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Two Trees Make a Forest
- In Search of My Family's Past Among Taiwan's Mountains and Coasts
- Narrated by: Jessica J. Lee
- Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
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Publisher's summary
National best seller
Winner of the 2020 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize
Winner of the 2021 Banff Mountain Book Prize in Adventure Travel
Shortlisted for Canada Reads 2021
One of The Globe and Mail’s “100 favourite books of 2020”
On CBC’s list of “the best Canadian nonfiction of 2020”
An exhilarating, anti-colonial reclamation of nature writing and memoir, rooted in the forests and flatlands of Taiwan from the winner of the RBC Taylor Prize for Emerging Writers
"Two Trees Make a Forest is a finely faceted meditation on memory, love, landscape - and finding a home in language. Its short, shining sections tilt yearningly toward one another; in form as well as content, this is a beautiful book about the distance between people and between places, and the means of their bridging." (Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland)
A chance discovery of letters written by her immigrant grandfather leads Jessica J. Lee to her ancestral homeland, Taiwan. There, she seeks his story while growing closer to the land he knew.
Lee hikes mountains home to Formosan flamecrests, birds found nowhere else on earth, and swims in a lake of drowned cedars. She bikes flatlands where spoonbills alight by fish farms, and learns about a tree whose fruit can float in the ocean for years, awaiting landfall.
Throughout, Lee unearths surprising parallels between the natural and human stories that have shaped her family and their beloved island. Joyously attentive to the natural world, Lee also turns a critical gaze upon colonialist explorers who mapped the land and named plants, relying on and often effacing the labor and knowledge of local communities.
Two Trees Make a Forest is a genre-shattering book encompassing history, travel, nature, and memoir, an extraordinary narrative showing how geographical forces are interlaced with our family stories.
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Critic reviews
WINNER of the 2021 Banff Mountain Book Prize in Adventure Travel
WINNER of the 2020 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize
Shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature
Shortlisted for Canada Reads 2021
On CBC’s list of “the best Canadian nonfiction of 2020”
One of:
The Globe and Mail’s “100 favourite books of 2020”
The Guardian's Best Books of the Year
CBC’s “24 Canadian books to read during Women's History Month”
Toronto Star's “Book gift ideas for lovers of the good life”
“Like a forest itself, Jessica J. Lee’s book is mesmerizing on the scale of both the intimate and the vast. With gorgeous language that sings in your head like the songs of the birds in the trees, she deftly stitches together nature and travel writing with history and memoir. This book is a triumph. It left me longing to pack my boots and set off for the dew-covered mountains of Taiwan.” —Juli Berwald, author of Spineless
“A poignant and beautifully written account of family, time, and place.” —Library Journal
“[A] luminescent exploration of family and landscape in Taiwan . . . a powerful, beautifully written account of the connections between people and the places they call home.” —The Times Literary Supplement
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Story
What do you do when your world ends? At 28 years old, Krista Schlyer sold almost everything she owned and packed the rest of it in a station wagon bound for the American wild. Her two best friends joined her - one a grumpy, grieving introvert, the other a feisty dog - and together they sought out every national park, historic site, forest, and wilderness they could get to before their money ran out or their minds gave in.
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No a travelogue - its a diary
- By Jonathan on 12-29-20
By: Krista Schlyer
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Full Circle
- A Pacific Journey with Michael Palin
- By: Michael Palin
- Narrated by: Michael Palin
- Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins
- Abridged
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Following the hugely popular and successful Around the World in 80 Days and Pole to Pole, Michael Palin set off to meet another challenge: an anti-clockwise circumnavigation of the world's largest ocean, the Pacific.
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Excellent, per usual
- By Enroute8 on 06-03-07
By: Michael Palin
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In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond
- In Search of the Sasquatch
- By: John Zada
- Narrated by: Pete Cross
- Length: 8 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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On the central and north coast of British Columbia, the Great Bear Rainforest is the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world, containing more organic matter than any other terrestrial ecosystem on the planet. The area plays host to a wide range of species, from thousand-year-old western cedars to humpback whales to iconic white Spirit bears. According to local residents, another giant is said to live in these woods.
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Not a relatable book
- By RJK on 07-14-19
By: John Zada
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The Hour of Land
- A Personal Topography of America's National Parks
- By: Terry Tempest Williams
- Narrated by: Terry Williams
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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For years, America's national parks have provided public breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why close to 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now, to honor the centennial of the National Park Service, Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, returns with The Hour of Land, a literary celebration of our national parks, what they mean to us, and what we mean to them.
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It could have been good.
- By udzuzu on 04-14-18
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House of Rain
- Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest
- By: Craig Childs
- Narrated by: Craig Childs
- Length: 15 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In this landmark work on the Anasazi tribes of the Southwest, naturalist Craig Childs dives head-on into the mysteries of this vanished people. The various tribes that made up the Anasazi people converged on Chaco Canyon (New Mexico) during the 11th century to create a civilization hailed as "the Las Vegas of its day", a flourishing cultural center that attracted pilgrims from far and wide, and a vital crossroads of the prehistoric world. By the 13th century, however, Chaco's vibrant community had disappeared without a trace.
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Poetic Travel Log
- By Staci Adleman on 01-09-19
By: Craig Childs
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Lassoing the Sun
- A Year in America's National Parks
- By: Mark Woods
- Narrated by: Corey M. Snow
- Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Many childhood summers, Mark Woods piled into a station wagon with his parents and two sisters and headed to America's national parks. Mark's most vivid childhood memories are set against a backdrop of mountains, woods, and fireflies in places like Redwood, Yosemite, and Grand Canyon national parks. On the eve of turning 50, and a little burned out, Mark decided to reconnect with the great outdoors. He'd spend a year visiting the national parks.
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great narrator, lackluster story, wonderful themes
- By MT on 08-21-18
By: Mark Woods
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Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All
- A New Zealand Story
- By: Christina Thompson
- Narrated by: Sarah Mollo-Christensen
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All is the story of the cultural collision between Westerners and the Maoris of New Zealand, told partly as a history of the complex and bloody period of contact between Europeans and the Maoris in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and partly as the story of Christina Thompson's marriage to a Maori man.
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a beautiful story
- By Pumpkin99 on 12-24-22
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The Boiling River
- TED Books
- By: Andrés Ruzo
- Narrated by: Andrés Ruzo
- Length: 2 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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In this exciting true adventure mixed with amazing scientific study, a young, exuberant explorer and geoscientist journeys deep into the Amazon - where rivers boil and legends come to life. When Andrés Ruzo was just a small boy in Peru, his grandfather told him the story of a mysterious legend: There is a river, deep in the Amazon, that boils as if a fire burns below it. Twelve years later, Ruzo - now a geoscientist - hears his aunt mention that she herself had visited this strange river....
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Fantastic story about the Peruvian Amazon.
- By S Massie on 02-22-16
By: Andrés Ruzo
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The Good Rain
- Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest
- By: Timothy Egan
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 12 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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A fantastic book! Timothy Egan describes his journeys in the Pacific Northwest through visits to salmon fisheries, redwood forests and the manicured English gardens of Vancouver. Here is a blend of history, anthropology and politics.
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White man bad, capitalism bad
- By Forget about it on 04-15-21
By: Timothy Egan
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Secrets of the Savanna
- Twenty-Three Years in the African Wilderness Unraveling the Mysteries of Elephants and People
- By: Mark Owens, Delia Owens
- Narrated by: Donna Postel, Sean Runnette
- Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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In this riveting real-life adventure, Mark and Delia Owens tell the dramatic story of their last years in Africa, fighting to save elephants, villagers, and - in the end - themselves. The award-winning zoologists and pioneering conservationists describe their work in the remote and ruggedly beautiful Luangwa Valley, in northeastern Zambia. There they studied the mysteries of the elephant population’s recovery after poaching, discovering remarkable similarities between humans and elephants.
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A vivid view of the savanna in Africa, culture and wildlife!
- By Kd on 09-12-20
By: Mark Owens, and others
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The Marches
- A Borderland Journey Between England and Scotland
- By: Rory Stewart
- Narrated by: Rory Stewart
- Length: 12 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Ten years after the walk across Central Asia and Afghanistan that he memorialized in The Places in Between, Rory Stewart set out on a new journey, traversing a thousand miles between England and Scotland. Stewart was raised along the border of the two countries, the frontier taking on poignant significance in his understanding of what it means to be both Scottish and English, of his relationship with his father, who's lived on this land his whole life, and of his ties to the rich history and culture of the region.
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Uneven and unexpected, still worth it.
- By Nassir on 04-29-17
By: Rory Stewart