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How Books Can Save Democracy argues that American democracy is in crisis as healthy disagreement has pivoted into negative, winner-take-all contests. Michael Fischer proposes that literature is an essential tool to rekindle the relationships and mutual understanding that functional democracies require.By participating in reading, writing, and discussions about literature with diverse perspectives—whether in classrooms or book clubs or at public festivals—we can discover how to embrace our differences rather than fear them, enabling the empathy and collaborative spirit needed to sustain a democratic society.How Books Can Save Democracy illustrates how literature, from classics to contemporary works, fosters nuanced thinking and the ability to find common ground despite our differences. Fischer draws insightful connections and examines how great literature throughout history has diagnosed societal democratic challenges, discussing the works of Zadie Smith, Charles Dickens, Alexis de Tocqueville, Hannah Arendt, Philip Roth, Ezra Klein, Bishop Desmond Tutu, and many others. For anyone concerned about polarization and democratic backsliding, he provides evidence that the reading, writing, and discussion of powerful texts may be our most valuable and overlooked democratic resource.How Books Can Save Democracy is essential reading for educators, community leaders, and anyone concerned about the future of American democracy. Now more than ever we need works of literature to help us benefit from our differences instead of being threatened by them, and our bookshelves may hold the solution to this pressing civic challenge.

In this new telling of Mexico's Second Empire and Louis Napoleon's installation of Maximilian von Habsburg and his wife, Carlota of Belgium, as the emperor and empress of Mexico, Maximilian and Carlota brings the dramatic, interesting, and tragic time of this six-year-siege to life. From 1861 to 1866, the French incorporated the armies of Austria, Belgium--including forces from Crimea to Egypt--to fight and subdue the regime of Mexico's Benito Juarez during the time of the U.S. Civil War. France viewed this as a chance to seize Mexican territory in a moment they were convinced the Confederacy would prevail and take over Mexico. With both sides distracted in the U.S., this was their opportunity to seize territory in North America. In 1867, with aid from the United States, this movement came to a disastrous end both for the royals and for France while ushering in a new era for Mexico. In a bid to oust Juarez, Mexican conservatives appealed to European leaders to select a monarch to run their country.Maximilian and Carlota's reign, from 1864 to 1867, was marked from the start by extravagance and ambition and ended with the execution of Maximilian by firing squad, with Carlota on the brink of madness. This epoch moment in the arc of French colonial rule, which spans North American and European history at a critical juncture on both continents, shows how Napoleon III's failure to save Maximilian disgusted Europeans and sealed his own fate. Maximilian and Carlota offers a vivid portrait of the unusual marriage of Maximilian and Carlota and of international high society and politics at this critical nineteenth-century juncture. This largely unknown era in the history of the Americas comes to life through this colorful telling of the couple's tragic reign.

At Great Salt Lake, near Robert Smithson’s iconic earthwork Spiral Jetty, a motley crew of scientists walks the mudflats to study fossils in the making. This reputedly dead sea is home to tar seeps, pools of raw oil (nicknamed ‘death traps’) that act as a preservative, encasing organisms as they were in life.In this spare landscape, an intricate web of life unfurls. Halophiles―salt-hungry microorganisms―tint the brackish water pink and orange; crystals of gypsum stud the ground, glistening underfoot; and pelicans and other migratory birds stop for a crucial rest. Barn owls and seagulls flirt with their prey around the seeping constellations, sometimes falling prey to the oil themselves. Gretchen Henderson came to the tar seeps, a kind of natural asphalt, after recovering from being hit by a car as she walked in a crosswalk―a manmade asphalt. Like the spiraling artwork that made Great Salt Lake’s north shore famous, Henderson’s associations of life and death, degeneration and regeneration, and injury and healing coalesced. As she reexamined pressing issues that this delicate area revealed about the climate crisis, her sense of ecology spiraled into other ways of perceiving the lake’s entangled lives.How do we move beyond narrow concepts of wounded and healed, the beautiful and the ugly, to care for ecosystems that evolve over time? How do we confront our vulnerability to recognize kindred dynamics in our living planet? Through shifting lake levels, bird migrations, microbial studies, environmental arts, and cultural histories shaped by indigenous knowledges and colonial legacies, Life in the Tar Seeps contemplates the waysthat others have understood this body of water, enlivening more than this region alone. As Henderson witnesses scientists, arts curators, land managers, and students working collaboratively to steward a challenging place, she grows to see the lake not as dead but as a watershed for shifting perceptions of any overlooked place, offering a meditation on environmental healing across the planet.Henderson interweaves her journey with her own vivid photographs of tar seeps and pelican death assemblages, historic maps and contemporary art, as a wayfinding guide for exploring places of our own.

For the past five decades the Texas Observer has been an essential voice in Texas culture and politics, championing honest government, civil rights, labor, and the environment, while providing a platform for many of the state's most passionate and progressive voices. Included are ninety-one selections from Roy Bedichek, Lou Dubose, Ronnie Dugger, Dagoberto Gilb, Jim Hightower, Molly Ivins, Larry McMurtry, Maury Maverick Jr., Willie Morris, Debbie Nathan, and others. To mark the Observer's fiftieth anniversary, Char Miller has selected a cross section of the best work to appear in its pages. Not only does the collection pay homage to an important alternative voice in Texas journalism, it also serves as a progressive chronicle of a half-century of life in the Lone Star State--a state that has spawned three presidents in the last forty years. If Texas is, as some say, a crucible for national politics, then Fifty Years of the Texas Observer can be read as a casebook for issues that concern citizens in all fifty states. Molly Ivins's foreword gives historical background for the Observer and sets the stage for the book.

Collected here are sixteen essays on poets and poetry, the writing life, and a host of fascinating topics that come into the wide range of Marianne Boruch's attention. She examines how the imagination works with mystery and surprise in a variety of poets from Elizabeth Bishop to Theodore Roethke, from Russell Edson to Larry Levis, from Walt Whitman to Eavan Boland. Combining a richly associative personal style with original insights on poetic texts and historical and cultural musing, Boruch considers how the atomic bomb changed William Carlos Williams's deepest ambition for poetry, and how Edison's listening, through his famous deafness, informs our sense of the poetic line. Other essays explore how the car--its danger and solitude--helps us understand American poetry or how Dvorak and Whitman shared darker things than their curious love for trains. Poetry transforms, changing over time in the work of individual poets as well as changing us as we read it or write it. Boruch's writing has a musical, incantatory style, creating a mood in which many of her subjects are immersed.Her approach isn't meant to fix or crystallize her ideas in any hard and fast light, but rather to present the music of her thinking.

At the heart of The Land's Wild Music is an examination of the relationship between writers and their. Interviewing four great American writers of place — Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams, and James Galvin — author Mark Tredinnick considers how writers transmute the power of nature into words. Each author is profiled in a separate chapter written in rich, engaging prose that reads like the best journalism, and Tredinnick concludes with his own thoughts on what it takes to be "an authentic witness of place."

This anthology pays tribute to the awe-inspiring diversity of planet Earth, with contributions from: Vikram Seth, Michael Ondaatje, Mark Twain, Pablo Neruda, Langston Hughes, and many more, including excerpts from the field of both classical and cutting edge geology. This book will appeal to both the general reader and the professional geologist. "Bedrock" is a remarkable collection of fiction, poetry and geological essays that pay tribute to the boundless beauty and amazing power of our Earth. The book is organised into sections on rock, sand, earthquakes, rivers, deserts and much more beyond, emphasising the diversity to be found on Earth. Classical heavy weights sit beside young new writers, offering varied perspectives on the wonders of geology. First hand accounts describe specific earthquakes and volcanic erruptions that have left a permanent mark on the face of history, while contributors also cover subjects such as the patterns that are found in stone and the movement of rivers.This book will appeal to both the general reader as an introduction to geology and as a source of inspiration - it will also appeal to the expert as a welcome, if unnecessary, reminder of the beauty and power to be found within the exploration of our planets foundations.

In Ranch Gates of the Southwest, Daniel Olsen and Henk van Assen present more than 100 full-color photographs of ranch gates taken across Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona. From rugged and functional to stylized and adorned, ranches with names such as F. V. Cuahope Ranch, High Lonesome, Felix River Ranch, and Rancho Quatro Hermanas reveal cultural history, landscape features, and individualism through language and design. Lucy R. Lippard's introduction offers historical and cultural context of ranches and their gates. Landscape architecture professor Kenneth I. Helphand explains the environmental history of ranches from land appropriation and naming to the impact of gates on the landscape. In their own essays, Olsen and van Assen tell the behind-the-scenes story of making the book and describe type design and language from their perspectives as designers and photographers. Ranch Gates of the Southwest is both a sumptuous documentary record and a tribute to a quintessentially American symbol.

This book tells us how maps help us to understand where we are in the world in the same way that literature, whether realistic or experimental, attempts to explain our realities. "Maps of the Imagination" explores how writers and cartographers use many of the same devices for plotting and executing their work, making crucial decisions about what to include and what to leave out, in order to get us from here to there, without excess baggage or a confusing surplus of information.Turchi traces the history of maps, from their initial decorative and religious purposes to their later instructional applications. He describes how maps rely on projections in order to portray a three-dimensional world on the two-dimensional flat surface of paper, which he goes on to relate to what writers do in projecting a literary work from the imagination onto the page.Drawing from texts as varied as poetry by Louise Gluck, stories by Kate Chopin and Robert Coover, novels by Robert Louis Stevenson and Italo Calvino, the film "Memento", and Chuck Jones' "Roadrunner" cartoons, Turchi ranges across a wide literary geography, illustrating his argument with an array of maps and illustrations, which will be scattered throughout the text.

"Defiant Gardens" examines gardens of war in the twentieth century, including gardens built behind the trenches in World War I, in the ghettos during World War II, and in Japanese-American internment camps in the US, as well as gardens created by soldiers at their bases and encampments during the Gulf War, Vietnam, Korea and the Second World Wars.

In the year he spent teaching at Borrego Pass, a remote Navajo community in northwest New Mexico, Kurt Caswell found himself shunned as persona non grata. His cultural missteps, status as an interloper, and white skin earned him no respect in the classroom or the community--those on the reservation assumed he would come and go like so many teachers had before. But as Caswell attempts to bridge the gap between himself and those who surround him, he finds his calling as a teacher and develops a love for the rich landscape of New Mexico, and manages a hard-won truce between his failings and successes.

Acclaimed poet and MacArthur Foundation Fellow, Lucia Perillo, a former park ranger who loved to hike the Cascade Mountains alone and prided herself on daring solo skis down the wild slopes of Mount Rainier, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when she was in her thirties. I've Heard the Vultures Singing is a clear-eyed and brazenly outspoken examination of her life as a person with disabilities. In unwavering and witty prose, and without a trace of self-pity, she contemplates the bitter ironies of being unable to walk, what it's like to experience eros as a sick person, how to lower one's expectations for a wilderness experience, and how to deal with the vagaries of a disease that has no predictable trajectory. Masterfully written, the essays resonate with lovers of literature and nature, and with anyone who has dealt with disadvantages of the body or the hard-luck limitations of ordinary life.

In The Walk, William deBuys writes about personal loss and the power of the landscape to nurture the recovery of hope. The book consists of three interrelated essays that move from a period of strife in the author's life to a kind of limbo and eventually to a place of peace. The setting is deBuys' small farm in New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Each morning, he takes the same walk through the woods, arriving, as he describes in the first essay, at a clarity that comes from looking at the same vantage point for years. The middle essay, "Geranium," takes its name from a mare deBuys had to put down, and whose remains become one with the forest. In the final essay, deBuys reflects on drought, the loss of a friend, and the resurgence of land and hope. Contemplative, compassionate, and quietly humorous, The Walk is nature writing at its finest.

In this eclectic anthology, more than 20 scientists, nature writers, poets, and Zen practitioners, attest to how paying attention to nature can be a healing antidote to the hectic and harrying pace of our lives. Throughout this provocative and uplifting book, writers describe their various experiences in nature and portray how careful, and mindful, attention to the larger world around us brings rewarding and surprising discoveries. They give us the literary, personal, and spiritual stories that point a way toward calm and quiet for which many people today hunger. Contributors to The Way of Natural History highlight their individual ways of paying attention to nature and discuss how their experiences have enlivened and enhanced their worlds. The anthology is a rich array of writings that provide models for interacting with the natural world, and together, create a call for the importance of natural history as a discipline.

Moral Ground brings together the testimony of over 80 visionaries -- theologians and religious leaders, scientists, elected officials, business leaders, naturists, activists, and writers -- to present a diverse and compelling call to honor our individual and collective moral responsibilities to our planet. In the face of environmental degradation and global climate change, scientific knowledge alone does not tell us what we ought to do. The missing premise of the argument and much-needed centerpiece in the debate to date has been the need for ethical values, moral guidance, and principled reasons for doing the right thing for our planet, its animals, its plants, and its people. This book encourages a newly discovered, or rediscovered, commitment to consensus about our ethical obligation to the future and why it's wrong to wreck the world.

Intimate in size yet quietly breathtaking in scope, this graceful gift book will forever change how you think, and how you feel, about trees. In poetically sparse scientific observations, renowned conservation biologist Gretchen Daily narrates the evolution, impact, and natural wonder of trees. Alongside photographs by Chuck Katz, the text and images form a quiet and moving meditation on The Power of Trees. Twenty-six duotone black and white photographs illustrate the development of trees: how trunks were formed, what tree rings tell us about human societies, and how trees define the future of humanity. Pictures of trees threading through the landscape - dotting mountainsides, braiding along the sides of glassine rivers - bear witness to the lyrical force and clarity of Daily's observations. Recreating the authors' hike together through the landscape of the Skagit River in Washington State, the balletic movement between Daily's commentary and Katz's vision reaches out to readers, inviting them to enjoy the landscape through a scientific understanding of trees.At once emotional and intellectual, The Power of Trees is the first collection of nature photographs that invites the reader to not only delight in the gorgeous play between light and shadow, but also the fascinating natural mechanisms that create such striking natural beauty. An ecologist by training, Gretchen Daily is an internationally acclaimed conservancy advocate and scholar. Her role as a National Trustee for The Nature Conservancy will feature prominently in the national marketing campaign to bridge the gap between scientific educators and the general nature reader.

Westerners--from early missionaries to explorers to present-day artists, scientists, and tourists--have always found volcanoes fascinating and disturbing. Native Hawaiians, in contrast, revere volcanoes as a source of spiritual energy and see the volcano goddess Pele as part of the natural cycle of a continuously procreative cosmos. Volcanoes hold a special place in our curiosity about nature. The Burning Island is an intimate, multilayered portrait of the Hawaiian volcano region--a land marked by a precarious tension between the harsh reality of constant geologic change, respect for mythological traditions, and the pressures of economic exploitation. Pamela Frierson treks up Mauna Loa, the world's largest active volcano, and Kilauea to explore how volcanoes work, as well as how their powerful and destructive forces reshape land, cultures, and history. Her adventures reveal surprising archeological ruins, threatened rainforest ecosystems, and questionable real estate development of the islands.Now a classic of nature writing, Frierson's narrative sets the stage for a larger exploration of our need to take great care in respecting and preserving nature and tradition while balancing our ever-expanding sense of discovery and use of the land.

Braiding strands of earthen insight with uproarious storytelling, Texas Hill Country legendary author Becky Patterson recreates the history of the Steiler Hill Ranch in twenty-four anecdotal chapters interspersed with original artwork. The result is a mixture of memoir and montage, treasure chest and tableau vivant of a world that's beautiful, brash, and wonderfully heartbreaking. Patterson -- the daughter of Texas folk hero and self-proclaimed mayor of Luckenbach, Hondo Crouch -- has big shoes to fill and she does so successfully in this colorful collection of Hill Country and Texas ranch vignettes. Foreman and general cowboy guru Raymond Kuhlmann tells stories of the Goat King and German drinking songs, the buzzard traps and Mexican corridos that filled the nighttime pastures. First-person accounts and vivid historical narratives evoke the ranch's past, overlaid with Patterson's breathless personal histories of afternoons spent rescuing a doe in a nightgown, or saving a porcupine from a pack of dogs. This is a book that will connect you to whatever patch of earth you hold dear.It is poignant reminder of the landscapes we've forgotten to keep close, of the land that does not belong to us but simply is who we are. The Ranch That Was Us is an affectionate reminder to go outside and touch the earth that is you.

What better way to learn shapes than with eye-catching works of art? With art from across Latin America and beyond, children will become armchair world travelers and art connoisseurs. This bilingual edition introduces early readers, and even earlier listeners, to shapes in both English and Spanish. One in a series of bilingual board books called Arte Kids that also includes 1, 2, 3, Si! (an artistic exploration of numbers) and Colores Everywhere! (featuring colors in the arts). Art for this book was selected from the collection of the San Antonio Museum of Art, one of the leading art museums in the United States with a collection spanning a broad range of history and world cultures.

Architects expect to design buildings. But persuading clients to carry those designs into tangible form almost always involves writing as well as designing. Yet architects, and those who write about architecture, are often more comfortable with images than words. Presenting their visions in an articulate, accessible, and convincing written form can be difficult, and professionally hazardous. In Writing Architecture, Carter Wiseman provides an invaluable guide for students and practitioners on how to convey the importance of architecture to those who commission it, build it, and benefit from it. Drawing on a wide range of sources and citing examples from such authors as Frank Lloyd Wright, Ada Louise Huxtable, Vincent Scully, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and today's leading designers, Wiseman analyzes basic principles of compositional structure to illustrate the most effective forms of architectural writing. Free of professional and theoretical jargon, Writing Architecture considers the process, methods, and value of architecture writing based on Wiseman's 30 years of experience in writing, editing, and teaching young architects how to write.It integrates historical references with current practice to help students and practitioners reach their professional goals.

An Almanac for Moderns contains a short essay for each day of the year that contemplates a unique but factual aspect of unbridled nature. According to a review in Nation, this collection of essays manages to "appeal to the ordinary lover of nature ...but the turn of Peattie's mind is poetic and speculative." The New York Times calls this book "a fine and subtle perception ...rising at times to an intense lyric beauty ...a book which the reader will deeply treasure, and to which he will repeatedly return."

A Book of Hours contains 24 essays, one for each hour of the day, that seek to bridge the gap between definitive scientific philosophy and the sheer unadulterated beauty that Donald Culross Peattie envisioned within everyday life. The Boston Transcript referred to this collection as "science, in sheer poetry," and the Chicago Daily Tribune mused that "it leaves one a better man for having read it" and offers "the inevitableness of natural laws and the truth of beauty, if one cares to seek it."

Cargoes and Harvests, famed naturalist Donald Culross Peattie's first book, eloquently explores agriculture and trade within America's past using thoughtful language that is well ahead of its time. Originally published in 1926, Peattie takes readers on a compelling adventure through the socioeconomic histories of staples such as tea, coffee, cocoa, potatoes and tobacco. Starting with the seeds and roots of the American landscape, Cargoes and Harvests illustrates where we've been and how far we've come. By considering the relationship between a nation and its goods, Peattie unearths countless reflective implications that still resonate within the field of American agriculture today.

A Gathering of Birds is an anthology containing selected prose about birds by nineteen famous authors, such as Hudson, Audubon, and Thoreau, and includes brief biographical information about each. The New York Times called the collection "a delightful 'gathering' that Mr. Peattie has presented, and his own contributions to the book make it something new and valuable in this field."

In Green Laurels, Donald Culross Peattie combines his extensive knowledge of history's foremost naturalists with his personal observations about the subject to form what the New York Herald Tribune calls "a delightful book...one would not wish to miss on any account." This piece is accurate and precise but according to Nation, "there is not a line which is not dramatically vivid and entertaining." Peattie's enthusiasm and enlightened curiosity make Green Laurels appealing to readers of all backgrounds.

"A volume for a lifetime" is how The New Yorker described the first of Donald Culross Peatie's two books about American trees published in the 1950s. In this one-volume edition, modern readers are introduced to one of the best nature writers of the last century. As we read Peattie's eloquent and entertaining accounts of American trees, we catch glimpses of our country's history and past daily life that no textbook could ever illuminate so vividly. Here you'll learn about everything from how a species was discovered to the part it played in our country's history. Pioneers often stabled an animal in the hollow heart of an old sycamore, and the whole family might live there until they could build a log cabin. The tuliptree, the tallest native hardwood, is easier to work than most softwood trees; Daniel Boone carved a sixty-foot canoe from one tree to carry his family from Kentucky into Spanish territory. In the days before the Revolution, the British and the colonists waged an undeclared war over New England's white pines, which made the best tall masts for fighting ships.It's fascinating to learn about the commercial uses of various woods -- for paper, fine furniture, fence posts, matchsticks, house framing, airplane wings, and dozens of other preplastic uses. But we cannot read this book without the occasional lump in our throats. The American elm was still alive when Peattie wrote, but as we read his account today we can see what caused its demise. Audubon's portrait of a pair of loving passenger pigeons in an American beech is considered by many to be his greatest painting. It certainly touched the poet in Donald Culross Peattie as he depicted the extinction of the passenger pigeon when the beech forest was destroyed. A Natural History of North American Trees gives us a picture of life in America from its earliest days to the middle of the last century. The information is always interesting, though often heartbreaking. While Peattie looks for the better side of man's nature, he reports sorrowfully on the greed and waste that have doomed so much of America's virgin forest.

The Road of a Naturalist is a fascinating autobiographical wonder written by one of America's most beloved naturalists at the height of his fame. A scientist, a philosopher, and a poet, Donald Culross Peattie takes us on an confessional journey across the landscape of his life. Told in flashbacks of years past and interspersed with impressions of a journey by motorcar across the American West, it is intensely personal. It is American in the best sense of the word. From saying goodbye to the trees at his childhood home on Lake Michigan to a man formed via Harvard and New York City, finally discovering a belief in the nature of things in a cabin in the Grand Tentons, it is not told as as linear life story but rather an adventure in living, in science, in thought.