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In this conservation classic, originally published fifty-five years ago, Fred Bodsworth tells the story of a solitary Eskimo curlew’s perilous migration and search for a mate. The lone survivor comes to stand for the entirety of a species on the brink of extinction, and for all in nature that is endangered. This new paperback edition includes a foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin and an afterword by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann.
The River Sea
Since its discovery by Europeans in 1500, explorers, visionaries, soldiers of fortune, men of God, scientists, and slavers have been drawn to the legendary Amazon. The River Sea is a sweeping chronicle of those brave and hardy souls, ranging from the Spanish seafarer Vicente Pinzón, who discovered the river, to contemporary heroes and heroines, like Sister Dorothy Stang and Chico Mendes, whose efforts to save the rain forest cost them their lives.Among the vast cast of characters who people this drama of the Amazon are Francisco de Orellana, the first European to traverse the river from the Andes to the sea; the fiery priest Bartolomé de las Casas, defender of the indigenous peoples; the great scientist explorers Alexander von Humboldt and Alfred Russel Wallace; the madman and psychopath Lope de Aguirre; and the Peruvian Evangeline, Isabel Godin, who in 1769 crossed the continent, braving the terrors of the jungles to reunite with her husband, whom she had not seen in twenty years.The River Sea is a compelling account of five centuries of the history, the myths, and the legends of Río Amazonas, the most exotic and fascinating locale on earth.
Guston in Time
In the years following his controversial 1970 exhibition at the Marlborough Galleries, Philip Guston was generally viewed as yesterday’s scandal, a maverick who had abandoned abstract expressionism and, with it, the adulation of the art world. Few paid serious attention to the disturbing, profound work he was producing in his Woodstock studio. So when Ross Feld, a young novelist and critic, wrote a penetrating review of Guston’s latest show, the artist sent him a letter of appreciation: “I felt . . . as if we knew each other and had many discussions about painting and literature. In a word—I felt recognition.”Thus began a remarkable friendship. Feld, a frequent visitor to Guston’s studio where the two men would talk late into the night, became Guston’s intellectual sparring partner and sounding board—“I’ll shout it right out,” Guston wrote to Feld, “you inspire me to paint again!”—as well as the artist’s most eloquent critic and champion. Guston in Time is Feld’s final tribute, and it is at once a testament to a friendship, a provocative and richly nuanced study of one of the twentieth century’s most important artists, and a portrait of a remarkable character.
Sam Shepard
> This is the first biography of playwright, director, and actor Sam Shepard in 30 years> Includes dozens of interviews and reveals previously hidden aspects of Shepard’s life, such as his nearly three-decade relationship with actress Jessica Lange
Gifted
"[A] remarkable story." — The New York Times Book Review Henry Fielder, solitary and unmoored in his thirties, runs into an old lover and finds himself ready to tell the story he has harbored for two decades. He is fifteen, in rural western Oregon, enduring a year of sorrows. His mother has died, his father is physically abusive, and his extraordinary spiritual affinity for the wild lives of his native country seems to desert him. An older couple, retiring to the area from California, offer solace and expanded cultural horizons but set him further at odds with his millworker father. The abuse escalates, and ultimately a natural disaster catalyzes a crisis in which father and son betray each other and Henry sets out on a trek through the backcountry of the Oregon Coast Range, seeking to understand what has happened and to forge a new sense of self.A Huck Finn of the modern age, Henry is portrayed with a directness and clarity that pulls readers through the environmental dynamics of the Pacific Northwest. In stark yet beautiful prose that highlights his long tenure as a nature writer, Daniel creates an odyssey that explores the spiritual dimensions and deeply entangled pains and pleasures of belonging to the human domain and the natural world of which it is part.Set in the mid-1990s, when environmentalists and timber communities warred over the future of the last Northwestern old-growth forests, Gifted is the story of a young man with a metaphysical imagination—naïve yet wise, gifted yet ordinary—who comes of age under harsh circumstances, negotiating the wildness of his home country, of his human relationships, and of the emerging complexities of his own being.
Complete Poison Blossoms from a Thicket of Thorn
Following his translation of just over half the original text in 2014, Norman Waddell presents the complete teaching record of Zen master Hakuin, now available in English with extensive explanations, notes, and even the wry, helpful comments that students attending Hakuin’s lectures inscribed in their copies of the text With this volume, Norman Waddell completes his acclaimed translation of the teaching record of one of the greatest Zen masters of all time, Hakuin Ekaku (1685–1769). Hakuin lived at a time when Japanese Buddhism as a whole and his own Rinzai sect in particular were at low ebb. Through tremendous force of character and creative energy, he initiated a reform movement that swept the country, and today, all Rinzai Zen masters trace their lineage through him. This outcome is all the more extraordinary because Hakuin’s base of operations was a small temple in the country town of Hara, where he grew up, not in one of the nation's political, cultural, or commercial centers. This book represents the first full publication of the Keisō Dokuzui in any foreign language. Inspired by the enthusiastic reception that greeted his 2014 selections from the text, Waddell returned to work and now gives us the opportunity to examine the entirety of Hakuin's record and to benefit as never before from the example and instruction of this exuberant personality and remarkable teacher. Poison Blossoms contains a highly diverse set of materials: formal and informal presentations to monastic and lay disciples, poems, practice instructions, inscriptions for paintings, comments on koans, letters, and funeral orations. While most items are brief, easily read in a quick sitting, the book also includes extended commentaries on the Heart Sutra, one of Mahayana Buddhism’s central texts; on the famously difficult Five Ranks of Tung-shan; and on the accomplishments of his eminent predecessor Gudō Tōshoku. Having devoted himself for more than three decades to the study and translation of Hakuin's works, Norman Waddell is peerless when it comes to conveying into English the vital, sometimes elegant, often earthy voice of this outstanding teacher. His command of the subject enables Waddell to elucidate the vast array of idioms and images that Hakuin employed to enliven his poetry and prose—historical and mythological elements, street slang, doctrinal and cultural allusions that would otherwise place these writings beyond the grasp of anyone but a specialist. Waddell's five previous Hakuin translations, each important in its own right, can now be recognized as stepping stones to this towering achievement.
Unframed Originals
In this haunting, elegantly written memoir, W. S. Merwin recalls in utterly unsentimental prose his youth, growing up in a repressed Presbyterian household in the small river towns of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The complex portrait that emerges of a family without language or history, transforms the story of their isolated lives into the development of a writer’s conscience and a warning about the fate of a middle class eager to obliterate origins."This book is superbly written, offering deep glimpses into the complexities and mysteries of family bonds, with just that distancing from people and events necessary for artistic control."—Edmund Fuller, Wall Street Journal
The Gift of Good Land
The essays in The Gift of Good Land are as true today as when they were first published in 1981; the problems addressed here are still true and the solutions no nearer to hand. The insistent theme of this book is the interdependence, the wholeness, the oneness of people, land, weather, animals, and family. To touch one is to tamper with them all. We live in one functioning organism whose separate parts are artificially isolated by our culture. Here, Berry develops the compelling argument that the “gift” of good land has strings attached. We have it only on loan and only for as long as we practice good stewardship.
Practice Resurrection
"Erik Reece is obviously a writer to be reckoned with." —Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature In Erik Reece's stunning collection of essays, ideas are the main characters. Written over a period of ten years, and revealing Reece's continued obsession with religion, family, and the natural world, in many ways these essays represent a sequel to his stirring memoir, An American Gospel . In that book, Reece intimitately describes his conflicted relationship with Christianity in the context of the death of his father, and Reece's own journey since then to find meaning and balance in the material and spiritual worlds. Practice Resurrection continues that exploration through essays that take the reader to Norway, New England, London, the Adirondacks, Appalachia, and back to Reece's native Kentucky River. "With his singular wit and pith, environmental writer Reece explores issues such as God, Christianity, the environment (of course), and his father's suicide in essays rife with sentient turns of phrase and exceptionally insightful passages . . . Few are better than [Reece] is at discussing a personal crisis of faith." — Booklist (starred review)
America's Secret Jihad
The conventional narrative concerning religious terrorism inside the United States says that the first salvo occurred in 1993, with the first attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. This narrative has motivated more than a decade of wars, and re-prioritized America’s domestic security and law enforcement agenda. But the conventional narrative is wrong.A different group of jihadists exists within US borders. This group has a long but hidden history, is outside the purview of public officials and has an agenda as apocalyptic as anything Al Qaeda has to offer. Radical sects of Christianity have inspired some of the most grotesque acts of violence in American history: the 1963 Birmingham Church bombing that killed four young girls; the “Mississippi Burning” murders of three civil rights workers in 1964; the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, the Atlanta Child Murders in the late 1970s; and the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995.America's Secret Jihad uses these crimes to tell a story that has not been told before.Expanding upon the author’s ground-breaking work on the Martin Luther King, Jr. murder, and through the use of extensive documentation, never-before-released interviews, and a re-interpretation of major events, America's Secret Jihad paints a picture of Christian extremism and domestic terrorism as it has never before been portrayed.