Reading Good Nonfiction Articles on Your Kindle
At present that we're more than than halfway through year two of the COVID-xix pandemic, it'south easy to feel a chip disconnected from the natural globe. Between stay-calm orders, travel restrictions, and the important measures nosotros've been taking to help stop the spread and keep people in our communities safe since March 2020, nosotros haven't had much of a chance (as well our daily walks) to go out there and explore the great outdoors.
Luckily, books are a fantastic mode to indulge in some pandemic escapism and learn nigh nature, wildlife and conservation in the process. That's why we're celebrating the National Parks Service's 105th Anniversary with this roundup of nonfiction books that tin aid you slow down, pay attention to and reconnect with the natural world.
Interested in learning more about climate alter and the environment? Check out our books virtually climate alter reading list and our roundup of movies and Tv shows nearly environmental issues.
"Vesper Flights" by Helen MacDonald
Helen MacDonald'southward Vesper Flights, released in 2020, is a collection of previously published and new essays about the complex relationship between humans and the natural world. Roofing topics like mushroom foraging, the 2014 solar eclipse and watching songbird migrations from the summit of the Empire Country Building, MacDonald's essays serve equally reminders of the pricelessness of the plant and animal life surrounding united states of america.
Vesper Flights is MacDonald's followup to H Is for Hawk, her critically acclaimed memoir nigh grief, the sudden death of her father and her experiences training Northern Goshawks. H Is for Hawk is the recipient of the Samuel Johnson Prize and the 2014 Costa Book of the Year award.
Helen MacDonald, who grew upwardly in Surrey, England, is a naturalist, lecturer and faculty member at the University of Cambridge Department of History and Philosophy of Science.
The Cairngorm Mountains of northeast Scotland provide the setting for poet and mountaineer Nan Shepherd's meditative, lyrical volume about the intersection between mountains and the human imagination. Hailed by The Guardian as "the best book e'er written on nature and mural in Britain" and described by author Jeanette Winterson equally "a kind of geo-poetic exploration of the Cairngorms," The Living Mountain vividly depicts the varied and diverse mural of the Cairngorms in all seasons and atmospheric condition.
Written during the afterwards years of World War II simply not published until 1977, near the end of Shepherd'southward life, The Living Mountain is the result of Shepherd's lifelong obsession with the mountain range and her conviction that "Place and a listen may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered."
Shepherd, born in 1893, lived in her hometown of Aberdeen, Scotland, for most of her adult life. She worked equally a lecturer in English at the Aberdeen College of Educational activity and published several novels set in Northern Scotland.
"Braiding Sweetgrass" by Robin Wall Kimmerer
In this ode to everything the plant globe has to teach humankind, Robin Wall Kimmerer draws on her feel as an Ethnic scientist and botanist to tell a story about "indigenous ways of knowing, scientific cognition, and the story of an Anishinaabekwe scientist trying to bring them together in service to what matters near" in Braiding Sweetgrass.
Sweetgrass (scientific name: Hierochloe odorata), a institute that's sacred to the Potawatomi people, is central to the volume. "It is called wiingaashk – the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth. Breathe information technology in and you start to retrieve things yous didn't know you'd forgotten," Kimmerer writes in the preface.
Through a series of interwoven narratives, Kimmerer advocates for a more reciprocal and interconnected human relationship betwixt humans and the natural earth. Braiding Sweetgrass is a timely and urgent reminder of the value of Indigenous plant knowledge. But it'due south also an investigation into how this Indigenous noesis tin can work mitt in mitt with the scientific method to support life on Earth and ultimately "heal our human relationship with the earth," equally Kimmerer writes.
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and an Indigenous scientist. She is the author of Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. Kimmerer is also an American Distinguished Pedagogy Professor of Environmental and Forest Biology at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
"The Domicile Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man'south Love Affair with Nature" by J. Drew Lanham
In his 2016 memoir The Dwelling Place, writer J. Drew Lanham traces his family's history dorsum to Edgefield Canton, South Carolina, where several generations of his ancestors were enslaved prior to the Civil War. Characterizing Edgefield County as somewhere "like shooting fish in a barrel to pass by on the way somewhere else," Lanham interrogates his own circuitous relationship with the canton, and, by extension, how living in Edgefield County shaped his identity as a Blackness man living in the rural South in the 1970s.
The Home Place was listed as a "All-time Book of 2016" by Forwards Reviews and was a Nautilus Silver Award Winner. William Souder, writer of Under a Wild Sky, described the memoir equally "a wise and deeply felt memoir of a black naturalist's improbable journey." Helen MacDonald, writer of Vesper Flights, characterized The Dwelling house Place every bit "a groundbreaking work about race and the American landscape, and a deep meditation on nature, selfhood, and the nature of home."
Lanham is a birder, naturalist and hunter-conservationist, as well every bit the Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Principal Teacher at Clemson Academy. His essays about the natural globe can be found in Orion, Flycatcher and Wilderness.
"Honouring High Places: The Mountain Life of Junko Tabei" by Junko Tabei
For readers who are looking for a high-stakes gamble narrative, Honouring High Places: The Mountain Life of Junko Tabei fits the bill. Legendary Japanese mountaineer Junko Tabei was the showtime woman to pinnacle Chomolungma (Everest) and climb the Seven Summits. Her memoir, released for the first time in English in 2017 (previously simply available in Japanese), provides a fascinating glimpse into Japanese mountaineering culture and Tabei's groundbreaking life.
Honouring High Places opens with Tabei's recollections from leading the first all-women team to acme Chomolungma, including a harrowing encounter with several avalanches on the mount's slopes. In the memoir'southward diaristic format, Tabei also writes most the gender norms that shaped her babyhood, her quest to climb Mountain Tabor, her cancer diagnosis afterwards in life, and the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima earthquake and tsunami.
"Two Trees Make a Wood" by Jessica J. Lee
Jessica J. Lee's 2020 book, Two Trees Make a Forest: In Search of My Family's Past Among Taiwan's Mountains and Coasts, is delightfully hard to categorize. Part historical narrative, part travelogue and part memoir, Two Trees Make a Forest starts with Lee's discovery of messages written by her grandfather, an immigrant from Taiwan. This leads Lee to travel to Taiwan, her family'south bequeathed home, where she discovers a new manner to think nearly the links between her family unit lineage and the identify where her ancestors lived.
Lee traces the history of Taiwan from the Qing era up to nowadays solar day and writes eloquently most Taiwan's natural landscapes, in what Electrical Literature calls "a poetic tour and anti-colonial reclamation of the island through her descriptions of its flora, fauna, natural disasters, and political history."
Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author, historian, environmentalist and the founding editor of The Willowherb Review. Lee is the winner of the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Author Accolade and holds a doctorate in environmental history.
"Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape" by Lauret Savoy
Over the grade of eight essays, Lauret Savoy investigates how American history and systemic racism take informed the way we call up virtually place and regionality in Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape. Savoy's training every bit a geologist gives her a unique perspective on the intersection of history and identify, and the effect is a collection that writer and conservationist Terry Storm Williams has chosen "a crucial book for our time, a bound sanity, not a forgiveness, but a reckoning."
Lauret Savoy is a woman of African American, Euro-American and Native American heritage and is the David B. Truman Professor of Ecology Studies & Geology at Mount Holyoke College. Trace was the winner of the American Book Award (from the Before Columbus Foundation) and the ASLE Environmental Artistic Writing Award and was a finalist for the PEN American Open Book Award.
"Horizon" by Barry Lopez
Barry Lopez's sweeping, world-spanning travel memoir couldn't have come up at a better fourth dimension. Released in January 2020, Horizon provided a much-needed bit of escapism for readers sheltering in place and quarantining due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Lopez'south memoir is focused on his fourth dimension spent in six regions — Coastal Oregon, the High Arctic, the Galápagos Islands, the Kenyan desert, Australia's Botany Bay and the glaciers of Antarctica.
Every bit Lopez unravels the histories of these places, he likewise looks inwards, reminding the reader that "to enquire into the intricacies of a distant landscape, then, is to provoke thoughts about one'south own interior landscape, and the familiar landscapes of memory." Horizon also interrogates our Earth's future, asking what should be done to tiresome global warming and providing readers with real-globe examples of the damaging impacts of climate change.
Barry Lopez is the author of Arctic Dreams (winner of the National Book Laurels), Of Wolves and Men, and Crow and Weasel. He received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Lannan and National Science foundations. Lopez died in 2020 at the age of 75.
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