Nature Biography

As he was composing what was to become his most enduring and popular book, E. B. White was obeying that oft-repeated maxim: "Write what you know." Helpless pigs, silly geese, clever spiders, greedy rats - White knew all of these characters in the barns and stables where he spent his favorite hours. In The Story of Charlotte's Web, Michael Sims shows how White solved what critic Clifton Fadiman once called "the standing problem of the juvenile-fantasy writer: how to find, not another Alice, but another rabbit hole."

In 2007, after 20 years of living in London, Kate Humble and her husband Ludo decided it was time to leave city life behind them. Three years later, now the owner of a Welsh smallholding, Kate hears that a nearby farm is to be broken up and sold off. Another farm lost; another opportunity for a young farmless farmer gone. Desperate to stop the sale, Kate contacts the council with an alternative plan - to keep the farm working and to run a rural skills and animal husbandry school alongside it. Against all odds, she succeeds.

As her twenty-first birthday approached, Marina Gibson received a unique gift suggestion from her parents, who offered her a choice between fishing rods or jewelry. In an unconventional decision, she opted for fishing rods. Her intention was to rekindle a childhood passion and carry on a family tradition initiated by her mother, who had dedicated years to pursuing salmon in the rivers of the Scottish Highlands. As fishing overtook Marina’s life and evolved into a full-time career, she became enraptured by the silent mysteries of the river and the quiet magic of angling.

The most accomplished mountain runner of all time contemplates his record-breaking climb of Mount Everest in this profound and free-flowing memoir - an intellectual and spiritual journey that moves from the earth’s highest peak to the soul’s deepest reaches. What drives a person to the edge of one of the most difficult and revered mountains in the world? How much is one willing to sacrifice and suffer to pursue an authentic and bold life?

Penguin Audio presents The Push by Tommy Caldwell, read by Johnathan McClain. A dramatic, inspiring memoir by legendary rock climber Tommy Caldwell, the first person to free climb the Dawn Wall of Yosemite's El Capitan. On January 14, 2015, Tommy Caldwell, along with his partner, Kevin Jorgeson, summited what is widely regarded as the hardest climb in history Yosemite's nearly vertical 3,000 foot Dawn Wall, after 19 days on the route. Caldwell's odds-defying feat was the culmination of an entire lifetime of pushing himself to his limits as an athlete.

How can we begin to talk about what is happening to the world? We are facing a global emergency. Temperatures are rising. Mass species extinction has begun. The time for denial is over. It is time to act. Letters to the Earth is the beginning of a new story. It is an invitation to act and an opportunity to extend the invitation. These letters are the result of a callout from Culture Declares Emergency to the public to write a response to climate and ecological emergency.

In the great depths surrounding the Lofoten islands in Norway lives the infamous Greenland shark. At 26 feet in length and weighing more than a ton, it is truly a beast to behold. But the shark is not just known for its size alone: Its meat contains a toxin that, when consumed, has been known to make people drunk and hallucinatory.

A deeply moving story of the beauty and brutality of life, and death, on the world's most unpredictable and perilous mountain. Sitting just lower than Everest at 8,611 meters above sea level on the China-Pakistan border, the Savage Mountain claims the lives of even the most experienced climbers. Alongside severe altitude, the weather is notoriously volatile and the climb relentlessly steep. A staggering one in four attempts result in death on the mountain.

Madhav Gadgil was born in Pune in 1942, just as Salim Ali's superbly illustrated Book of Indian Birds was published. Influenced by his birdwatcher father, he learnt to recognize birds from their pictures even before he could read. He is an unusual combination of a person fascinated by the diversity of the natural world, of the landscapes and the life they support, as well as the diversity of cultures and lifestyles of the people firmly rooted to India's soil. He has dedicated himself to intellectual pursuits ranging over mathematics, natural and social sciences, history and public policy.

At dusk on 24 September 1975, Doug Scott and Dougal Haston became the first Britons to reach the summit of Everest as lead climbers on Chris Bonington's epic expedition to the mountain's immense south-west face. As darkness fell, Scott and Haston scraped a small cave in the snow 100 metres below the summit and survived the highest bivouac ever - without bottled oxygen, sleeping bags and, as it turned out, frostbite.

Jeanne Villepreux-Power was never expected to be a scientist. Born in 1794 in a French village more than 100 miles from the ocean, she pursued an improbable path that brought her to the island of Sicily. There, she took up natural history and solved the two-thousand-year-old mystery of how the argonaut octopus gets its shell. In an era when most research focused on dead specimens, Jeanne was determined to experiment on living animals. And to keep sea creatures alive for her studies, she had to invent a contraption to hold them: the aquarium.

Once a killing ground for whalers hunting a leviathan they called the "devilfish," the San Ignacio Lagoon in Baja, Mexico, is now an environmental and spiritual sanctuary—the only place in the world where animals in their natural aquatic environment routinely seek out human contact. A nursery for the gray whale since before recorded history, the lagoon and its stories, told here by James Michael Dorsey, illuminate the magic of human connection to animals, and what those bonds teach us about ourselves and our purpose on this shared planet.

A firsthand account of hiking the entire Appalachian Trail in 2009. Starting in Georgia and continuing on foot nearly 2,200 miles to Maine, this is a collection of stories, adventures, and experiences from the Appalachian Trail. Anyone who has hiked or wishes to hike the AT will benefit from this easy and enjoyable listen.

In the wake of a significant breakup, Luke Turner is visited by familiar demons, including depression and guilt surrounding his bisexual identity, experiences of sexual abuse, and confusion brought on by an intensely religious upbringing. With nowhere to turn, Turner seeks refuge in London’s Epping Forest, where unexpected, elusive threats seem to have replaced its former comforts. No stranger to compulsion, Turner finds himself repeatedly drawn to the woods, eager to uncover its secrets and investigate an old family rumor of illicit behavior that once happened there.

Fanny Bullock Workman was a complicated and restless woman who defied the rigid Victorian morals she found as restrictive as a corset. With her frizzy, brown hair tucked under a topee, Workman was a force on the mountain and off. Instrumental in breaking the British stranglehold on Himalayan mountain climbing, this American woman climbed more peaks than any of her peers, became the first woman to map the far reaches of the Himalayas, the first woman to lecture at the Sorbonne, and the second to address the Royal Geographic Society of London.

Ron Fawcett is a natural-born climber. In 1969, while still at school in his native Yorkshire, he tied into a climbing rope for the first time and was instantly hooked. From that moment on, it seemed nothing else in his life mattered nearly as much as his next vertical fix... Fawcett found the pressures of the limelight too much to bear, and at the end of the 1980s he faded from view. Now, for the first time, he tells his extraordinary story, of how his love of nature and the outdoors developed into a passion for climbing that took him to the top - and almost consumed him.

When Helen Lehndorf moves to the city after a childhood living off the land in rural Taranaki, she can't help but feel different from her peers and professors. She finds solace in long walks foraging weeds and plants along the river, but something inside her still longs for home. Chasing a feeling of ancestral belonging, she travels to England with her new husband. There they learn about nature as the commons, shared between all who encounter it - a source of delight, food, medicine.

After a nearly fatal bout of appendicitis, Hal Borland decided to leave the city behind and move with his wife to a farmhouse in rural Connecticut. Their new home on one hundred acres inspired Borland to return to nature. In this masterpiece of American nature writing, he describes such wonders as the peace of a sky full of stars, the breathless beauty of blossoming plants, the way rain swishes as it hits a river, and the invigorating renewal brought by the changing seasons. The delights of nature as Borland observes them seem boundless, and his sense of awe is contagious.

The Will of Heaven is the powerful true story of how one woman overcame a debilitating addiction - rising from the courtrooms of her past to the grass plains of Kenya as a conservation research scientist. It was there she could finally fulfill her lifelong dream of working with wild elephants.

A stirring look at nonviolent activism, from American suffragists to civil rights to the climate change movement. We Are Power brings to light the incredible individuals who have used nonviolent activism to change the world.