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The inspiring biography of the adventuresome naturalist Carol Ruckdeschel and her crusade to save her island home from environmental disaster. In a “moving homage . . . that artfully articulates the ferocities of nature and humanity,” biographer Will Harlan captures the larger-than-life story of biologist, naturalist, and ecological activist Carol Ruckdeschel, known to many as the wildest woman in America. She wrestles alligators, eats roadkill, rides horses bareback, and lives in a ramshackle cabin that she built by hand in an island wilderness. A combination of Henry David Thoreau and Jane Goodall, Carol is a self-taught scientist who has become a tireless defender of sea turtles on Cumberland Island, a national park off the coast of Georgia (Kirkus Reviews). Cumberland, the country’s largest and most biologically diverse barrier island, is celebrated for its windswept dunes and feral horses. Steel magnate Thomas Carnegie once owned much of the island, and in recent years, Carnegie heirs and the National Park Service have clashed with Carol over the island’s future. What happens when a dirt-poor naturalist with only a high school diploma becomes an outspoken advocate on a celebrated but divisive island? Untamed is the story of an American original who fights for what she believes in, no matter the cost, “an environmental classic that belongs on the shelf alongside Carson, Leopold, Muir, and Thoreau” (Thomas Rain Crowe, author of Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods). “Vivid. . . . Ms. Ruckdeschel’s biography, and the way this wandering soul came to settle for so many decades on Cumberland Island, is big enough on its own, but Mr. Harlan hints at bigger questions.” —The Wall Street Journal “Wild country produces wild people, who sometimes are just what’s needed to keep that wild cycle going. This is a memorable portrait.” —Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature “Deliciously engrossing. . . . Readers are in for a wild ride.” —The Citizen-Times
The author of Seedtime on the Cumberland returns with another richly detailed evocation of pioneering in the Cumberland River basin, or what is now middle Tennessee and southern Kentucky. Not a sequel but a companion piece, Flowering of the Cumberland covers much the same time—from first settlement in 1780 to the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Whereas Seedtime was preoccupied with solitary men and women struggling to secure food, clothing, shelter, and land, Flowering goes beyond simple survival to focus on family and community. Memorably described are the strength of women like Sally Buchanan in stations fortified against Indian attack, the emergence of men like Andrew Jackson, the pursuit of sex and marriage, the birthing and raising of children, schooling, the state of agriculture, business opportunities and the professions, religion and tolerance, border politics, and social life and diversions. An entire bygone world comes to life, and with it the smell of strong whiskey, the clippety-clop of horses, and the haunts of ghosts.
While writing his book, Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness, Erik Reece spent a great deal of time studying strip mining and its effect on the environment and surrounding communities. After a year of exploring the ugliness of a rapidly disappearing landscape, Reece felt a strong need to celebrate the wonder the Eastern broadleaf forests still have to offer. The result is a collection of poems by individuals who share Thoreau's belief that the natural world is "an unroofed church, a place of reverence." Field Work: Modern Poems from Eastern Forests seeks an answer to Frost's question, "What to make of a diminished thing?" by contemplating work from some of the twentieth century's greatest nature poets. Reece frames contemporary American poems with a rich selection of Chinese poetry from the T'ang Dynasty, written by poets who produced what many consider the first great nature writing. More than 1,300 years ago Li Po, Tu Fu, Wang Wei, and Han Shan described a landscape in southern China remarkably similar in landscape and ecology to the forests of Appalachia. Consequently, their work has inspired many of the American poets featured in Field Work, including Hayden Carruth, Mary Oliver, A. R. Ammons, Jane Kenyon, and Denise Levertov. The modern poets in this collection share the eastern reverence for the natural world -- they desire to create a poetry of belonging, of elemental contact with something much larger than the self. These poems ask the reader to turn away from urban landscapes in an effort to better understand the natural world as a spectacular, profound organism. Wendell Berry, for example, praises the quiet and solitude of nature, inspiring the reader to experience each poem in the setting for which it was written. In Field Work, Reece brings together a collection of poetry that calls readers out of doors as these poems become gateways to a natural world we are often too distracted to see.