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nature themed e-books. |
The Annotated Anne of Green Gables by Since its publication in 1908, Anne of Green Gables has been a continuous international best-seller, enjoying successful television adaptations on PBS and The Disney Channel, and captivating children and adults alike with the irresistible charms of its remarkable heroine, Anne Shirley. This wildly imaginative, red-headed chatterbox tries to fit into the narrow confines of Victorian expectations, but her exuberant spirit keeps leaping delightfully beyond the bounds. Indeed, when Maud Montgomery decided to reject the sermonizing formulas of the children's books of her day, she brought to life a character much closer to Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and Tom Sawyer--also orphans, like Anne--than to the self-sacrificing, conformist heroines then in demand. In doing so, Montgomery subtly questioned the values of her society--the stifling restraints of its religion and most especially its treatment of women--while giving readers all the pleasures of her considerable story-telling gifts. Now, in this first fully annotated edition of Anne of Green Gables, readers will appreciate more clearly than ever before the scope and depth of this extraordinary novel. Editors Margaret Anne Doody, Mary Doody Jones, and Wendy Barry provide a richly illustrated, completely revised text, along with hundreds of notes describing the real-life characters and settings Anne encounters, the autobiographical connections between Anne and Maud Montgomery, and the book's astonishing range of literary, biblical, and mythological references. Additional essays offer fascinating background information on such topics as the geography and settlement of Prince Edward Island (where Anne takes place); the education, orphanages, music, and literature of Anne's time; and the horticulture, homemade artifacts, and food preparation that are so prevalent in the story. Margaret Anne Doody supplies a comprehensive introduction, which situates the novel in its literary and social contexts, explores those aspects of Montgomery's life most relevant to the story, examines revisions in the manuscripts, and provides an overall sense of both the impulses that drove Montgomery to write Anne of Green Gables and the larger concerns it dramatizes so compellingly. This edition also contains a chronology of Montgomery's life, an extensive bibliography, songs and poems that appear in the text, and a selection of original reviews of the book. This wealth of material enables readers to grasp the marvelous multi-layeredness of the novel and to understand more fully its place in both its own time and in ours. Elegantly and beautifully designed, with generous illustrations from previous editions, photographs of the places the novel inhabits, and explanatory drawings that reproduce the texture of Anne's world, The Annotated Anne of Green Gables is a major event in the publishing history of one of the world's most charming stories.
Birds of America by An "endlessly fascinating novel" of an American student finding his way in 1960s Paris from the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Group (San Francisco Chronicle). It is 1964, and Peter Levi, a young student and bird watcher, has come to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. Shy and innocent at nineteen years old, he arrives fresh from an extended Maine holiday with his vivacious mother, and is determined to live a life free of unwanted complications and unnecessary stress. But this is an era of great change in the world, a time when war is looming in Southeast Asia and social unrest is simmering. There is much to trouble and confuse the young American as he journeys through foreign countries--and feelings--into adulthood. For Peter, the simplicity of childhood is over--and his new life is becoming increasingly complex in a world growing more unrecognizable by the day. Mary McCarthy's splendid Birds of America is a moving and surprising coming-of-age tale: the unforgettable story of a young man's awakening, and a stunning evocation of the disorienting change of the 1960s. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author's estate. 
Middlemarch by A masterful tale of a small town in the English midlands, and the hopes, regrets, and unrealized dreams of those who make it their home. In Middlemarch, George Eliot created a landmark of English literature as she incisively portrayed the drama and folly found in even the most simple and bucolic of precincts. Intertwined are the lives and stories of unforgettable characters such as Dorothea Brooke, whose desire for intellectual fulfillment leads her to marry the Reverend Edward Casaubon, who coldly refuses to let her follow her ambitions; Tertius Lydgate, a young doctor whose wife, Rosamond, sees him as a stepping stone to a greater place in society; Mr. Bulstrode, the wealthy town financier whose past corruptions return to plague him; and a menagerie of players large and small who find themselves both driven by their own motivations and held in stagnation by the will of others. As complex in theme as it is heart-wrenching and engaging, Middlemarch stands as a true classic of Victorian-era storytelling. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
Persuasion by Jane Austen's classic novel about a second chance at love Anne Elliot is a perfect catch. Born to a landed family, she's observant and intelligent. When Anne came of age, she accepted a proposal from the ambitious officer Frederick Wentworth. Unfortunately, Wentworth's modest means made him a poor choice for the Elliot family, and Anne was persuaded to call off the engagement. One refused marriage and nearly a decade later, Anne has not forgotten about Wentworth. Little does she know that her fortune is about to change. When the Elliots make ill-advised investments and lose their money, they are forced to rent out their ancestral home and move to Bath. There, Anne once again meets Wentworth, who is now a captain, in what could be her second and final chance at love and marriage. Buttressed by the author's humane characterization and sharp social commentary, Persuasion is a must-read for any Jane Austen fan. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
A Room with a View by A Room with a View is a romance and a social critique of Edwardian society. A young woman is chaperoned to Italy by her bitter aunt. There she meets an intriguing, but eccentric young man. Back in England she finds herself respectably engaged to a proper gentleman, but is thrown into a muddle when her young man from Italy moves to her English town. The novel celebrates the chaotic, unsure muddle of feelings over a kind of lifeless acceptance of the way things are.
The Secret Garden by Spoiled and rude, Mary Lennox has been raised by servants as her parents had no time for her. When her parents die in a cholera epidemic, Mary suddenly becomes an orphan. She moves to her uncle's mysterious house in England. The huge mansion and its friendly staff offer Mary a new kind of environment in which to grow. As she explores, she discovers a key to a secret garden and builds friendships with a local boy and her invalid cousin. A story of overcoming selfish desires, this unabridged version of Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic English novel is taken from the 1911 copyright edition, with original illustrations by Charles Robinson.
The Wind in the Willows by 'Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.'So says Rat to Mole, as he introduces him to the delights of the river and his friends Toad, the spirit of rebellion, and Badger, the spirit of England. But it is a world where the motor-car is about to wreck the gipsy caravan, the revolutionaries in the Wild Wood are threatening the social fabric,the god Pan is abroad, and the warm seductive whispers of the south are drifting into the English lanes.An international children's classic, The Wind in the Willows grew from the author's letters to his young son, yet it is concerned almost exclusively with adult themes: fear of radical changes in political, social, and economic power. Mole's acceptance into the conservative world of the River Bank,and Toad's wild attempts to escape from it, are narrated in virtuoso language ranging from lively parody to elaborate fin-de-siecle mysticism. A profoundly English fiction with a world following, it is a book for adults adopted by children, a timeless masterpiece, and a vital portrait of anage.
The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Sixteen-year-old Kit Tyler is marked by suspicion and disapproval from the moment she arrives on the unfamiliar shores of colonial Connecticut in 1687. Alone and desperate, she has been forced to leave her beloved home on the island of Barbados and join a family she has never met. Torn between her quest for belonging and her desire to be true to herself, Kit struggles to survive in a hostile place. Just when it seems she must give up, she finds a kindred spirit. But Kit's friendship with Hannah Tupper, believed by the colonists to be a witch, proves more taboo than she could have imagined and ultimately forces Kit to choose between her heart and her duty. Elizabeth George Speare won the 1959 Newbery Medal for this portrayal of a heroine whom readers will admire for her unwavering sense of truth as well as her infinite capacity to love.
Almost Somewhere by Day One, and already she was lying in her journal. It was 1993, Suzanne Roberts had just finished college, and when her friend suggested they hike California's John Muir Trail, the adventure sounded like the perfect distraction from a difficult home life and thoughts about the future. But she never imagined that the twenty-eight-day hike would change her life. Part memoir, part nature writing, part travelogue, Almost Somewhere is Roberts's account of that hike. John Muir had written of the Sierra Nevada as a "vast range of light," and this was exactly what Roberts was looking for. But traveling with two girlfriends, one experienced and unflappable and the other inexperienced and bulimic, she quickly discovered that she needed a new frame of reference. Her story of a month in the backcountry--confronting bears, snowy passes, broken equipment, injuries, and strange men--is as much about finding a woman's way into outdoor experience as it is about the natural world she so eloquently describes. Candid and funny and, finally, wise, Almost Somewhere is not just the whimsical coming-of-age story of a young woman ill-prepared for a month in the mountains but also the reflection of a distinctly feminine view of nature. Watch a book trailer. Purchase the audio edition.
The Gentle Subversive by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring antagonized some of the most powerful interests in the nation--including the farm block and the agricultural chemical industry--and helped launch the modern environmental movement. In The Gentle Subversive, Mark Hamilton Lytle offers a compact life of Carson,illuminating the road that led to this vastly influential book.Lytle explores the evolution of Carson's ideas about nature, her love for the sea, her career as a biologist, and above all her emergence as a writer of extraordinary moral and ecological vision. We follow Carson from her childhood on a farm outside Pittsburgh, where she first developed herlove of nature (and where, at age eleven, she published her first piece in a children's magazine), to her graduate work at Johns Hopkins and her career with the Fish and Wildlife Service. Lytle describes the genesis of her first book, Under a Sea Wind, the incredible success of The Sea Around Us (aNew York Times Bestseller for over a year), and her determination to risk her fame in order to write her "poison book": Silent Spring. The author contends that despite Carson's demure, lady-like demeanor, she was subversive in her thinking and aggressive in her campaign against pesticides. Carsonbecame the spokeswoman for a network of conservationists, scientists, and concerned citizens who had come to fear the mounting dangers of the human assault on nature. What makes this story particularly compelling is that Carson took up this cause at the very moment when she herself faced a losingbattle against cancer.Succinct and engaging, The Gentle Subversive is a story of success, celebrity, controversy, and vindication. It will inspire anyone interested in protecting the natural world or in women's struggle to find a voice in society.
Hawthorn by An engaging introduction to the ancient hawthorn tree and its varied roles in human history One of humankind's oldest companions, the hawthorn tree is bound up in the memories of every recorded age and the plot lines of cultures across the Northern Hemisphere. In Hawthorn, Bill Vaughn examines the little-recognized political, cultural, and natural history of this ancient spiky plant. Used for thousands of years in the impenetrable living fences that defined the landscapes of Europe, the hawthorn eventually helped feed the class antagonism that led to widespread social upheaval. In the American Midwest, hawthorn-inspired hedges on the prairies made nineteenth-century farming economically rewarding for the first time. Later, in Normandy, mazelike hedgerows bristling with these thorns nearly cost the Allies World War II. Vaughn shines light on the full scope of the tree's influence over human events. He also explores medicinal value of the hawthorn, the use of its fruit in the world's first wine, and the symbolic role its spikes and flowers played in pagan beliefs and Christian iconography. As entertaining as it is illuminating, this book is the first full appreciation of the hawthorn's abundant connections with humanity. 
The Hunt for the Golden Mole by Taking as its narrative engine the hunt for an animal that is legendarily rare, Richard Girling writes an engaging and highly informative history of humankind's interest in hunting and collecting - what prompts us to do this? what good might come of our need to catalog all the living things of the natural world? Girling, named Environmental Journalist of the Years 2008 and 2009, has here chronicled - through the hunt for the Somali golden mole - the development of the conservation movement, the importance of diversity in the animal kingdom, including humankind within this realm, as well as a hard look at extinction. The Somali mole of the title, first descibed in print in a text book published in 1964, had as sole evidence of its existence only the fragment of a jaw bone found in an owl pellet, a specimen that seemed to have vanished as Girling began his exploration. Intrigued by the elusiveness of this creature and what the hunt for the facts of its existence might tell us about extinction, he was drawn to the dusty vaults of museums of natural history where the most rare artifacts are stored and catalogued, as he found himself caught up in the need to track it down. Part quest, part travelog, the book that results not only offers an important voice to the scientific debate about extinction and biodiversity it becomes an environmental call to arms.
The Spirit of the Appalachian Trail by "Want to know what wilderness means to people who live it for over two thousand miles? Then read this extremely interesting, informative, intelligent, and thoughtful book." --Roger S. Gottlieb, author of Engaging Voices: Tales of Morality and Meaning in an Age of Global Warming "There is no doubt that Bratton's book will be of value to students and scholars of leisure studies, recreation, and religion. Those who are familiar with the Appalachian Trail sense intuitively that a journey along its length kindles spiritual awakening; this book provides the hard data to prove it's true." --David Brill, author of As Far as the Eye Can See: Reflections of an Appalachian Trail Hiker The Appalachian Trail covers 2,180 miles, passing through fourteen states from Georgia to Maine. Each year, an estimated 2-3 million people visit the trail, and almost two thousand attempt a "thru-hike," walking the entire distance of the path. For many, the journey transcends a mere walk in the woods and becomes a modern-day pilgrimage. In The Spirit of the Appalachian Trail: Community, Environment, and Belief, Susan Power Bratton addresses the spiritual dimensions of hiking the Appalachian Trail (AT). Hikers often comment on how their experience as thru-hikers changes them spiritually forever, but this is the first study to evaluate these religious or quasireligious claims critically. Rather than ask if wilderness and outdoor recreation have benefits for the soul, this volume investigates specifically how long-distance walking might enhance both body and mind. Most who are familiar with the AT sense intuitively that a trek along its length kindles spiritual awakening. Using both a quantitative and qualitative approach, this book provides the hard data to support this notion. Bratton bases her work on five sources: an exhaustive survey of long-distance AT hikers, published trail diaries and memoirs, hikers? own logs and postings, her own personal observations from many years on the trail, and conversations with numerous members of the AT community, including the "trail angels," residents of small towns along the path who attend to hikers? need for food, shelter, or medical attention. The abundant photographs reinforce the text and enable visualization of the cultural and natural context. This volume is fully indexed with extensive reference and notes sections and detailed appendixes. Written in an engaging and accessible style, The Spirit of the Appalachian Trail presents a full picture of the spirituality of the AT. Susan Power Bratton is professor of environmental studies. She is the author of Six Billion and More: Human Population Regulation and Christian Ethics, Environmental Values in Christian Art, and Christianity, Wilderness, and Wildlife: The Original Desert Solitaire. 
To Yosemite and Beyond by When John Muir died in 1914, the pre-eminent American naturalist, explorer, and conservationist had not yet written the second volume of his autobiography, in which he planned to cover his Yosemite years. Editors Robert Engberg and Donald Wesling have here provided a remedy. Their account begins in 1863, the year Muir left the University of Wisconsin for what he termed the "University of the Wilderness." Following an accident in 1867 that nearly left him blind, he vowed to turn from machines and continue to study nature. That led, in 1868, to his first visit to Yosemite Valley, where he began his glacier studies. Muir spent much time exploring the Yosemite region, Tuolumne, and both the southern and northern Sierras, publishing articles, and keeping extensive journals through 1875, when he began to write for the San Francisco Bulletin and expanded his travels to areas throughout the west. Mining a rich vein of sources--Muir's letters, journals, articles, and unpublished manuscripts, as well as selections drawn from biographical pieces written about Muir by people who met him in Yosemite in the early 1870s--Engberg and Wesling have assembled what they term a "composite autobiography," providing brief interpretive and transitional passages throughout the book. This work is especially valuable because it documents Muir's formative years, when he is maturing away from "conventional cultural paradigms of work and materialism toward new ways of thinking about nature and its impact on human development." 
Wildflowers of the High Sierra and John Muir Trail by This new book by Sierra expert Elizabeth Wenk includes photos and descriptions of approximately 300 species of wildflowers and flowering shrubs in the High Sierra. Focused on areas above 8,000 feet in elevation from Yosemite south through the Whitney Region, by restricting the collection of species to higher elevations, the book can include all commonly seen species and nearly half of all higher elevation species in a compact guide. Make plant identification more approachable to hikers, this book differentiates between species using features easily identifiable to a non-botanist. Descriptions include the species' common and scientific names, family name, growth form, flowering time, elevation range, region, specific locations on popular trails, and how to identify the plant using color, petal number, leaf shape, height, and more.
City of Eternal Spring by Winner of the 2015 Phillis Wheatley Book Award (poetry category) This is the final book in the Plum Flower Trilogy by Afaa Michael Weaver, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The two earlier books, The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985 to 2005 and The Government of Nature, reveal similar themes that address the author's personal experience with childhood abuse through the context of Daoist renderings of nature as a metaphor for the human body, with an eye to recovery and forgiveness in a very eclectic spiritual life. City of Eternal Spring chronicles Weaver's travels abroad in Taiwan and China, as well as showing the limits of cultural influence.
Poems by Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886) was an eccentric, reclusive poet, though born to a family of good standing within their Massachusetts community. She had fewer than a dozen poems published in her lifetime, though posthumously her sister found a cache of nearly eighteen hundred, all of which have now been published. Emily's style was broke with the common forms of poetry at the time, and foreshadowed what was to come. Her work was harshly criticized when first published, but she is now considered one of the American greats.
The Road to the Spring by The Road to the Spring is the first book publication of Mary Austin's (1868-1934) poems. Best known for her prose book The Land of Little Rain (1903), Austin was in fact a poet from the beginning of her career to the end, even though she never published a volume dedicated to her own original poetry. Instead, Austin's work came to light in collections of poetry and in prestigious journals such as Poetry, the Nation, the Forum, Harper's, and Saturday Review of Literature, among many others. The Road to the Spring contains more than 200 poems, most of which can only be found in out-of-print books, magazines, and periodicals, and her unpublished manuscripts archived at the Huntington Library. This singular publication includes her original work, poems she claimed to have written with her grammar school pupils at the end of the nineteenth century, and her translations and "re-expressions" of Native American songs, which often diverge greatly from any other known sources. Warren includes an introduction, laying out Austin's place in American literature and situating her writings in feminist, environmentalist, regionalist, and Native American contexts. He also includes notes for those new to Austin's work, glossing Native terms, geographical names, and the ethnological sources of the Native songs she re-creates.
Spring by Representing nothing less than a tour-de-force of formal invention and emotional intensity, Oni Buchanans Spring encompasses radically contrasting work. Ecstatic, visually intricate rhapsodies are juxtaposed with tight, sonnet-like poems, and wispy columns of verse brush up against large-scale epics and kinetic text. This collections point of departure is the paradox of existence as an individual in a political and violent world. All of the formal innovations in this book have in common an urgent need for texture and polyphony, and the poems attempt to discover how to fulfill the individual human responsibility of surviving as a resiliently loving and hopeful living creature. An accompanying multimedia compact disc offers a full Flash-animated version of the printed kinetic work, The Mandrake Vehicles.?
