Speaking for the River is the first book-length study of Willamette River clean-up efforts from the 1920s through the 1970s. These efforts centered on a struggle between abatement advocates and the two primary polluters in the watershed, the City of Portland and the pulp and paper industry.

Who Speaks for the River? tells the true story of the collision between power and justice in the desperate final battle between the Alberta Government, Friends of the Oldman and members of the Piikani First Nation surrounding the building of Alberta's Oldman River dam. Environmentalist Martha Kostuch uses the law and "Woodstock of the Environment," the largest environmental rally in Canada to stop construction of the dam. Piikani First Nation activist Milton Born With A Tooth and his group The Lonefighters, use protests, bulldozers to divert the Oldman River, and one shotgun which Milton fires at police. Those shots result in Milton facing an unfair trial, which one observer characterizes as "what Native people have faced for a century." "My world cannot be documented on your white paper with words. Your dictionaries reveal the white society and show how whites go in circles. Words simply refer to words and are only excuses for what's real. The real world is about fresh air as medicine going into my lungs and the enjoyment of each meal as my last one." --Milton Born With A Tooth, from a Southern Alberta Jail, while waiting for his first trial.

Born in Minnesota in 1890 and raised and educated in Massachusetts, Marjory Stoneman Douglas came to Florida in 1915 to work for her father, who had just started a newspaper called the Herald in a small town called Miami. In this "frontier" town, she recovered from a misjudged marriage, learned to write journalism and fiction and drama, took on the fight for feminism and racial justice and conservation long before those causes became popular, and embarked on a long and uncommonly successful voyage into self-understanding. Way before women did this sort of thing, she recognized her own need for solitude and independence, and built her own little house away from town in an area called Coconut Grove. She still lives there, as she has for over 40 years, with her books and cats and causes, emerging frequently to speak, still a powerful force in ecopolitics. Marjory Stoneman Douglas begins this story of her life by admitting that "the hardest thing is to tell the truth about oneself" and ends it stating her belief that "life should be lived so vividly and so intensely that thoughts of another life, or a longer life, are not necessary." The voice that emerges in between is a voice from the past and a voice from the future, a voice of conviction and common sense with a sense of humor, a voice so many audiences have heard over the years—tough words in a genteel accent emerging from a tiny woman in a floppy hat—which has truly become the voice of the river.

Emmy Pérez’s poetry collection With the River on Our Face flows through the Southwest and the Texas borderlands to the river’s mouth in the Rio Grande Valley/El Valle. The poems celebrate the land, communities, and ecology of the borderlands through lyric and narrative utterances, auditory and visual texture, chant, and litany that merge and diverge like the iconic river in this long-awaited collection. Pérez reveals the strengths and nuances of a universe where no word is “foreign.” Her fast-moving, evocative words illuminate the prayers, gasps, touches, and gritos born of everyday discoveries and events. Multiple forms of reference enrich the poems in the form of mantra: ecologist’s field notes, geopolitical and ecofeminist observations, wildlife catalogs, trivia, and vigil chants. “What is it to love / within viewing distance of night / vision goggles and guns?” is a question central to many of these poems. The collection creates a poetic confluence of the personal, political, and global forces affecting border lives. Whether alluding to El Valle as a place where toxins now cross borders more easily than people or wildlife, or to increased militarization, immigrant seizures, and twenty-first-century wall-building, Pérez’s voice is intimate and urgent. She laments, “We cannot tattoo roses / On the wall / Can’t tattoo Gloria Anzaldúa’s roses / On the wall”; yet, she also reaffirms Anzaldúa’s notions of hope through resilience and conocimiento. With the River on Our Face drips deep like water, turning into amistad—an inquisition into human relationships with planet and self.

The search for a missing boy and his dog illuminiates the inner lives of a multitude of individuals with charged needs and desires; a confession of faith, and a love song to the world.

An American Library in Paris "Coups de Coeur" Selection A Los Angeles Times Bestseller "Elaine Sciolino is a graceful, companionable writer.… [She] has laid one more beautiful and amusing wreath on the altar of the City of Light.” —Edmund White, New York Times Blending memoir, travelogue, and history, The Seine is a love letter to Paris and the river that determined its destiny. Master storyteller and longtime New York Times foreign correspondent Elaine Sciolino explores the Seine through its lively characters—a bargewoman, a riverbank bookseller, a houseboat dweller, a famous cinematographer—and follows it from the remote plateaus of Burgundy through Paris and to the sea. The Seine is a vivid, enchanting portrait of the world’s most irresistible river.

On a series of solitary walks around London, a woman recalls the rivers she's encountered in prose reminiscent of Sebald.