fascinate and polarize people, and Haber’s work continues to resonate.
[more]
cover of Bloom Again: A Novel

Bloom Again

A Novel

Marybeth Holleman

University of Alaska Press, 2025

Elyse is an empty-nest mother and artist in Alaska, and Astrid is a paleobotany professor in North Carolina. When the seemingly fulfilling lives of these distanced childhood friends are shaken, everything they’ve carefully established—from friends to careers to marriages—shifts, slips, unravels. This outer unraveling mirrors a growing discomfort with their safe lives. For Elyse, it begins with a mundane moment at the grocery store and a news story about polar bears. For Astrid, it happens during a faculty reception where a visiting lecturer’s talk sparks a rift with her mentor and father figure.
 
As the ground beneath them stirs, both women begin to recall their shared childhoods. Each must ignore the rumblings and fight for their comfortable existence—or leap. Before long, Elyse is following a Yup’ik marine mammal hunter along the windswept Siberian coast, and Astrid is risking her entire career to plant trees in India. As they navigate upheaval, they also confront the reminders of their past—a past whose full truth carries in it the promise of their future.
 
Bloom Again weaves together sophisticated narrative and characters, evocative travel and nature writing, and effective and reliable depictions of the climate change crisis in parts of the world underrepresented in mainstream literary fiction. A realistic work of ecoclimate fiction, it considers how people confront and respond to an amorphous yet unavoidable event like climate change in their everyday lives, as well as how women find new inspiration in their “second spring”—a time in life when career and family needs are fulfilled. It’s a book about waking up and finding our way, together.
 
 
[more]
cover of Heart Of The Sound

Heart Of The Sound

Marybeth Holleman

University of Utah Press, 2004

"You can’t step in the same river twice—although I once believed I could. I believed that the pieces of my life I had chosen, those I held close to my heart, would, once chosen and held, remain the same."—from the book

How does one recover from disaster? That question is at the heart of Marybeth Holleman’s lyrical, elegiac response to the repercussions of the Exxon Valdez oil spill that devastated Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989. Twining together the destruction of an ecosystem and the disintegration of her marriage, Holleman explores the resiliency of nature—both wild and human—and the ways in which that resiliency is tested. Like the oil that remains pooled beneath rocks years after the tanker spill, the emotional wounds of the past lie just below the surface. Recovery and restoration from the pain wrought by human hands does not come easily.

If much of nature writing is about the heart’s search for an unspoiled, perfect landscape, The Heart of the Sound is about what happens when the return-to-paradise fantasy is over and paradise is lost. In language rich with passion and hard-won insight, Holleman creates a captivating picture of a woman who found her Eden in the sweeping fjords of Alaska only to lose it to ecological tragedy. But somewhere within that loss, she finds herself.

[more]