"Often considered alienated from mainstream culture and consigned to negative environments, Afro-American writers have created alternative spatial and geographical metaphors to develop a positive sense of individual and cultural identity. Melvin Dixon demonstrates how three principal figures of the land--the wilderness, the underground, and the mountaintop--have become places of refuge and cultural revitalization for the performance of identity, from early slave songs and fugitive narratives to modern and contemporary fiction"--Jacket.

The growing awareness of the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s, along with the enactment of the Wilderness Act, precipitated local, regional, and national joint actions of the many outdoor recreation organizations. Wilderness enactments resulted from some of the more successful citizen attempts. The onrush of man's capability to "tame the wilderness" continues to accelerate with the population growth and the need for some restraints has become increasingly evident. This book shows what happened in a magical part of the American Southwest. "Wisconsin Bookwatch" reported: "...an informative history of the conflicting forces striving to determine the fate of New Mexico's wild lands-on one hand, the press of population growth and the desire to 'tame the wilderness'; and on the other, the efforts of environmental movements and outdoor recreation groups to preserve the wilderness and its heritage. Black-and-white photographs illustrate this thoughtful and moving account which is a welcome and much appreciated contribution to Environmental Studies reference collections and reading lists." * * * * * Corry McDonald was employed for over thirty years by Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was during this time that he developed an interest in the wilderness areas of that state. McDonald took copious notes on every back country trip he made. Those notes have become the basis for this book. In it he reluctantly tells about some of his secret places in the hope that it will reduce some of the overuse of the wildernesses that are so well known. He is also the author of "The Dilemma of Wilderness" from Sunstone Press.

No one rides like Chase Austin. Bad boy. Player. Adrenaline junkie. Snowboarder Chase Austin has a reputation--and not just for being the world's best extreme athlete. He's as cold as the mountains he rides, loyal only to his crew . . . and panties drop wherever he goes. Photographer Brooke Larson knows better than to let him get through her emotional Kevlar. So what if she used to have his poster on her bedroom wall? She's not a teenager with a crush anymore. Chase Austin is her key to the big time, and she's getting his photo no matter what. Too bad the only place Chase wants her is in his bed. Men leave. Success is forever. Brooke knows the drill, and she's not letting anyone get in the way of her career--or into her heart. But whether it's on the slopes or between the sheets, riding with the best means risking it all.

In the summer of 2010, brothers-in-law Marty and Jim embark on a cycling trip along the Great Allegheny Passage and C&O Canal, a 335-mile trek from their home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Jim's boyhood home in Washington, DC. Chance encounters with colorful local characters and other surprising escapades during five days on the trail make for nonstop laughs. As they travel through forests and along winding rivers, they experience the breathtaking scenery of western Pennsylvania, Maryland and West Virginia, exploring early American history while learning more about each other as well as themselves. This true story is for adventurers and cyclists as well as couch potatoes looking for a lighthearted take on friendship and some hilarious fun.

The concrete jungle defines financier Shal Gregory, who thrives on the sheer vitality of the fast-paced corporate world. Until he finds himself alone in the thick of the New Zealand bush with a feisty guide who despises everything he stands for.

In this groundbreaking study, Anthony B. Pinn challenges the long held assumption that African American theology is solely theist, arguing that this assumption has stunted African American theological discourse and excluded a rapidly growing segment of the African American population - non-theists. Rejecting the assumption of theism as the African American orientation, Pinn poses a crucial question: What is a non-theistic theology?

This informative and provocative study focuses on the centrality of departure in the texts of five major American women novelists. An important moment in many novels and poems by American women writers occurs when a central character looks out a window or walks out the door of a house. These acts of departure serve to convey such values as the rejection of constraining social patterns, the search for individual fulfillment, and the entry into the political. Janis Stout examines such moments and related patterns of venture and travel in the fiction of five major American novelists of the 20th century: Mary Austin, Willa Cather, Anne Tyler, Toni Morrison, and Joan Didion. Stout views these five writers within a spectrum of narrative engagements with issues of home and departure—a spectrum anchored at one end by Sarah Orne Jewett and at the other by Marilynne Robinson, whose Housekeeping posits a vision of female transience. Through the Window, Out the Door ranges over an expansive territory. Moving between texts as well as between texts and contexts, Stout shows how women writers have envisioned the walls of physical and social structures (including genres) as permeable boundaries, drawing on both a rhetoric of liberation and a rhetoric of domesticity to construct narrative arguments for women's right to move freely between the two. Stout concludes with a personal essay on the dilemmas of domesticity and the ambivalence of departure.