George F. Thompson – förlag

For more than fifty years, Yi-Fu Tuan has carried the study of humanistic geography - what John K. Wright early in the twentieth century called geosophy, a blending of geography and philosophy - to new heights, offering with each new book a fresh and often unique intellectual introspection into the human condition. His latest book, Humanist Geography, is a testament of all that he has learned and encountered as a geographer.     In returning to and reappraising his previous books, Tuan emphasizes how the study of humanist geography can offer a younger generation of students, scholars, and teachers a path toward self-discovery, personal fulfillment, and even enlightenment. He argues that in the study of place can be found the wonders of the human mind and imagination, especially as understood by the senses, even as we human beings deal with nature's stringencies and our own deep flaws.

Claude Monet is one of most influential French painters and a founder of the Impressionist movement. When he purchased a house and land in Giverny, France, during the 1890s, he soon set about creating gardens on his property, including a water garden inspired by the Japanese art that influenced so much of his work. These gardens would become a focal point for his art for the rest of his life. He made more than 250 paintings of them, including hundreds of paintings of the water garden that make up his famous Water Lilies series. In Giverny—A Colorful Silence: Four Seasons in the Gardens of Monet, Monet’s gardens are the subject of photographers Janet Russek and David Scheinbaum, who first visited the gardens in 2015. That experience inspired them to delve more deeply into Monet’s life and work and to seek special permission from the Monet Foundation to visit and photograph the gardens in Giverny. They proceeded to make four more trips over three years to photograph the gardens in each of the four seasons, and the stunning photographs they made reveal the changing beauty, light, and color palettes of the gardens throughout the year. In their own way, Russek and Scheinbaum captured unforgettable views and perspectives that even those fortunate enough to visit the gardens in person may not see. Their photographs embrace the spirit of Monet’s magical gardens while also honoring their history and Monet’s legacy and vision. Russek and Scheinbaum’s color photographs are accompanied by heartfelt and informative essays (presented in both English and French) by Jean-Marie Avisard, the current Head Gardener at Monet’s gardens, Jan Huntley, Head of the Artist and Volunteer Program at the Versailles Foundation Inc.’s Foundation Claude Monet à Giverny, and Paul Hayes Tucker, an esteemed art historian and expert on Monet’s life and works. Giverny—A Colorful Silence is a gift for all who revere Monet and his gardens. As the world celebrates the 100th anniversary of Monet’s passing on December 5, 2026, readers will treasure this book in unforgettable ways.

Can Yi-Fu Tuan, one of the world's most decorated geographers, from the aspen glow of retirement and a distinguished career, hold the interest of young readers who themselves are just now embarking on their own sojourns into the larger world? The question is all the more important for Professor Tuan, because the topic of his last book, his 'last launch,' is human life itself---what it means to be human and how we humans can reach our full potential in the brief period we live on Earth.Professor Tuan, like the curious child on a familiar beach, has decided to make his last launch a personal voyage in which he sends messages to the young in a bottle presented as a book. Securely corked, the bottle is cast into the vast sea before finding its resting ground in the hands of a young reader, who discovers the bottle on a foreign shore. Contained within the bottle are sixteen messages never before published. They represent Professor Tuan's last conversation, his last meal, with his readers, young and old.The messages that Professor Tuan has presented involve his final thoughts about childhood and education, about comprehending the relationship between space, place, and time, about understanding social reality and our attitudes toward nature and religion. But, ultimately, The Last Launch is about goodness and the Good, a recurrent theme in the master scholar's work.Although we humans, by nature, are flawed beings, Professor Tuan affirms that we are also the most subtly complex beings in the solar system, if not in the Milky Way. All of us are endowed with keen senses and some with even keener minds that enable us to savor the wonders of this world that is our only home. Moreover, we humans are, by nature, moral beings who find fulfillment and happiness in doing good. Since evil--as the fact of suffering, misfortune, and wrongdoing--does not disdain from inflicting the slightest hurt or harm, we must not miss any opportunity to do good, Professor Tuan urges, however inconsequential the doing may seem at the time.In a final reflection, Professor Tuan offers the following: that, in living a life fully, one senses that we are engaged in something larger than ourselves, that we may well be in a cosmic struggle for life in which there is no trifling player among us. Everyone and everything on Earth counts. Thus, doing good in one's life is the ultimate form of human love and caring. If we do not embrace this truth, is it because we fear the responsibility and accountability of doing good? Such are the questions to be found in Professor Tuan's bottle, to be answered in his last launch. Lucky is the person forever young in spirit who picks up the bottle on the beach and reads and listens to its contents.Distributed for George F. Thompson Publishing.

Although women were not officially permitted to practice law in Maryland until 1902, the history of women acting as lawyers in Maryland is storied, going back to the earliest decades of colonial America. Today, of course, women serve not only as lawyers but also as judges, professors, and elected officials, and anywhere from in local government to the U.S. Senate. Finding Justice tells the remarkable story of how women overcame historical obstacles—legal, social, and economic—to enter the legal profession and how their pioneering work has influenced the practice of law and society at large. The volume contains a CD with the first-evercompiled list of the nearly 25,000 women who have been admitted to the bar in Maryland.Distributed for George F. Thompson Publishing in association with the Maryland Women’s Bar Association Foundation and the University of Baltimore Foundation.

America. Located about 150 miles (241 kilometers) west of Las Vegas near the border of California and Nevada, it straddles an area of about 3,000 square miles (770 square kilometers). A land of extremes and contrasts, it includes Telescope Peak that towers over the valley at 11,049 feet elevation (3,367 meters) and an oasis that provides habitat for the endangered Devils Hole Pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis). Designated a national monument in 1933 and expanded into a national park in 1994, its rugged yet otherworldly beautiful landscape now attracts more than 1,000,000 visitors per year. Attracted by the distinctive topography and light of Death Valley, Stephen Strom, a renowned professor of astrophysics, began regularly traveling there some thirty-five years ago. His acute eye for abstract, almost pointillist compositions not only reveals the patterns and effects of geologic forces over millennia, but it also takes in the vast, colorful sweep of land and sky as well as the land’s myriad details—volcanic cinder cones and sand dunes, dry lakes and salt pans, colorful badlands and canyons, and pine-studded mountains—that give the area its distinctive and varied character. Strom’s photographs are complemented by Alison Hawthorne Deming’s original sequence of poems, written for this book, that are as luminous and detailed as the images themselves. And Rebecca A. Senf’s perceptive essay situates Strom’s work within the canon of those photographers who have inspired and mentored him, including Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, Keith McElroy, Eliot Porter, Frederic Sommer, and Max Yavno. Death Valley: Painted Light is a book unlike any other about a landscape whose topographic relief and sheer beauty are unforgettable.

Beginning in 1872 with the establishment of Yellowstone, national parks were set aside to preserve for future generations the most spectacular and inspirational features of the country. The best representative examples were sought out of major ecosystems, such as Yosemite, geologic forms, such as the Grand Canyon, archaeological sites, such as Mesa Verde, and scenes of human events, such as Gettysburg. But one type of habitat—the desert—was overlooked until travel writers and the Automobile Age began to change Americans’ perceptions about desert landscapes.As the National Park Service began to explore the better-known Mojave and Colorado Deserts of southern California during the 1920s for a possible desert park, many agency leaders still held the same negative image of arid lands shared by many Americans—that they are hostile environments and largely useless. But one wealthy woman—Minerva Hamilton Hoyt, from Pasadena—came forward, believing in the value of the desert, and convinced President Franklin D. Roosevelt to establish a national monument that would protect the unique and iconic Joshua trees and other desert flora and fauna. Thus was Joshua Tree National Monument officially established in 1936, and when the area later was expanded in 1994, it became Joshua Tree National Park.Since 1936 the National Park Service and a growing cadre of environmentalists and recreationalists have fought to block ongoing proposals from miners, ranchers, private landowners, and real estate developers who historically have refused to accept the idea that desert might be suitable for anything other than their consumptive activities. Joshua Tree National Park, even with its often-conflicting land uses, is more popular today than ever, serving more than one million visitors per year who find the desert to be a place worthy of respect and preservation.

First published in 1990, this updated and enlarged edition of Challenge of the Big Trees stands as the new definitive history of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. Located in the southern Sierra Nevada of California, these twin parks, preserve an astounding sweep of natural and cultural resources, including not only the world's largest trees but also some of the most spectacular mountain terrain to be found anywhere in the nation.With its origins in the nineteenth century, the story of the two parks conveys the larger narrative of nature preservation in the United States. Generously illustrated with historic photographs and thirty-five custom maps, this new edition brings the story of Sequoia and the Kings Canyon into the twenty-first century, documenting the major changes made in the parks since 1990 and addressing the myriad challenges the parks still face, including climate change and evolving attitudes toward nature.

After the American Revolution, sites representing key events in American history were crucial to the young nation's efforts to formalize its story. Following the Civil War, national history became a primary vehicle for patriotic and spiritual reconstruction, and sites such as historic battlefields served important roles in remembering the past during the nation's subsequent challenging periods, including the Great Depression and the Vietnam War.Gettysburg Contested traces patterns of commemoration back to the well-known field of battle of July 1 3, 1863, which earned a legacy as sacred ground that remains today, more than 150 years later. But the landscape history and record of preservation at Gettysburg are complicated, for Gettysburg has wrestled with large issues, ranging from public versus private development, to the role of local, state, and federal governments, to the actual implementation of memorialization on the battlefield.Although the story of the battle is ingrained in the fabric of American memory, Brian Black's account considerably broadens the scope. Never before has Gettysburg's story been told so completely, offering layer upon layer, story upon story. Gettysburg thus becomes a springboard to understanding more fully the nation's need for sacred sites and symbols of America's past, including cherished landscapes such as Gettysburg. In Gettysburg Contested, America's treasured battlefield becomes the great laboratory for how Americans preserve and honor the past.

Picturing Harrisonburg provides the most vibrant examination available of the history of the Virginia city, once a frontier town founded in the 1730s but now a burgeoning city centrally located in one of America’s most beloved, historic, and beautiful regions—the Shenandoah Valley. Taking advantage of the rich visual record of Harrisonburg, the book serves as a model for how pictures of every kind reveal and represent a community’s evolving ideals and aspirations that change over time.Editor David Ehrenpries and a cast of contributors that includes historians and other experts on the region have organized six illuminating essays around 258 illustrations, many in full color, to discuss Harrisonburg’s changing built environment, its iconic ""places of memory,"" and how ideal visions of the place were often at odds with the lived reality. Their captivating essays and visual presentations begin in 1828 and include town maps and plans, a pivotal 1867 panoramic oil painting of Harrisonburg, early twentieth-century postcards, mid-twentieth century documentary and commercial photographs, images of ""urban renewal,"" and the graphic designs, logos, and digital photographs pertaining to the twenty-first-century city. The innovative approach of Picturing Harrisonburg offers a new model for understanding the past and present of the places we inhabit.

Fish Town is an inspired documentary project focused on preserving, through photography and oral history recordings, the cultural and environmental remains of southeastern Louisiana's fishing communities. Owing to a dying wild-caught seafood industry and a rapidly vanishing coastline, the places and people who are multigenerations deep in Louisiana's fishing traditions have been quietly slipping into extinction for decades, many without a form of historic preservation. These are the same towns that not only have made New Orleans an epicenter of fresh seafood dining but have traditionally served as getaway places for New Orleanian families, an escape to nature where time can be spent together sport fishing on the lakes and bayous and gathering around crab and crawfish boils. J. T. Blatty has been traveling ""down the road"" from her home in New Orleans since 2009, capturing these places and people as no one previously has.Fish Town includes 137 color photographs taken by Blatty between 2012 and 2017. Interspersed throughout are text narratives transcribed from audio recordings with long-standing members of the fishing communities, many of whose ancestors came to Louisiana during the late 1600s.

Iceland is best known for its stunning scenery and majestic landscapes. When photographer Nancy Libson first visited Iceland for a hiking trip some twenty years ago, she immediately fell in love with the country and its dramatic landscape. She vowed to return again, camera in hand. Beginning in 2015, Libson did just that, revisiting Iceland for four additional summers to photograph the land and its people.When Libson began her project, she chose to get to know the Icelandic people in rural areas. As she continued to experience this remote and beautiful land, she developed an awareness of the unique qualities of childhood in Iceland, and so her emphasis shifted from people of all ages to children at home and at play. Libson noticed that Icelandic children were granted an unusual level of freedom while living securely in close-knit families and supportive communities. She was further inspired to capture Iceland’s remoteness and beauty and its impact on the children who live there.As portrayed in Children in Iceland, Libson’s photographs provide an intimate and evocative view of the lives of the children surrounded by Iceland’s natural landscape. By photographing Iceland’s children, Libson began to better understand not only the children, but through them the culture and spirit of growing up in this remarkable country. The book is further enhanced by an afterword by Kristín Helga Gunnarsdóttir, the well-known Icelandic children’s author, who shares her thoughts about the freedom that Icelandic children feel from living with and close to nature.

This book is a beautiful and engaging presentation of drawings and letters by John Douglas Woodward, (1846–1924), a prominent American artist/illustrator during the 1870s and 1880s. He was on assignment for New York publisher D. Appleton and Co. to make on-the-spot drawings for illustrations for Picturesque Palestine, Sinai and Egypt (1881–1883), which has been called the most important book of illustrations of the region of its time. Some 200 of his compositions appeared in the book as wood engravings, the least expensive mass media of the time, while he contributed the art for 13 steel engravings. Woodward traveled with the somewhat older and better-known artist, Harry Fenn, who was the lead artist for the very successful Picturesque America, published by D. Appleton in parts from 1872–1874\. Woodward was the second most prolific contributor to Picturesque America and, like Fenn, also travelled and drew for Picturesque Europe (1878–1879).Woodward’s travels for Picturesque Palestine yielded a treasure trove of unique historical art and correspondence. Most drawings for book and magazine illustrations during this period were discarded by the artist after the printing plates were made. But Woodward saved his, providing a visual record, often in full color, of the region, in addition to the black-and-white illustrations in the book. In presenting them alongside his lively, engaging letters, this book will appeal to those interested in the history and art of the Middle East as well as in the appearance of places of importance mentioned in the Holy Bible and the specifics of travel to the region during the 1870s, when there was almost no tourist infrastructure and limited knowledge of other cultures.Although Picturesque Palestine is well-known to scholars and connoisseurs and available in some libraries and on-line, Woodward’s drawings and letters recording his trip to Palestine are not. The exquisite drawings, rendered in pencil, watercolor, and gouache, belong to the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia and have been stored since 1941 at Shrine Mont, a conference center in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley (founded by the artist’s nephew). The letters to his wife and mother are in the collection of the Valentine History Museum in Richmond.

Critical regionalism is a place-based approach to landscape architecture, architecture, and planning that emphasizes and embraces combining local and regional influences—natural and cultural—into the design and planning process. In such a world view, emphasis is placed on design responses to the vernacular and ecological characteristics of a region while respecting other historic and contemporary influences. Hopman carefully explains how and why this regionalist approach is invaluable to creating viable and sustainable landscapes and buildings. Architects and designers are shown the effectiveness of a resilient and continuously adaptive design methodology—a methodology that acknowledges both regional and global traditions and celebrates the creativity of individual designs that anchor the past with the present.Hopman pays special attention to the importance of creating aesthetic experiences when designing a new landscape or built environment. Experiential aesthetics can guide and inform the designer in implementing regionalist ideas—how the experience of a place is reflected in cultural values, personal creativity, and the poetics and ecological tributes of the natural environment where we live and work. Creative regionalism is shown to be an effective way to design for the modern age.In Creative Regionalism, Hopman highlights the best regionalist thinking by landscape architects, architects, planners, and educators during the last century. And Hopman’s historical and theoretical expositions are grounded with real examples: scores of twentieth- and twenty-first-century designs from around the world that Hopman has carefully studied and critiqued. He further explores the regionalist ideas of well-known living designers with interviews, reviews of the literature, philosophical inquiry, and reflection as a practicing landscape architect himself with three decades of studying, testing, and applying the concepts of critical regionalism into innovative landscape designs.

Vietnam is an ancient and beautiful land, with a deep history of occupational conflict that remains an enigma in Americans’ collective memory. It is still easy to forget that Vietnam is a country and not a war, even as America’s role in Vietnam inflamed and divided the American citizenry in ways that are still evident today. It is as if Vietnam’s civil war resurrected our own. And if you are a Vietnam War veteran or a family member of a vet, it’s worse, because, even after a half-century, many of the wounds won’t heal. What do you do when you have given up on forgetting? Chuck Forsman is one of a sizable number of aging Vietnam vets who have found deep satisfaction in revisiting Vietnam, supporting charities, orphanages, and clinics, doing volunteer work and more—anything to redeem what the U.S. military did there. He is also a renowned painter and photographer who depicts places and environments in ways that become unforgettable visual experiences for the contemporary viewer. Lost in Vietnam chronicles a journey, not a country. They were taken on visits averaging two months each and two-year intervals over a decade. Forsman traveled largely by motorbike throughout the country—south, central, and north—sharing his experiences through amazing photographs of Vietnam’s lands and people. His visual journey of one such veteran’s twofold quest: the one for redemption and understanding, and the other to make art. The renowned Le Ly Hayslip introduces the book and sets the table for Forsman’s incredible sojourn.

Human beings in the 21st century hunger, often unconsciously, for places to live that are more than efficient, economical machines. Inhabiting the Sacred offers sound and innovative guidance to both citizens and planning professionals who seek to transform public spaces into sites that answer not only practical needs but spiritual and humanitarian needs as well. The book explains how to give form in everyday landscapes to our most deeply held values and most ennobling purposes, thus turning profane spaces into sacred places.This transformation may be accomplished in interior and exterior private and civic spaces alike. Complex projects may require the assistance of a professional designer and planner, but many projects can be carried out by the individual or family. The processes and techniques described in these pages may even assist indigenous people or other groups in defending territories crucial to their cultural survival. To shape neighborhood and civic space into sacred place requires a partnership between citizens, government and public officials, planners and designers; this book is a resource for all who play these various roles in their communities.The book is organized as a practical guide to creating more meaningful and fulfilling habitation that harmonizes with local culture and personal experiences. Each chapter provides theory, case studies, and how-to techniques aggregated from nearly fifty years of research and practice of embedding values into public landscapes.

Imagine setting out on a road trip in a 1929 Ford Model A Roadster, with the stated goal of traveling from Manhattan to Mexico and Central America, after only a week’s worth of preparation. This is exactly what brothers Arthur Lyon and Joe Lyon Jr. did on March 23, 1930. The Lyons acquired some camping gear, studied a few maps, and mounted in the car’s rear seat a fifty-five-gallon oil drum equipped with a gas feed for extra fuel. They divided up the princely sum of $324 in cash to fund their expedition.The story related here is replete with the brothers’ accounts of the challenges the young men faced on their epic journey, including encounters with a fascinating cast of characters—and unforgettable brushes with fate such as a Mexican freight train that nearly ran them and their car off the rails. The amazing 1930 journey of the young Lyon brothers can be seen as the centerpiece of a larger story, of a pair of lives lived out not just as brothers but as partners in an emerging automobile age.

_Paris Park Photographs_ features spectacular images from a dozen public parks and gardens in and near France's capital city. Exploring many of the same places that photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927) made famous a century ago, Michael Kolster references the pleasures and pitfalls of wandering alone amongst trees and plants and sculpture, unkempt and formally designed places, tempered by the knowledge that the modern world with all its congestion is only a few short steps away. These intimate yet inherently expansive views of Paris’s parks invite closer scrutiny of the encounters awaiting us at the edges of the well-worn paths defining our daily lives.Few people venture into the frame of Kolster's photographs, but the promise of a renewed sense of hope and community resides in the details of his visual encounters and the moments of his heightened attention. Each picture speaks to us as a moment in time, even as the sequence suggests a choreography of place, one that can vary daily along with the changing moods and light of each park. Paris Park Photographs is presented in a bilingual English/French edition and concludes with an afterword by Michelle Kuo. Of note is how the book’s design is inspired by Walker Evans's 1938 classic work, American Photographs, making Kolster's book of immediate interest to photo and book collectors.

Janet Pritchard’s romance with the American West began with horseback riding, watching movies, and hearing her dad’s dreams of being a cowboy. When she began to spend adolescent summers in Wyoming during the 1960s, her world changed forever, as she fell under the spell of natural wonder in the shadow of the Grand Tetons. Only later did she recognize her feelings as a response to what nineteenth-century Romantics called the sublime.A vintage 1916 picture postcard of Golden Gate Canyon by F. Jay Haynes inspired this project. When Pritchard turned it over and read the message – “I cannot describe the Yellowstone as the dictionary is only a book. It is more than scenery. In some places, it is so beautiful that the men take off their hats, and the women are silent!” – she was back in a childhood place of wonder tempered by a lifetime of work as an artist and teacher in landscape photography.Formed by fire and ice, embraced by a nation seeking an ancient past with a future as grand as the landscapes it inhabited, Yellowstone was established as the world’s first national park by an Act of Congress in 1872\. One hundred fifty years later, the park and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem continue to occupy an iconic role in the public imagination of Yellowstone as a place that is both real and ideal. Here, in this complex ecosystem where wild nature and culture meet, the complexities of our relationship to the natural world are revealed unlike any other place.Yellowstone is truly unique, and each generation who visits it invests Yellowstone with ideas, beliefs, and values reflecting its historical moment. In More than Scenery: Yellowstone, an American Love Story, Janet Pritchard surveys these relationships with her captivating photographs and insightful text, and Lucy R. Lippard’ sets the table with her heartfelt introduction to the world’s romance with Yellowstone. This book reveals why Yellowstone is so important to American and the world and how its landscapes reflect more than scenery.

Varanasi, also known as Kashi and Banaras, is a city in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh dating to the 11th century B.C.E. Regarded as the spiritual capital of India, the city draws Hindu pilgrims who bathe in the Ganges River’s sacred waters for prayer and ritual. In Varanasi, one is in a time warp where one is living in history as if time has never stopped, for the people, both residents and pilgrims, continue their daily practices and worship in ways relatively unchanged for millennia, a continuum of thousands of years. Being in Varanasi is like being on a thread pulled from a cloth that dates back to the beginning of time. Here, one doesn’t “see” a ruin, as one does in other ancient civilizations, but a living city where history hasn’t stopped. David Scheinbaum guides us, with his camera, through the city’s winding streets that are filled with thousands of shrines and temples at virtually every turn. He takes us on an incredible visual journey to the Ganges, the sacred river where bathers are in prayer, and to the funerary Ghats, steps that lead down to the river where cremations take place, filling the air with incense and burning pyres. Hindus believe that being cremated along the banks of the holy Ganges allows one to break the cycle of death and rebirth and attain Moksha, (salvation) making it a major center for pilgrimages. David Scheinbaum’s beautiful, soulful photographs present an ancient, holy city immersed in prayer. Woven through are the words of B. J. Miller and Diana L. Eck, noted scholars and writers who each shed light on the special qualities that make Varanasi the holy city it has always been.

In 1998, Kevin Bubriski was fortunate to spend time with the Uyghurs in Kashgar, their ancient city on the Silk Road in Xinjiang, China. While there, he made unforgettable photographic portraits and street scenes that reveal a haunting beauty and sense of the past in old Kashgar. Bubriski was drawn to the faces of ordinary people and their daily lives, with the intent that through photographs mutual understanding between people might be fostered. Although 1998 was an uncomfortable time of rapid transformation for the Uyghurs, their oasis city in the high desert was still vibrant, even as the Chinese government’s brutal crackdown was about to commence. In the last few years, up to a million Uyghurs have been detained in “re-education camps” while others have been subjected to forced sterilizations and wider persecution. The vibrancy, beauty, and grit that Bubriski witnessed and photographed more than two decades ago has irrevocably changed. The Uyghur cultural, economic, familial, religious, and spiritual traditions are captured in Bubriski’s images and the extensive text by Tahir Hamut Izgil and the late Dru Gladney. These traditions, interwoven in Uyghurs’ lives and community for more than two millennia, have been severely impacted by the overt and disastrous policies of the Chinese government’s crackdown on Uyghur civil, spiritual, and cultural activities. The Uyghur community is now fractured and split due to widespread surveillance, mass detentions, and incarcerations. This book is also presented in a bilingual edition so that it is not only accessible to Uyghur people living in non-English-speaking regions of the world, but a way for Uyghurs around the world to reaffirm their cultural and social identity wherever they now live. As many Uyghur families are now separated due to detentions or flight to asylum elsewhere, the book is meant to be an enduring gift for the Uyghur people and for all who wish to understand better Uyghur culture and history. Bubriski’s book is a stunning work of art that reveals an earlier time when Kashgar, beloved city of the Uyghurs, retained much of its traditional life and charm.

During the 1980s, the Reagan Administration financed and directed wars against popular movements in El Salvador and Nicaragua that left more than 300,000 dead and countless more wounded. Vowing to block “Soviet expansion,” the U.S. waged a Vietnam-style counterinsurgency against leftist rebels in El Salvador while orchestrating an illegal and covert war to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Some 75,000 died in El Salvador, mostly at the hands of U.S.-backed military and security forces, and more than 30,000 were killed in Nicaragua. Meanwhile, with tacit American support, the Guatemalan military razed hundreds of communities and killed an estimated 200,000 people during a 36-year civil war, including 100,000 Indigenous Mayan villagers.Scott Wallace arrived in Central America in 1983 to cover the conflicts as a freelance “stringer” for CBS News and the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, and he would also later report for Newsweek, The Nation, The Independent, The Guardian, and other news organizations. Seeking to discern the truth in a region riddled with death and deception, Wallace evolved a distinctive style of field reporting that included photography, writing, and broadcast recordings. He stayed in the region throughout the decade, moving back and forth across national boundaries and battlelines to produce a unique body of work that includes the perspectives of opposing sides of the interwoven conflicts as well as their impacts on the noncombatants tragically caught in the middle. He later reported from Afghanistan and Iraq.Situating the exercise of U.S. power on a continuum running from Vietnam through Central America to Iraq and the Middle East, Central America in the Crosshairs of War provides a rare look into the shocking real-life consequences of morally dubious policies while offering a gripping primer for aspiring foreign correspondents and field reporters. As Wallace reminds us, the multiple “troubles” associated today with America’s southern border—among them immigration, drugs, and crime—are in significant measure the result of misadventures undertaken by the U.S. during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. He also shows a continuum in U.S. military affairs, from Vietnam to Central America and the Middle East.

_The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America_ is the first book to tell the story of the Black cowboy experience in contemporary America. Although Black cowboys have been a fixture on the American landscape and frontier since the nineteenth century, few people are aware of their enduring contributions to the history of the West and how their unique culture continues to thrive today in urban as well as rural areas all over the country.The book features Ron Tarver’s beautiful, compelling, and often surprising contemporary images of African-American cowboys that not only convey the Black cowboy’s way of life and its rich heritage, but also affirm a thriving culture of Black-owned ranches and rodeo operations, parades, inner-city cowboys, retired cowhands, and Black cowgirls of all ages, too. Tarver, who grew up in a family of Black cowboys in Oklahoma, uses his artistry to question, if not upend, long-held notions of what it means to be a cowboy and, with that, what it means to be an American._The Long Ride Home_ couldn’t be more timely, coming on the heels of films such as Lil Nas X’s hit time-travel western, _Old Town Road_ (2019), and Idris Elba’s _Concrete Cowboy_ (2021), which was based on Greg Neri’s _Ghetto Cowboy_ (2013), about Philadelphia’s contemporary African-American cowboy culture. Many of Tarver’s images were made in some of the same Philadelphia neighborhoods. Widespread interest in the Black experience in America will also make this book an especially important contribution to Black history.In addition to Tarver’s photographs, _The Long Ride Home_ includes an essay by Art T. Burton, an expert on the history of Black cowboys. This book is both a tribute to and celebration of the Black cowboy in America. It is certain to be an invaluable addition to American history for years to come.

The volcanoes on the Alaska Peninsula and the fifty-seven volcanoes that project into the Aleutian Islands form the northern rim of the Pacific Ring of Fire. Many are in Alaska’s national parks, monuments, and preserves. They continue to erupt, creating new Earth surfaces, and the deposits of lava, pumice, and ash ejected by these volcanoes create primeval ground: a true wilderness where few people on Earth other than volcanologists have traversed. Gary Freeburg has wandered and lived among Alaska’s volcanoes for regular periods during the last twenty years. The volcanoes he visits are alive and in some cases still steaming, and its lands are coarse and free of distraction: a vacuum of emptiness that embraces solitude and silence stirred only by the winds that blow and the rains that fall. The Earth surfaces that he walks are hard and largely barren of plant life, except where surfaces are shielded by the wind or are near water sources. There, new life returns in the form of lichen and tiny plants and insects and animals—bees, bear, fox, mayflies, and Alaskan hares—taking their rightful place in these vast, remote national parks, monuments, and preserves, reminding us that they are signs of hope that Earth will continue to evolve, regenerate, and renew itself long after we humans are gone.Freeburg’s writings, photographs, and drawings reflect what it is like to seek solitude and live among Alaska’s wild volcanoes. His travels were mostly solo treks in which he was flown in with supplies, a camera, sketchbooks, and journal to share his thoughts and artistically render his experiences. Each day spent in Alaska’s volcanic wilderness affirmed the importance of this place for the author and those who can only dream of such a place. His book seems to explain: How fortunate it is to have magical places and national parks like Alaska’s volcanoes, how fortunate we are to be alive on this magnificent Earth.

In Aldo Leopold’s Shack: Nina’s Story, Nancy Nye Hunt tells the remarkable tale of the famous Leopold family’s efforts to restore a worn-out farm along the lower Wisconsin River near Baraboo in the 1930s during the Great Depression and into the 1940s. Aldo Leopold, the world-renowned ecologist and conservationist—along with Estella, his wife, and their five children and two dogs, Gus and Flick—spent most weekends and vacations living and working at their Sand County farm that they called the Shack, now a National Historic Landmark that is also listed on both the National and Wisconsin Registers of Historic Places.Told through the eyes of Nina, the eldest daughter, details of life at the Shack unfold seasonally. Along the way, readers learn about the family’s many experiences and adventures: healing the land and converting an old chicken coop into a cabin (the “Shack”); restoring prairies and improving woodlands; planting gardens, collecting firewood, and tending orchards; observing animal tracks, bird migrations, and times when plants bloom; cooking meals over an open fire; singing the family’s old Spanish songs from New Mexico, where Estella was born and raised and had deep Spanish roots, and having great fun walking, swimming, canoeing, cross-country skiing, and playing tracking games.While at the Shack, Aldo and his family also recorded scientific observations in their “Shack journals.” These journals became the basis of Aldo’s 1949 landmark book, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. That book continues to inspire people today with its call for a land ethic in everyday life. Visiting the Shack, as thousands of people from all over the world do every year, is the equivalent of seeking out Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond as a pilgrimage site and source of inspiration.Using interviews with Nina and the Leopold family and relying on the original Shack journals, historic family photographs, and her extensive field experiences over dozens of years, Hunt has captured the spirit of this special place as no other book previously has. Here, readers discover Nina’s story of growing up at the Shack and learn about the family’s favorite recipes and songs as well as genealogical information all that go back centuries. And the blending of Nina’s story with 161 historic and contemporary photographs of life at the Shack, maps, and original pencil drawings of wildlife all provide for a transformative reading experience. First published in 2011 and now presented in an updated and greatly expanded new edition, including 38 new illustrations, 32 additional pages, and a new field trip to the Shack, readers will be able to appreciate and better understand Aldo’s famous concepts—the land ethic and phenology—that continue to influence our lives today. This book is a unique tribute and introduction to one of the world’s greatest conservationists and his family and how one place—the Shack—can help shape the world.

This is the first book to present the stories and portraits of ordinary Tibetan women and men in exile, in their own words. It includes gorgeous photographs of the lands they embraced in Ladakh, where they fled after the Chinese annexed Tibet in 1959.To meet the people and make these photographs, the Johnsons traveled throughout Ladakh, visiting many villages, and interviewing dozens of people. Most of them had to leave everything behind when they fled: family, friends, and their most precious possessions: their animals, with whom they had a unique and symbiotic relationship. Yet, as Dr. Johnson reveals in his photographs and stories, these refugees are resilient, wise, and hopeful. They have made their tragedy a source of strength, along with their unwavering devotion to their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and to their Buddhist practice, which continues to sustain them. In a world full of exiles, more than 150,000 of which are Tibetan, this book is not only of historical significance, it is timely. It puts a human face on the increasingly complex problem of people being forcibly displaced from their homelands. These remarkable individuals show us the meaning of never giving up, and that everyone deserves compassion, for without it, the future of humanity stands in peril.

In October 1921 the famous planner and conservationist Benton MacKaye formally proposed the establishment of the Appalachian Trail (the AT) from northern Georgia to Maine. The trail and its 2,198.4 miles was finally opened in 1937. Today, it is one of the most visited and cherished greenways and hiking paths in North America.In Hiking the AT in the Virginias, Dave Pruett shares his incredible journey of hiking all 559 miles of the AT in Virginia and West Virginia, beginning with retirement at sixty-five and completing it as a septuagenarian at age 75. Perhaps no stretch of the AT provides such awe, diversity, and wonder as the AT in Virginia and West Virginia, which, prior to 1862, were one state. Pruett’s informative and beautifully illustrated book conveys what it is like to experience the AT’s many characteristics—its vistas, bridges, flora, meadows, shelters, weather, water sources, wildlife, and magic—in an unforgettable journey.For those who seek a sense of what it is like to walk and hike the AT in the Virginias, Pruett’s book is perhaps the best guide available. Written for the general reader and for the millions who visit not only the AT but the Skyline Drive, Blue Ridge Parkway, and Shenandoah and Great Smokey Mountains National Parks, Pruett’s book is an indispensable and memorable guide.

Imagine walking among and learning about 130 ancient cities in 25 countries across the world: from the Mediterranean to the Middle East, from Asia to the Americas. Some are world heritage sites, accessible to tens of thousands of visitors each year, and some are remote and seldom seen. But each ancient city from the distant past conveys a special place in the history of human civilization, and each presents its own story and sense of place.In Unforgotten: Ancient Cities from a Distant Past, William Frej presents 200 duotone photographs of these ancient cities that are simply unforgettable, capturing as they do their allure, their beauty, their spirit and resonating sense of space. Anne Frej, in her elegant introduction, sets the table for the personal journey that awaits every reader—a journey into deep history and magical architecture and geographical splendor that speaks to us today. And Michael E. Smith, a noted scholar and author, writes about the lessons to be learned from these ancient cities, including his insights into the various urban traditions behind the building of the cities and why their histories remain poignant.As readers explore the ruins and remnants of these amazing ancient cities, a sense of awe and wonder is ever-present. Yet so is the knowledge that human civilization and life on Earth, no matter how grand, is tenuous and fragile. Even as these places reached their apogee and influence in the distant past, there are reasons why these places were abandoned and replaced. So let your curiosity wander as you turn each page, for you will see in words and pictures why they should not be forgotten.

Hawaiʻi’s “Big Island” is a place created by fire, being formed entirely from volcanic activity. Currently, it is home to four active volcanoes. The Big Island is also, due to its position relative to the North Pacific trash gyre, home to large amounts of plastic debris that ocean currents deposit on its shores, particularly on its remote southeastern areas such as Kamilo Beach. Much effort has been made to remove this debris, with a fair amount of success, but the flow of trash onto the beaches continues unabated, and keeping these beaches clean a never-ending task. Does clearing the beaches of plastic waste, only to bury it elsewhere, actually help? As plastic washes up on an island so recently formed from volcanic activity, we are reminded that everything there, including all forms and traces of life, must have come from somewhere else. Photographer Michael Kolster became interested in the issue of plastic debris on Kamilo Beach through a paper from the Geological Society of America whose authors claimed that the plastic debris, when melted or otherwise combined with rocks on the beach, would probably enter the fossil record to become a horizon marker for the Anthropocene. Dubbed “plastiglomerates” by geologists, these hybrid “stones” are the product of humans burning plastic, whether intentionally or accidentally, that then melts and become fused with the naturally-occurring rocks that were created by volcanoes. These fusions of human and geological activity form a fossil-like record of present-day human activity that is likely to persist for thousands of millennia due to their prevalence, location, and composition. Wanting to see these plastiglomerates for himself, Kolster traveled to Hawaiʻi, where he photographed Kamilo Beach and its plastiglomerates. He also collected examples of plastiglomerates that he took back to his studio in Maine. Kolster’s photographs of the plastiglomerates, both in Hawai‘i and collected at home, show both the harsh reality and surprising beauty of plastic trash from the beaches of a Pacific paradise. While this trash can be viewed as both an eyesore and an insult to our ideas of what a tropical paradise like Hawai‘i should be, Kolster also shows how seeing plastic on the beach is equivalent to looking in the mirror: We need to look closer at our reflection before impulsively wiping it clean, only to have to do it over and over day after day, week after week, endlessly.

We all eat. By the time food gets to your plate it has been on a journey. Open this book to the start of that journey, where much of your food (and flowers) comes from. Some of the best soil in the world lies north of Seattle in the fertile Skagit River Valley. More than 90 crops are grown by farmers who immigrated from Europe, Japan, and Mexico. Farming is labor intensive and repetitive throughout the seasons, and daily tasks are required to keep the crops thriving. Wanting to show the unique mechanics of farming and who is involved in tending and harvesting the foods we eat, Craig J. Barber has spent years visiting and photographing land and life on small mostly organic farms. He interviewed farmers, many of them third and fourth generation, whose stories are featured in these pages. He spent time with the field workers, not taking photos right away but gaining their trust. As a result of his persistence, Barber captures the physical demands and artistry of farming—field workers tossing cabbages up to another crew member in the back of a truck, a crew walking bent over behind a planter-tractor to make sure the seedlings are set correctly, the care and tenderness of those caring for livestock, the beauty of a kale field in the snow, and the drama of harvesting leeks on a winter night under a spotlight. Where Our Food Comes From is a book with many facets. Look at and savor the rich photographs. Read the farmers’ stories. Study the facts and figures to expand your knowledge about farmland, food, and farmers. The “magical” Skagit River Valley is unique in producing so much of the United States's and world’s food (and flowers), but it is also a microcosm of the universal and worthy occupation of raising food. In Craig Barber’s unforgettable book, we see how hard work, careful planning, and a love of the land combine to feed the world.