The Book That Launched an International Movement Fans of The Anxious Generation will adore Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv's groundbreaking New York Times bestseller. “An absolute must-read for parents.” —The Boston Globe “It rivals Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.” —The Cincinnati Enquirer “I like to play indoors better ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are,” reports a fourth grader. But it’s not only computers, television, and video games that are keeping kids inside. It’s also their parents’ fears of traffic, strangers, Lyme disease, and West Nile virus; their schools’ emphasis on more and more homework; their structured schedules; and their lack of access to natural areas. Local governments, neighborhood associations, and even organizations devoted to the outdoors are placing legal and regulatory constraints on many wild spaces, sometimes making natural play a crime. As children’s connections to nature diminish and the social, psychological, and spiritual implications become apparent, new research shows that nature can offer powerful therapy for such maladies as depression, obesity, and attention deficit disorder. Environment-based education dramatically improves standardized test scores and grade-point averages and develops skills in problem solving, critical thinking, and decision making. Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that childhood experiences in nature stimulate creativity. In Last Child in the Woods, Louv talks with parents, children, teachers, scientists, religious leaders, child-development researchers, and environmentalists who recognize the threat and offer solutions. Louv shows us an alternative future, one in which parents help their kids experience the natural world more deeply—and find the joy of family connectedness in the process. Included in this edition: A Field Guide with 100 Practical Actions We Can Take Discussion Points for Book Groups, Classrooms, and Communities Additional Notes by the Author New and Updated Research from the U.S. and Abroad

Imagine a 7-year-old boy asking his father if they can hike the entire Appalachian Trail, and then imagine that the father says yes.

After moving to Billings, Montana, things are finally looking up for the Shannon familyFrank, Eileen, and their two childrennine-year-old Jimmy Lee and seven-year-old Jodie. But when Jimmy is unjustly accused of stealing a gold medallion from his fathers workplace, he runs away to the mountain wilderness. After being mistreated by his parents for years, Jimmy feels this is the best option for him. Mr. Shannon organizes a search party to look for Jimmy. After two weeks of looking, the sheriff asks a local Indian tribe for its help. The two men assigned to the task find Jimmys tracks, and they follow them for days. At the end of the trail, they discover a large pool of blood where a fight has taken place. All signs indicate Jimmy was attacked by a wild animal, but no remains are found. Meanwhile, with Bear, a wolf pup, Jimmy struggles to survive on what he knows, encountering an array of challenging situationsforaging for food, fighting off wild animals, braving the ever-changing weather conditions, and finding makeshift shelter. Like the mountain men in the 1800s, Jimmy survives by relying on his wits and wonders every day whether he will live or die.

What happens when society finds a wild boy alone in the woods and tries to civilize him? A true story from the author of The Fairy Ring. One day in 1798, woodsmen in southern France returned from the forest having captured a naked boy. He had been running wild, digging for food, and was covered with scars. In the village square, people gathered around, gaping and jabbering in words the boy didn’t understand. And so began the curious public life of the boy known as the Savage of Aveyron, whose journey took him all the way to Paris. Though the wild boy’s world was forever changed, some things stayed the same: sometimes, when the mountain winds blew, “he looked up at the sky, made sounds deep in his throat, and gave great bursts of laughter.” In a moving work of narrative nonfiction that reads like a novel, Mary Losure invests another compelling story from history with vivid and arresting new life. Back matter includes an author’s note, source notes, and a bibliography.

Anyone can get lost while camping or on a hike and Survivor Kid teaches young adventurers the survival skills they need if they ever find themselves lost or in a dangerous situation in the wild. Written by a search and rescue professional and lifelong camper, it's filled with safe and practical advice on building shelters and fires, signaling for help, finding water and food, dealing with dangerous animals, learning how to navigate, and avoiding injuries in the wilderness. Ten projects include building a simple brush shelter, using a reflective surface to start a fire, testing your navigation skills with a treasure hunt, and casting animal tracks to improve your observation skills.

The Pulitzer Prize winning author -- “an immensely gifted writer and a magical prose stylist” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times) -- offers his first major work of nonfiction, an autobiographical narrative as inventive, beautiful, and powerful as critics and readers have come to expect. A shy manifesto, an impractical handbook, the true story of a fabulist, an entire life in parts and pieces: MANHOOD FOR AMATEURS is the first sustained work of personal writing from Michael Chabon. In these insightful, provocative, slyly interlinked essays, one of our most brilliant and humane writers presents his autobiography and his vision of life in the way so many of us experience our own: as a series of reflections, regrets and re-examinations, each sparked by an encounter, in the present, that holds some legacy of the past. What does it mean to be a man today? Chabon invokes and interprets and struggles to reinvent for us, with characteristic warmth and lyric wit, the personal and family history that haunts him even as -- simply because -- it goes on being written every day. As a devoted son, as a passionate husband, and above all as the father of four young Americans, Chabon’s memories of childhood, of his parents’ marriage and divorce, of moments of painful adolescent comedy and giddy encounters with the popular art and literature of his own youth, are like a theme played -- on different instruments, with a fresh tempo and in a new key -- by the mad quartet of which he now finds himself co-conductor. At once dazzling, hilarious, and moving, MANHOOD FOR AMATEURS is destined to become a classic.