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Rising from the Plains

10 best books like Rising from the Plains (John McPhee): Nature's Clocks: How Scientists Measure the Age of Almost Everything, Hard Road West: History and Geology along the Gold Rush Trail, Principles of Geology, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, The Lost Grizzlies: A Search for Survivors in the Colorado Wilderness, The Yosemite, The Sound of Mountain Water, Two in the Far North, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History

Nature's Clocks: How Scientists Measure the Age of Almost Everything
AuthorDoug Macdougall
ISBN0520249755
"Radioactivity is like a clock that never needs adjusting," writes Doug Macdougall. "It would be hard to design a more reliable timekeeper." In Nature's Clocks, Macdougall tells how scientists who were seeking to understand the past arrived at the ingenious techniques they now use to determine the...
Hard Road West: History and Geology along the Gold Rush Trail
AuthorKeith Heyer Meldahl
ISBN0226519600
In 1848 news of the discovery of gold in California triggered an enormous wave of emigration toward the Pacific. Lured by the promise of riches, thousands of settlers left behind the forests, rain, and fertile soil of the eastern United States in favor of the rough-hewn lands of the American West. The...
Principles of Geology
AuthorCharles Lyell
One of the key works in the nineteenth-century battle between science and Scripture, Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830-33) sought to explain the geological state of the modern Earth by considering the long-term effects of observable natural phenomena. Written with clarity and a dazzling...
I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination
AuthorFrancis Spufford
ISBN0312220812
Francis Spufford explores the British obsession with polar exploration in a book that Jan Morris, writing in The Times, called, "A truly majestic work of scholarship, thought and literary imagination . . ." The title, a last quote from one explorer to his party as he left their tent never to return, embodies...
The Legend of Colton H. Bryant
AuthorAlexandra Fuller
ISBN1594201838
From the bestselling author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and Scribbling the Cat, the unforgettable true story of a boy who comes of age in the oil-fields and open plains of Wyoming; a heartrending story of the human spirit that lays bare where it is that wisdom truly resides.

Colton H....
The Lost Grizzlies: A Search for Survivors in the Colorado Wilderness
AuthorRick Bass
ISBN0395717590
Do grizzly bears still wander the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, where they have long been considered extinct? If so, can they elude the naturalists determined to prove that these bears, smarter than all other bears, survive in the mountain wilderness? Rick Bass, along with veteran grizzly expert...
The Yosemite
AuthorJohn Muir
ISBN1426421451
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not...
The Sound of Mountain Water
AuthorWallace Stegner
ISBN0140266747
A book of timeless importance about the American West, our "native home of hope."

The essays, memoirs, letters, and speeches in this volume were written over a period of twenty-five years, a time in which the West witnessed rapid changes to its cultural and natural heritage, and Wallace Stegner...
Two in the Far North
AuthorMargaret E. Murie
This enduring story of life, adventure, and love in Alaska was written by a woman who embraced the remote Alaskan wilderness and became one of its strongest advocates. In this moving testimonial to the preservation of the Arctic wilderness, Mardy Murie writes from her heart about growing up in Fairbanks,...
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History
AuthorStephen Jay Gould
ISBN0393311031
Interesting. Gould wrote these essays around the time that the Alvarez meteoric impact theory was being published. This is something that we now know to be beyond doubt. But at the time, when it was just being introduced, the theory, and especially its association with the Cretaceous extinction, was...
Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony
AuthorLewis Thomas
ISBN0140243283
This magnificent collection of essays by scientist and National Book Award-winning writer Lewis Thomas remains startlingly relevant for today's world. Luminous, witty, and provocative, the essays address such topics as "The Attic of the Brain, " "Falsity and Failure, " "Altruism, " and the effects...
Cascadia's Fault: The Coming Earthquake and Tsunami That Could Devastate North America
AuthorJerry Thompson
ISBN1582436436
There’s a crack in the earth’s crust that runs roughly 31 miles offshore, approximately 683 miles from northern California up through Vancouver Island off the coast of British Columbia. The Cascadia Subduction Zone has generated massive earthquakes over and over again throughout geologic...
Where Rivers Change Direction
AuthorMark Spragg
ISBN1573228257
It is a voice that echoes off canyon walls, springs from the rush of rivers, thunders from the hooves of horses. It belongs to award-winner Mark Spragg, and it's as passionate and umcompromising as the wilderness in northwest Wyoming in which he was born: the largest block of unfenced wilderness in...
Crossing Open Ground
AuthorBarry Lopez
ISBN0679721835
As an collection of journalistic pieces and essays, Crossing Open Ground is slightly less consistent in its overwhelming awe than Lopez' other works. His earlier, more explicitly journalistic pieces seem less impressive than the later works, which tend to be the ones that spend more time drawing...
Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the Heart in Nature Education (Nature Literacy Series, Vol. 1) (Nature Literacy)
AuthorDavid Sobel
ISBN0913098507
This is really more of an essay than a book (only 36 pages) but important nonetheless as it explores environmental education for children, connecting different types of activities to different ages. The basic message of the book is to not overburden very young children with the problems of the world...
Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature
AuthorDavid Quammen
ISBN0380717387
I promised a second review / rant about people I hate. This is it. This time it's Smug Environmentalists. The hate will manifest as the review goes on.

Natural Acts is a collection of essays, which mostly appeared originally in the authors column in "Outside" magazine. The essays mostly look...
Miles from Nowhere: Tales from America's Contemporary Frontier
AuthorDayton Duncan
ISBN0803266278
"In this splendid book a gifted observer and a terrific idea have come together in a real love match. In 1990, a century after the census bureau's famous observation of the frontier's imminent end, Dayton Duncan set out in an aging GMC Suburban to visit a large sampling of counties outside Alaska that...
Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West
AuthorRebecca Solnit
ISBN0520220668
In 1851, a war began in what would become Yosemite National Park, a war against the indigenous inhabitants that has yet to come to a real conclusion. A century later—1951—and about a hundred and fifty miles away, another war began when the U. S. government started setting off nuclear bombs at the...
Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father
AuthorRichard Rodríguez
ISBN0140096221
This is a short discussion essay I wrote in Spring 2007 regarding this book:

What if I Am You?:
Cultural Hybridity in Richard Rodriguez’s Days of Obligation

Tanya Collings

What if we are not diverse? What if I feel myself becoming like you? What does that mean? What if...
Southern Honor: Ethics And Behavior In The Old South
AuthorBertram Wyatt-Brown
ISBN0195033108
I absolutely love this book though I have not gotten very far. I saw it one day last year in Barnes and Noble on the employee picks shelf. I was shocked when I went back to buy it, and the salesperson, a college age young woman, exclaimed, "Oh, that was my pick!! I loved that book. I was using it for research on...
PrairyErth
AuthorWilliam Least Heat-Moon
I spent 2-1/2 years reading this amazing book because I didn't want it to end. For an author to devote time over several years visiting and researching every corner of a single Kansas county, walking it, talking to the locals, and writing 622 pages about its landscape, history, and people was an elegant...
Dirt: A Social History As Seen Through The Uses And Abuses Of Dirt
AuthorTerence McLaughlin
ISBN0880292504
Dirt, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. It is, Terence McLaughlin suggests, "evidence of the imperfections of life, a constant reminder of change and decay. It is the dark side of all human activities --human because it is only in our judgements that things are dirty; ther is no such material...
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