Nature Biography

In an effort to make sense of the deaths in quick succession of several loved ones, Kathleen Dean Moore turned to the comfort of the wild, making a series of solitary excursions into ancient forests, wild rivers, remote deserts, and windswept islands to learn what the environment could teach her in her time of pain. This audiobook is the record of her experiences.

Picked by President Thomas Jefferson to explore the unknown wilds of the Louisiana Territory, Meriwether Lewis assembles a rugged team of adventurers, including co-captain William Clark - and a Newfoundland dog named Seaman. As hunter, retriever, and guard, Seaman becomes a trusted member of the Corps of Discovery. While the team tackles raging rivers and muddy shallows, Seaman is there - sharing their hunger and fatigue. Whether Indians threaten or grizzlies roar, he stands his ground. And through mountain peak or valley deep, Seaman remains a watchful friend and determined foe.

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.

In When Everything Beyond the Walls Is Wild, Lilace Mellin Guignard draws from emblematic moments and relationships in her own life to explore issues of gender, recreation, and environmental conservation. Born into a suburban family, Guignard wanted to get up close and personal with iconic American landscapes, but social pressures and cautionary tales told her that these spaces were not meant for her as a woman. Refusing to stay indoors and “safe", Guignard drove cross-country with her dog, worked as a river guide, and set out to climb Mount Whitney.

After travelling the whole world, can exploring a single map ever be enough? Adventurer Alastair Humphreys spends a year investigating the small map around his own home. Can this unassuming landscape, marked by the glow of city lights and the hum of busy roads, satisfy his wanderlust? Could a single map provide a lifetime of exploration?

Charlotte Runcie has always felt pulled to the sea, lured by its soothing, calming qualities but also enlivened and inspired by its salty wildness. When she loses her beloved grandmother and becomes pregnant with her first child, she feels its pull even more intensely. In Salt on Your Tongue Charlotte explores what the sea means to us and particularly what it has meant to women through the ages.

This is Wasserman's seventh book about his encounters with big game poachers in the wilds of Pennsylvania. Join him as he investigates horrific hunting accidents and hunts down some of the most volatile and unstable outlaws you'll ever meet. Wasserman is a wonderful storyteller. His crisp use of dialog makes his characters come alive. Poacher Justice contains seven of his best tales to date.

Ben Mezrich takes us on an exhilarating true adventure story from the icy terrain of Siberia to the cutting-edge genetic labs of Harvard University. A group of young scientists, under the guidance of Dr. George Church, the most brilliant geneticist of our time, works to make fantasy reality by sequencing the DNA of a frozen woolly mammoth harvested from above the Arctic Circle and splicing elements of that sequence into the DNA of a modern elephant.

What compels mountain climbers to take the risks that they do? Is it the thrill in the physical accomplishment, in managing to defy the odds, or both - and why do they continue to do what they do in the face of such great danger? In On the Ridge Between Life and Death, David Roberts confronts these questions head-on as he recounts the exhilarating highs and desperate lows of his climbing career.

Into the Unknown -- Treasures of Nature Great individuals dared to explore and investigate to extend our understanding of the natural world. They have given us a rich knowledge of the treasures of nature. Their valuable discoveries are making a difference today. Into The Unknown -- Treasures of Nature traces the exciting events in the lives of gifted scientists. They made breakthroughs in understand the natural world. Some explored dense and dangerous rain forests, or climbed mountains to their dizzy peaks carrying scientific measuring instruments with them. One found adventure in viewing ...

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."

Prior to his untimely death, in 2010, Captain Phil Harris was a star of Discovery Channel's Deadliest Catch, the hit show that follows the exhilarating lives of Alaskan crab fishermen as they brave the vicious Bering Sea. He led his crew through hurricane-force winds and four-story-high waves, hauling in millions of pounds of crab and raking in millions of dollars. Phil worked hard, but he played even harder....

Mountain search-and-rescue volunteer Bree Loewen's to-do list isn't quite the same as most people's. A former Mount Rainier climbing ranger and trained leader in mountain search-and-rescue, Bree shares the drama and the camaraderie of this work, as well as the challenges of trying to fit her other roles as wife and mother into what is still largely a masculine environment. In a fearless voice - disarming yet laced with dark humor - Bree guides us through intense recoveries, vivid wilderness landscapes, and the warmth she discovers in motherhood, community, and purpose.

Professor David Wilson has spent his professional life working with violent men - especially men who have committed murder. Aged 29 he became, at that time, the UK's youngest ever prison governor in charge of a jail, and his career since then has seen him sat across a table with all sorts of killers: sometimes in a tense interview; sometimes sharing a cup of tea (or something a little stronger); sometimes looking them in the eye to tell them that they are psychopaths.

On the afternoon of July 13, 1977, having become the first climbers to reach the summit of the Ogre, Doug Scott and Chris Bonington began their long descent. In the minutes that followed, any feeling of success from their achievement would be overwhelmed by the start of a desperate fight for survival. And things would only get worse.

Beyond the garden wall lies a wealth of cultivated plants, each with a unique tale to tell. In The Grove, award-winning writer and head gardener Ben Dark reveals the remarkable secrets of 20 commonly found species—including the rose, wisteria, buddleja, box and the tulip—encountered in the front gardens of one London street over the course of year.

Entropy is a law of nature, the one predicting that "things fall apart." Spend enough time outdoors and it will eventually happen to you. When it does, who will pick up the pieces? Who will glue them back together? Professional search and rescue volunteers leave work, home, and their cozy beds to rescue people on the worst day of their lives. They buy their own gear, pay their own gas, and ask nothing more than to make a contribution to the lives of strangers who they'll probably never meet again.

An abiding love of nature lies at the root of all of Rabindranath Tagore’s works. Thousands of pages have been written in appreciation of his writings on nature. However, Tagore has not commonly been considered relevant to the current environmental debate. Using the lens of ecocriticism, the author shows us how Tagore brings up important issues regarding the imbalanced relationship between man and nature, decades before the concept had been formally introduced.

Kangchenjunga is the third highest mountain in the world and a notoriously difficult and dangerous mountain to climb. First climbed from the west in 1955 by a British team comprising Joe Brown, George Band, Tony Streather and Norman Hardie, it waited over 20 years for a second ascent. The third ascent, from the north, followed in 1979 by a four-man team including the visionary British alpinist Doug Scott.

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.