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North Dakota is regarded as flyover country, but extraordinary narratives play out on this improbable Great Plains landscape. North Dakota is the home of one of the world's largest nuclear missile fields, one of the first mosques in America, a zany collection of roadside attractions, resurgent Native American communities, one of the nation's most productive oil fields, and the magnificent Little Missouri River badlands. Join Clay Jenkinson as he searches for spirit of place, cultural identity, sacred landscapes, and a future for rural America at the center of the continent, where Lewis and Clark wintered, Sitting Bull resisted the conquest, and Theodore Roosevelt became America's leading conservationist and the exemplar of the strenuous life. Part travelogue, part love song to the prairie, and above all, a vision for a cultural renaissance at the heart of the continent, The Language of Cottonwoods will make you laugh, cry, and think, and inspire you to visit North Dakota.
And so poet and naturalist Kathleen Cain fell in love with the cottonwood tree. Regarded by many as a nuisance, a "trash tree," the cottonwood not only has a fascinating history, it has served noble purposes as well. Ranging from Vermont to Arizona to Alaska, this native North American tree, in various sizes, shapes, and subspecies, has been a sacred symbol, a shelter providing relief from both heat and cold, a signpost for the lost and weary-and underneath its branches many dreams have been born. In a magical blend of art and science, the author looks not only at the cottonwood-how it grows, how it travels, and what it says-but at the roles it has played and continues to play in the art, health, and history of North America. If you need the science, you will find it here-if you need the human heart, you will find it here as well. "Champion" means winner, defender, something outstanding-a hero. After reading The Cottonwood Tree: An American Champion you will see why this remarkable tree stands so tall in the American landscape. Book jacket.
In this sequel to Jennifer’s award-winning debut novel Fireflies in December, Jessilyn Lassiter and her best friend Gemma Teague have survived prejudice and heartache in their lifelong friendship, but the summer of 1936 threatens to tear them apart yet again. Gemma’s job with the wealthy Hadley family leads to a crush on their youngest son. But Jessilyn’s insistence that he’s no good and that no rich white man would ever truly fall for a poor black girl like Gemma puts them at odds. Tragedy strikes when Jessilyn’s cherished neighbor girl is hit by a car and killed. Things get worse when an elderly friend is falsely accused of the crime, and the only way to clear his name is to put her family’s livelihood in jeopardy. For Jessilyn, this is a choice too hard to bear and she wonders where to turn for answers, especially when an angry mob threatens vigilante justice. Jennifer’s third book, Catching Moondrops, releases in Fall 2010.
They never meant to come to Earth. They were never allowed to leave...Welcome to Cottonwood.Excerpt:"You should have heard it, Kate. It was subtle, but it wasn't my imagination. The guy spent five hours essentially telling us that the aliens are retarded.""Oh come on.""Not in so many words, but--hang on." Sarah moved the paz to her other hand so that she could lay her right arm over Fagin's back, since he was being insistent about it. "But he just really drilled it in," she continued, resigned. "Over and over, really soft and gentle. 'They're not smart, they don't take care of themselves, they need to be controlled.'"Kate's tiny image on the screen flickered as she shifted her own paz and had trouble restabilizing. The two weren't exactly compatible anymore. She really needed to get a new one. "So? Maybe they do.""And maybe they don't. Kate!" she said, trying to laugh through her frustration. "These people came to us in a spaceship! A planet full of stupid layabouts does not master intergalactic space travel!"Kate's image flickered again and snapped to black. She didn't need it. She could hear the distraction in Kate's voice, and the tight I'm-pretending-I'm-not-angry tone that had been her default setting pretty much since Sarah told her she was really moving to Cottonwood. "Okay, so the guy who's been studying them for twenty years is wrong and Sarah Fowler, who hasn't even met one yet, is right. Congratulations. You're that good."Sarah felt herself blush. "It didn't sound right, that's all I'm saying. Some of the little things he said just...just really got to me.""Like what?" Kate asked, sounding concerned now and not big-sister patronizing."Like...Like he said that if their claspers came off, they'd die."A short pause. "What are claspers?""Oh, that's not the point, they're like tiny little extra arms that smell things. The point is, how many aliens had to lose their claspers and die without having any other...What's the word I want? Variables?"Kate was quiet for a while. The picture tried to come back a few times, showing Sarah glimpses of her sister through a haze of multi-colored distortion. "These guys are professionals, Sarah. It's their job to make connections that people like us miss.""Yeah, but how did so many aliens lose their claspers in the first place, that's what I really want to--""Did your house come with a phone?""Huh? Um, yeah." She twisted to look up at it, clinging to the wall like a shiny, black beetle. "But it's patched into the IBI switchboard. I can't figure out how to get a line outside the village. I could look it up in the manual, but--" She laughed. "--I'm kind of manualed-out. I had to set everything, you have no idea. All the faucets are TruTouch. Who the heck even knows off-hand how many degrees they like their shower? Or their drinking water? Plus, I got my Fahrenheit and my Celsius screwed up and practically steamed-cooked my face off the first time I...Why?" She checked the paz's signal, but it looked good. "Can't you hear me okay?""I hear you. I was just curious. So this is your own paz?""Yeah," said Sarah, still trying to see where this was going. "But they scanned it in through the company server when I got here. You know. So I can't take pictures or blog about company policy or stuff. They said it wouldn't affect my performance. I mean, I can barely see you, but--""That's normal for the fossil you're using," Kate agreed. In a new, hearty voice, she added, "TruTouch faucets, those are awesome!"
A rollicking debut book of essays that takes readers on a trip through the muck of American myths that have settled in the desert of our country’s underbelly Early on July 16, 1945, Joshua Wheeler’s great grandfather awoke to a flash, and then a long rumble: the world’s first atomic blast filled the horizon north of his ranch in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Out on the range, the cattle had been bleached white by the fallout. Acid West, Wheeler’s stunning debut collection of essays, is full of these mutated cows: vestiges of the Old West that have been transformed, suddenly and irrevocably, by innovation. Traversing the New Mexico landscape his family has called home for seven generations, Wheeler excavates and reexamines these oddities, assembling a cabinet of narrative curiosities: a man who steps from the stratosphere and free-falls to the desert; a treasure hunt for buried Atari video games; a village plagued by the legacy of atomic testing; a showdown between Billy the Kid and the author of Ben-Hur; a UFO festival during the paranoid Summer of Snowden. The radical evolution of American identity, from cowboys to drone warriors to space explorers, is a story rooted in southern New Mexico. Acid West illuminates this history, clawing at the bounds of genre to reveal a place that is, for better or worse, home. By turns intimate, absurd, and frightening, Acid West is an enlightening deep-dive into a prophetic desert at the bottom of America.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was the greatest idealist of the Founding Fathers of America. He believed that average citizens are up to the challenge of governing themselves. He envisioned a republic of well-educated, well-informed, engaged, and vigilant citizens. Jefferson's dream of a semi-utopian American republic has nearly been swallowed up by cynical partisanship, government gridlock, consumer materialism, and the corrosive power of money in American politics. Jefferson believed in civility, majority rule, the primacy of science and reason, and harmony in all of our public and private relations. Public humanities scholar Clay S. Jenkinson believes we can return to Jeffersonian principles both in our private lives and the public sphere. Repairing Jefferson's America is a clear and concise guide for those who wish to live more rational, purposeful, and enlightened lives.
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the world's leading forest ecologist who forever changed how people view trees and their connections to one another and to other living things in the forest—a moving, deeply personal journey of discovery Suzanne Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence; her TED talks have been viewed by more than 10 million people worldwide. In this, her first book, now available in paperback, Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths--that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp, but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own. Simard writes--in inspiring, illuminating, and accessible ways—how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved, how they learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication, characteristics ascribed to human intelligence, traits that are the essence of civil societies--and at the center of it all, the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them. And Simard writes of her own life, born and raised into a logging world in the rainforests of British Columbia, of her days as a child spent cataloging the trees from the forest and how she came to love and respect them. And as she writes of her scientific quest, she writes of her own journey, making us understand how deeply human scientific inquiry exists beyond data and technology, that it is about understanding who we are and our place in the world.
This beautiful glimpse into the mind of a modern Zen priest shows us how we can cultivate and experience peace through silence, stillness, and practice. “A balm for our troubled hearts and minds . . . soulful, warm, and welcoming, and—at times—heartbreaking.” —Lion's Roar While there is suffering in the world and in each of us, there is also the possibility and the experience of peace. As Zenju Earthlyn Manuel—a Zen priest and disciple of Thich Nhat Hanh who has written at length on race, gender, sexual orientation, and homelessness—writes in the introduction: “I have testified many times of my suffering. Before I die, I must speak of peace.” The Deepest Peace is a poetic, lyrical ode to the ways contemplative practice illuminates daily life. It is at once a window into Zenju’s personal practice and an invitation to begin our own.
The book presents chronologically the writings - journal entries, reports and letters - of all the members of the Lewis and Clark expedition, allowing for examination the 215 days the Corps of Discovery spent in the state from several perspectives.--Publisher's description.
A RICH DISPLAY OF SOME OF THE BEST PROSE WRITTEN TODAY IN THE USA.