Empfehlungen basierend auf "The Awakening Land: The Trees, The Fields, & The Town"

A dazzlingly original, lyrical and epic encounter with the Earth as it used to beThis is the past as we've never seen it before.Otherlands is an epic, exhilarating journey into deep time, showing us the Earth as it used to exist, and the worlds that were here before ours. Travelling back in time to the dawn of complex life, and across all seven continents, award-winning young palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday gives us a mesmerizing up close encounter with eras that are normally unimaginably distant.Halliday immerses us in a series of ancient landscapes, from the mammoth steppe in Ice Age Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica, with its colonies of giant penguins, to Ediacaran Australia, where the moon is far brighter than ours today. We visit the birthplace of humanity; we hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the Earth has ever known; and we watch as life emerges again after the asteroid hits, and the age of the mammal dawns. These lost worlds seem fantastical and yet every description - whether the colour of a beetle's shell, the rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air - is grounded in the fossil record.Otherlands is a staggering imaginative feat: an emotional narrative that underscores the tenacity of life - yet also the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, including our own. To read it is to see the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous and familiar.

This is the true story of a 24-hour period on Everest, when members of three separate expeditions were caught in a storm and faced a battle against hurricane-force winds, exposure, and the effects of altitude, which ended the worst single-season death toll in the peak's history.

Delia Owens, author of the best-selling Where the Crawdads Sing, began her career writing riveting real-life adventure and wildlife tales with her husband, Mark Owens. Collected in a single volume for the first time, these three odysseys show how the Owenses’ “ingenuity, courage, and accomplishment are beyond exaggeration.” (People) Carrying little more than a change of clothes and a pair of binoculars, two young Americans, Delia and Mark Owens, caught a plane to Africa, bought a third-hand Land Rover, and drove deep into the Kalahari Desert. In this vast wilderness they met animals that had never seen humans before, and leopards, giraffes, and brown hyenas were regular visitors to their camp, all chronicled in Cry of the Kalahari. But the Kalahari is not Eden, and Mark and Delia were continually threatened by wildfires, drought, violent storms, and sometimes by the animals they studied and loved. They set off on another African odyssey in search of a new wilderness in The Eye of the Elephant. They land in a remote valley of Zambia, where the hippos swam in the river just below their tents, lions stalked the bush, and elephants wandered into camp to eat marula fruits. The peace, though, was soon shattered with gunfire, and Delia and Mark were inexorably drawn into a high-stakes struggle to save the wildlife. With Secrets of the Savanna, Delia and Mark 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.

In this meditative memoir—a compelling fusion of Barbarian Days and the journals of Thomas Merton—the author of Saltwater Buddha reflects on his "failing toward enlightenment," his continued search to find meaning and a greater understanding of grace in the world’s oceans as well as everyday life. Born to a family of seekers, Jaimal Yogis left home at sixteen to surf in Hawaii and join a monastery—an adventure he chronicled in Saltwater Buddha. Now, in his early twenties, his heart is broken and he’s lost his way. Hitting the road again, he lands in a monastery in Dharamsala, where he meets Sonam, a displaced Tibetan.  To help his friend, Jaimal makes a cockamamie attempt to reunite him with his family in Tibet by way of America. Though he does not succeed, witnessing Sonam’s spirit in the face of failure offers Jaimal a deeper understanding of faith. When the two friends part, he cannot fathom the unlikely circumstances that will reunite them.  All Our Waves Are Water follows Jaimal’s trek from the Himalayas to Indonesia; to a Franciscan Friary in New York City to the dusty streets of Jerusalem; and finally to San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. Along his journey, Jaimal prays and surfs; mourning a lost love and seeking something that keeps eluding him. The poet Rumi wrote, "We are not a drop in the ocean. We are the ocean in a drop." All Our Waves Are Water is Jaimal’s "attempt to understand the ocean in a drop, to find that one moon shining in the water everywhere"—to find the mystery that unites us.  

From Robert Macfarlane, the acclaimed author of The Old Ways and Underland—a celebration of the language of landscape and the power of words to shape our sense of placeFor years now, the British writer Robert Macfarlane has been collecting place-words: terms for aspects of landscape, nature, and weather, drawn from dozens of languages and dialects of the British Isles. In this, his fifth book, Macfarlane brilliantly explores the linguistic and literary terrain of the British archipelago, from the Shetlands to Cornwall and from Cumbria to Suffolk, offering themed glossaries of hundreds of these rare, deeply local, poetical terms, organized by such geographical terrains as flatlands, uplands, waterlands, coastlands, woodlands, and underlands. Interspersed with this archive of place words are biographical essays in which Macfarlane writes of his favorite authors who have paid close attention to the natural world and who embody in their own work the huge richness of place language—from Barry Lopez and John Muir to Nan Shepard, J. A. Baker, and Roger Deakin. Landmarks is a book about the power of language and how it can become a way to know and love landscape, from a writer acclaimed for his own precision of utterance and distinctive, lyrical voice.

“A gripping tale . . . A convincing, page-turning evocation of recent history.”—The New York TimesRay Barton travels to war-ravaged Southeast Asia to search for his missing friend Michael Langford, a brilliant, risk-taking combat photographer who was stolen into Khmer Rouge Cambodia on a mysterious mission and disappeared. The search illuminates Langford’s heroism, his fierce loyalties, and the personal highways he has traveled to war. Langford’s empathy for the brave but poorly commanded Cambodian troops and his love for a young Cambodian woman have led him in the end to put down the camera and take up the gun in a foreign struggle he had made his own.Koch richly evokes Indochina—from the deceptively tranquil rice paddies of South Vietnam to the corrupt, doomed pink-and-white city of Phnom Penh. Highways to a War is a story of intense relationships forged in a dangerous and hallucinatory land that continues to haunt the American soul.“An absorbing, deeply moving . . . tale of love and heroism. . . . The evocation of the Cambodian landscape . . . is truly haunting.”—Kirkus Reviews“Highways to a War ranks among the best of the . . . literature that has come out of the agony of the wars in Southeast Asia.”—The Orlando Sentinel

The life story of Ishi, the last Yahi Indian, lone survivor of an exterminated tribe, is unique in the annals of North American anthropology. For more than forty years, Theodora Kroeber's biography has captivated readers. Now recent advances in technology make it possible to return to print the 1976 deluxe edition, filled with plates and historic photographs that enhance Ishi's story and bring it to life.Ishi stumbled into the twentieth century on the morning of August 29, 1911, when, desperate with hunger and terrified of the white murderers of his family, he was found in the corral of a slaughter house near Oroville, California. Finally identified as a Yahi by an anthropologist, Ishi was brought to San Francisco by Professor T. T. Waterman and lived there the rest of his life under the care and protection of Alfred Kroeber and the staff of the University of California's Museum of Anthropology.Karl Kroeber adds an informative tribute to the text, describing how the book came to be written and how Theodora Kroeber's approach to the project was a product of both her era and her special personal insight and empathy.

Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award and the Banff Mountain Book Award for Mountain Literature"Gripping, intense…Buried in the Sky will satisfy anyone who loved [Into Thin Air]." ―Kate Tuttle, Boston GlobeWhen eleven climbers died on K2 in 2008, two Sherpas survived. Their astonishing tale became the stuff of mountaineering legend. This white-knuckle adventure follows the Sherpas from their remote villages in Nepal to the peak of the world’s most dangerous mountain, recounting one of the most dramatic disasters in alpine history from a fascinating new perspective.Winner of the NCTE George Orwell Award and an official selection of the American Alpine Club Book Club. 16 pages of illustrations; 8 maps

For over two hundred years, the Catskill Mountains have been repeatedly and dramatically transformed by New York City. In Making Mountains, David Stradling shows the transformation of the Catskills landscape as a collaborative process, one in which local and urban hands, capital, and ideas have come together to reshape the mountains and the communities therein. This collaboration has had environmental, economic, and cultural consequences. Early on, the Catskills were an important source of natural resources. Later, when New York City needed to expand its water supply, engineers helped direct the city toward the Catskills, claiming that the mountains offered the purest and most cost-effective waters. By the 1960s, New York had created the great reservoir and aqueduct system in the mountains that now supplies the city with 90 percent of its water. The Catskills also served as a critical space in which the nation's ideas about nature evolved. Stradling describes the great influence writers and artists had upon urban residents - especially the painters of the Hudson River School, whose ideal landscapes created expectations about how rural America should appear. By the mid-1800s, urban residents had turned the Catskills into an important vacation ground, and by the late 1800s, the Catskills had become one of the premiere resort regions in the nation. In the mid-twentieth century, the older Catskill resort region was in steep decline, but the Jewish "Borscht Belt" in the southern Catskills was thriving. The automobile revitalized mountain tourism and residence, and increased the threat of suburbanization of the historic landscape. Throughout each of these significant incarnations, urban and rural residents worked in a rough collaboration, though not without conflict, to reshape the mountains and American ideas about rural landscapes and nature.

In his breakout bestseller, The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger created "a wild ride that brilliantly captures the awesome power of the raging sea and the often futile attempts of humans to withstand it" (Los Angeles Times Book Review).Now, Junger turns his brilliant and empathetic eye to the reality of combat--the fear, the honor, and the trust among men in an extreme situation whose survival depends on their absolute commitment to one another. His on-the-ground account follows a single platoon through a 15-month tour of duty in the most dangerous outpost in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley. Through the experiences of these young men at war, he shows what it means to fight, to serve, and to face down mortal danger on a daily basis.