David Gessner – författare

A story of obsession, glory, and the wild early days of Ultimate Frisbee. David Gessner devoted his twenties to a cultish sport called Ultimate Frisbee. Like his teammates and rivals, he trained for countless hours, sacrificing his body and potential career for a chance at fleeting glory without fortune or fame. His only goal: to win Nationals and go down in Ultimate history as one of the greatest athletes no one has ever heard of. With humor and raw honesty, Gessner explores what it means to devote one’s life to something that many consider ridiculous. Today, Ultimate is played by millions, but in the 1980s, it was an obscure sport with a (mostly) undeserved stoner reputation. Its early heroes were as scrappy as the sport they loved, driven by fierce competition, intense rivalries, epic parties, and the noble ideals of the Spirit of the Game.  Ultimate Glory is a portrait of the artist as a young ruffian. Gessner shares the field and his seemingly insane obsession with a cast of closely knit, larger-than-life characters. As his sport grows up, so does he, and eventually he gives up chasing flying discs to pursue a career as a writer. But he never forgets his love for this misunderstood sport and the rare sense of purpose he attained as a member of its priesthood.

David Gessner first moved to Colorado in the wake of a bout with cancer. In Under the Devil's Thumb, this young New Englander takes readers on a joyous quest to discover the mysteries of the western landscape and the landscape of the soul as well. In the West Gessner began to rewrite his life. Under the Devil's Thumb is a story of rugged determination and sweat, as well as humor, adventure and hope. In and around his new hometown of Boulder, Colorado, Gessner hiked hard and ran alongside flooded creeks. He found that the West was a place of stories stories that grow out of the ground, flow out of the dirt, work their way through one's limbs, and drive people to push their physical limits. Hiking up scree slopes toward the Devil's Thumb, a massive outcrop of orange rock that attracts climbers, hikers, and contemplaters, Gessner reflects on the illness he has so recently survived. He pushes his physical limits, hoping to outrun death, to outrun dread. He finds momentary transcendence in the joys and self-inflicted pain of mountain biking. ""Nothing but the hardest ride has the power to flush out worry, mind clutter, and dread."" In tranquil moments he seeks a chance to recover an animal self that is strong and powerful enough to conquer mountains, but also still and quiet enough to see things human beings ignore. In the mountain West, Gessner finds what Wallace Stegner called ""the geography of hope."" He finds within himself an interior landscape that is healthy and strong. Combining memoir, nature writing, and travel writing, Under the Devil's Thumb is one man's journey deep into a place of healing.

Bestselling author David Gessner’s wilderness road trip inspired by America’s greatest conservationist, Theodore Roosevelt, is “a rallying cry in the age of climate change” (Robert Redford).“Leave it as it is,” Theodore Roosevelt announced while viewing the Grand Canyon for the first time. “The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.” Roosevelt’s pronouncement signaled the beginning of an environmental fight that still wages today. To reconnect with the American wilderness and with the president who courageously protected it, acclaimed nature writer and New York Times bestselling author David Gessner embarks on a great American road trip guided by Roosevelt’s crusading environmental legacy. Gessner travels to the Dakota badlands where Roosevelt awakened as a naturalist; to Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon where Roosevelt escaped during the grind of his reelection tour; and finally, to Bears Ears, Utah, a monument proposed by Native Tribes that is currently embroiled in a national conservation fight. Along the way, Gessner questions and reimagines Roosevelt’s vision for today’s lands. “Insightful, observant, and wry,” (BookPage) Leave It As It Is offers an arresting history of Roosevelt’s pioneering conservationism, a powerful call to arms, and a profound meditation on our environmental future.

"A powerful and timely book from one of the most provocative and engaging voices in contemporary environmental writing."—MICHAEL P. BRANCH, author of How to Cuss in Western When the pandemic struck, nature writer David Gessner turned to Henry David Thoreau, the original social distancer, for lessons on how to live. Those lessons—of learning our own backyard, re–wilding, loving nature, self–reliance, and civil disobedience—hold a secret that could help save us as we face the greater crisis of climate.DAVID GESSNER is the author of Leave It As It Is: A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelt''s American Wilderness and the New York Times–bestselling All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner and the American West. Chair of the Creative Writing Department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and founder and editor–in–chief of Ecotone, Gessner lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, with his wife, the novelist Nina de Gramont, and their daughter, Hadley.

Bestselling author David Gessner asks what kind of planet his daughter will inherit in this coast-to-coast guide to navigating climate crisis.The world is burning and the seas are rising. How do we navigate this new age of extremes? In A Traveler''s Guide to the End of the World, David Gessner takes readers on an eye-opening tour of climate hotspots from the Gulf of Mexico to the burning American West to New York City to the fragile Outer Banks, where homes are being swallowed by the seas. He does so with his usual sense of humor, compassion, and a willingness to talk to anyone, providing an informative and sobering yet convivial guide for the age of fire, heat, wind, and water.Gessner approaches scientists and thinkers with a father’s question: What will the world be like in forty-two years? Gessner was forty-two when his daughter, Hadley, was born. What will the world be like in 2064, when Hadley is his age now? What is the future of weather? The future of heat, storms, and fire? What exactly will our children be facing? A Traveler''s Guide to the End of the World tells a story of climate crisis that will both entertain and shake people awake to the necessity of navigating this new age together.

The story of Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped from Central Park Zoo and captured the hearts and imaginations of millions of followers around the world, with 32 pages of stunning color photographs.This is a parable of freedom, wildness, and our urban ecosystems. Flaco has been dubbed “the world’s most famous bird.” From the night in February of 2023 when vandals cut a hole in his cage until his death a year later in a courtyard on the Upper West Side, his is a story full of adventure and unexpected turns.Nature writer David Gessner chronicles the year-long odyssey of Flaco and the human drama that followed the owl who captured the imaginations of New Yorkers and people around the world. Though he’d spent his life in a cage, Flaco learned to survive in New York City by eating rats, squirrels, and birds. He was an immigrant coming from elsewhere to make it in the big city. Central Park, the island of green in an urban sea, was his new home territory.Flaco’s urban adventure brought controversy, pitting those who felt he should be returned to the safety of the zoo against those who created the “Free Flaco” movement. The birding world was fractured over the ethics of the online sharing of his location that brought scores of enthusiasts to view him each day. And his end—with a grim necropsy revealing Flaco had suffered a viral infection from eating pigeons and had multiple rodenticides in his system—serves as a Rachel Carson-esque warning about the harm we’ve done to our urban environments, inspiring the passage of long-sought legislation protecting urban birds and regulations meant to reduce the use of rodenticides in New York City.

The story of Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped from Central Park Zoo and captured the hearts and imaginations of millions of followers around the world, with 32 pages of stunning color photographs.This is a parable of freedom, wildness, and our urban ecosystems. Flaco has been dubbed “the world’s most famous bird.” From the night in February of 2023 when vandals cut a hole in his cage until his death a year later in a courtyard on the Upper West Side, his is a story full of adventure and unexpected turns.Nature writer David Gessner chronicles the year-long odyssey of Flaco and the human drama that followed the owl who captured the imaginations of New Yorkers and people around the world. Though he’d spent his life in a cage, Flaco learned to survive in New York City by eating rats, squirrels, and birds. He was an immigrant coming from elsewhere to make it in the big city. Central Park, the island of green in an urban sea, was his new home territory.Flaco’s urban adventure brought controversy, pitting those who felt he should be returned to the safety of the zoo against those who created the “Free Flaco” movement. The birding world was fractured over the ethics of the online sharing of his location that brought scores of enthusiasts to view him each day. And his end—with a grim necropsy revealing Flaco had suffered a viral infection from eating pigeons and had multiple rodenticides in his system—serves as a Rachel Carson-esque warning about the harm we’ve done to our urban environments, inspiring the passage of long-sought legislation protecting urban birds and regulations meant to reduce the use of rodenticides in New York City.

Bestselling author David Gessner’s wilderness road trip inspired by America’s greatest conservationist, Theodore Roosevelt, is “a rallying cry in the age of climate change” (Robert Redford).“Leave it as it is,” Theodore Roosevelt announced while viewing the Grand Canyon for the first time. “The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.” Roosevelt’s pronouncement signaled the beginning of an environmental fight that still wages today. To reconnect with the American wilderness and with the president who courageously protected it, acclaimed nature writer and New York Times bestselling author David Gessner embarks on a great American road trip guided by Roosevelt’s crusading environmental legacy. Gessner travels to the Dakota badlands where Roosevelt awakened as a naturalist; to Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon where Roosevelt escaped during the grind of his reelection tour; and finally, to Bears Ears, Utah, a monument proposed by Native Tribes that is currently embroiled in a national conservation fight. Along the way, Gessner questions and reimagines Roosevelt’s vision for today’s lands. “Insightful, observant, and wry,” (BookPage) Leave It As It Is offers an arresting history of Roosevelt’s pioneering conservationism, a powerful call to arms, and a profound meditation on our environmental future.

Archetypal wild man Edward Abbey and proper, dedicated Wallace Stegner left their footprints all over the western landscape. Now, award-winning nature writer David Gessner follows the ghosts of these two remarkable writer-environmentalists from Stegner's birthplace in Saskatchewan to the site of Abbey's pilgrimages to Arches National Park in Utah, braiding their stories and asking how they speak to the lives of all those who care about the West.These two great westerners had very different ideas about what it meant to love the land and try to care for it, and they did so in distinctly different styles. Boozy, lustful, and irascible, Abbey was best known as the author of the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (and also of the classic nature memoir Desert Solitaire), famous for spawning the idea of guerrilla actions—known to admirers as "monkeywrenching" and to law enforcement as domestic terrorism—to disrupt commercial exploitation of western lands. By contrast, Stegner, a buttoned-down, disciplined, faithful family man and devoted professor of creative writing, dedicated himself to working through the system to protect western sites such as Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado.In a region beset by droughts and fires, by fracking and drilling, and by an ever-growing population that seems to be in the process of loving the West to death, Gessner asks: how might these two farseeing environmental thinkers have responded to the crisis?Gessner takes us on an inspiring, entertaining journey as he renews his own commitment to cultivating a meaningful relationship with the wild, confronting American overconsumption, and fighting environmental injustice—all while reawakening the thrill of the words of his two great heroes.

Archetypal wild man Edward Abbey and proper, dedicated Wallace Stegner left their footprints all over the western landscape. Now, award-winning nature writer David Gessner follows the ghosts of these two remarkable writer-environmentalists from Stegner's birthplace in Saskatchewan to the site of Abbey's pilgrimages to Arches National Park in Utah, braiding their stories and asking how they speak to the lives of all those who care about the West.These two great westerners had very different ideas about what it meant to love the land and try to care for it, and they did so in distinctly different styles. Boozy, lustful, and irascible, Abbey was best known as the author of the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (and also of the classic nature memoir Desert Solitaire), famous for spawning the idea of guerrilla actions—known to admirers as "monkeywrenching" and to law enforcement as domestic terrorism—to disrupt commercial exploitation of western lands. By contrast, Stegner, a buttoned-down, disciplined, faithful family man and devoted professor of creative writing, dedicated himself to working through the system to protect western sites such as Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado.In a region beset by droughts and fires, by fracking and drilling, and by an ever-growing population that seems to be in the process of loving the West to death, Gessner asks: how might these two farseeing environmental thinkers have responded to the crisis?Gessner takes us on an inspiring, entertaining journey as he renews his own commitment to cultivating a meaningful relationship with the wild, confronting American overconsumption, and fighting environmental injustice—all while reawakening the thrill of the words of his two great heroes.

In My Green Manifesto, David Gessner embarks on a rough-and-tumble journey down Boston's Charles River, searching for the soul of a new environmentalism. With a tragically leaky canoe, a broken cell phone, a cooler of beer, and the environmental planner Dan Driscoll in tow, Gessner grapples with the stereotype of the environmentalist as an overzealous, puritanical mess. But as Dan recounts his own story of transforming the famously polluted Charles into an urban haven for wildlife and wild people, the vision of a new sort of eco-champion begins to emerge: someone who falls in love with a forgotten space, and then fights like hell for it. Considering everything from Ed Abbey's legacy to Jimmy Carter's sweater, Gessner points toward a scrappy environmentalism that, despite all odds, just might change the world.