Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert
10 best books like Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert (Terry Tempest Williams): A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, Desert Solitaire, The Monkey Wrench Gang, Down the River, Song for a Whale, House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky, Underland, Year of the Monkey
| Author | Aldo Leopold |
| ISBN | 0195007778 |
First published in 1949, A Sand County Almanac combines some of the finest nature writing since Thoreau with an outspoken and highly ethical regard for America's relationship to the land.
Written with an unparalleled understanding of the ways of nature, the book includes a section on the...
| Author | Edward Abbey |
| ISBN | 0345326490 |
First published in 1968, Desert Solitaire is one of Edward Abbey’s most critically acclaimed works and marks his first foray into the world of nonfiction writing. Written while Abbey was working as a ranger at Arches National Park outside of Moab, Utah, Desert Solitaire is a rare view of one man’s...
| Author | Edward Abbey |
| ISBN | 0061129763 |
Ed Abbey called The Monkey Wrench Gang, his 1975 novel, a "comic extravaganza." Some readers have remarked that the book is more a comic book than a real novel, and it's true that reading this incendiary call to protect the American wilderness requires more than a little of the old willing suspension...
| Author | Edward Abbey |
| ISBN | 0452265630 |
"Be of good cheer," the war-horse Edward Abbey advises, "the military-industrial state will soon collapse." This sparkling book, which takes us up and down rivers and across mountains and deserts, is the perfect antidote to despair.
Along the way, Abbey makes time for Thoreau while he takes...
In the spirit of modern-day classics like Fish in a Tree and Counting by 7s comes the story of a deaf girl's connection to a whale whose song can't be heard by his species, and the journey she takes to help him.
From fixing the class computer to repairing old radios, twelve-year-old Iris is a tech...
| Author | Craig Childs |
| ISBN | 0316608173 |
Put your tongue forcefully into the side of your cheek and keep it there while you read this book—just to remind yourself most of what you are reading is conjecture and poppycock. But—and here’s the important part—you’ll have a hell of a good read! As I went from one exploit to another, I kept...
| Author | Wallace Stegner |
| ISBN | 0140159940 |
John Wesley Powell fought in the Civil War and it cost him an arm. But it didn't stop him from exploring the American West. Here Wallace Stegner, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, gives us a thrilling account of Powell's struggle against western geography and Washington politics. We witness the successes and...
| Author | Ellen Meloy |
| ISBN | 0375708138 |
In this invigorating mix of natural history and adventure, artist-naturalist Ellen Meloy uses turquoise—the color and the gem—to probe deeper into our profound human attachment to landscape.
From the Sierra Nevada, the Mojave Desert, the Yucatan Peninsula, and the Bahamas to her...
| Author | Robert Macfarlane |
| ISBN | 0393242145 |
An exploration of the Earth’s underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself.
In this sequel to The Old Ways, Macfarlane takes us on an journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind. Traveling through...
| Author | Patti Smith |
| ISBN | 0525657681 |
From the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids and M Train, a profound, beautifully realized memoir in which dreams and reality are vividly woven into a tapestry of one transformative year.
Following a run of New Year’s concerts at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore, Patti...
| Author | Bill McKibben |
| ISBN | 0805090568 |
Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen. We've created, in very short order, a new planet, still recognizable but fundamentally different. We may as well call it Eaarth.
That new planet is filled with new binds...
| Author | Craig Childs |
| ISBN | 0316610690 |
The "essence of the American desert," as the subtitle of Craig Childs's book has it, is water. A desert, by definition, lacks it, but when water does come, it comes in torrential, sometimes devastating abundance. Childs, a thirtysomething desert rat with a vast knowledge of the Southwest's remote...
| Author | Mary Hunter Austin |
| ISBN | 0140249192 |
“Between the high Sierras south from Yosemite—east and south over a very great assemblage of broken ranges beyond Death Valley, and on illimitably into the Mojave Desert” is the territory that Mary Austin calls the Land of Little Rain. In this classic collection of meditations on the wonders...
| Author | Edward Abbey |
| ISBN | 0030693012 |
Outstanding fare from one of the modern age's greatest scribes on the American West. I snuck a peak at Wikipedia and agree with Larry McMurty's depiction of him as the "Thoreau of the American West". Having read Abbey's earlier pro-environmental novels ("The Monkey Wrench Gang", "Hayduke Lives")...
| Author | Sandra Steingraber |
| ISBN | 0375700994 |
With this eloquent and impassioned book, biologist and poet Sandra Steingraber shoulders the legacy of Rachel Carson, producing a work about people and land, cancer and the environment, that is as accessible and invaluable as Silent Spring--and potentially as historic.
In her early twenties,...
Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country
On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Houston’s ranch becomes her sanctuary, a place where she discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her after a childhood of parental...
