Andreas M. Cohrs presents an awesome guide to the less visited regions of California, as well as a glance into what makes up the Golden state and its glittering mentality. Through a chain of serendipitous events, Cohrs gained access to the belongings of the late backpacking icon, Colin Fletcher. Based on the outdoor guru’s original maps, notes, and photos, fifty years later he retraced The Walker’s hitherto untraceable thousand-mile journey along the lengthy spine of California, across the state’s enchanting deserts and over the snow-laden high sierra. With maps accompanying each chapter, drawn by Fletcher’s carto- grapher david Lindroth, more than 100 photos, and with stories from the trail, Cohrs tells a compelling tale of one of the most varied and fascinating regions on our planet. Yet, as the title reveals, California serendipity is more than a hiking guide that lays Fletcher’s original route at your feet for the first time. It takes the reader on a crash course through the state’s early history and its unique nature into finding the only true answer to Fletcher’s concern whether his 1958-trip could ever be repeated. With his narrative travel writing, Cohrs conveys the intimate sensations of what it means to venture upon a four-month trek, unpretentious but up close and affective, and why serendipity will travel with you, rewarding you with the most unexpected encounters, when you take the right turn.

Story of a six month hike along California's mountain backbone from the Mexican to the Oregon border.

Former high desert rancher Ellen Waterston writes of a wild, essentially roadless, starkly beautiful part of the American West. Following the recently created 750-mile Oregon Desert Trail, she embarks on a creative and inquisitive exploration, introducing readers to a “trusting, naïve, earnest, stubbly, grumpy old man of a desert” that is grappling with issues at the forefront of national, if not global, concern: public land use, grazing rights for livestock, protection of sacred Indigenous ground, water rights, and protection of habitat for endangered species. Blending travel writing with memoir and history, Waterston profiles a wide range of people who call the high desert home and offers fresh perspectives on nationally reported regional conflicts such as the Malheur Wildlife Refuge occupation. Walking the High Desert invites readers—wherever they may be—to consider their own beliefs, identities, and surroundings through the optic of the high desert of southeastern Oregon.

In this stunning collection, photographers David Muench and Marc Muench capture the luminous coastlines, magical deserts, giant redwoods, and fruitful valleys of this enchanting state.

Leaving her home in Seattle in mid-summer to drive 'the long way round' to the Detroit auto show, Lesley Hazleton embarks on a journey to visit the holy places for cars - where they are raced, displayed, crashed, tested and made - as she seeks to understand our deep fascination with automobiles. Her quest takes her on a road trip that teaches her not only about cars and the peculiar passions of car lovers but also about herself. Halfway through this extraordinary adventure, Hazleton's father, the man who taught her to drive, dies suddenly, and her trip becomes a journey of grief and memory.

"John Paul Lederach's work in the field of conciliation and mediation is internationally recognized. He has provided consultation, training and direct mediation in a range of situations from the Miskito/Sandinista conflict in Nicaragua to Somalia, Northern Ireland, Tajikistan, and the Philippines. His influential 1997 book Building Peace has become a classic in the discipline. In this book, Lederach poses the question, "How do we transcend the cycles of violence that bewitch our human community while still living in them?" Peacebuilding, in his view, is both a learned skill and an art. Finding this art, he says, requires a worldview shift. Conflict professionals must envision their work as a creative act-an exercise of what Lederach terms the "moral imagination." This imagination must, however, emerge from and speak to the hard realities of human affairs. The peacebuilder must have one foot in what is and one foot beyond what exists. The book is organized around four guiding stories that point to the moral imagination but are incomplete. Lederach seeks to understand what happened in these individual cases and how they are relevant to large-scale change. His purpose is not to propose a grand new theory. Instead he wishes to stay close to the "messiness" of real processes and change, and to recognize the serendipitous nature of the discoveries and insights that emerge along the way. overwhelmed the equally important creative process. Like most professional peacemakers, Lederach sees his work as a religious vocation. Lederach meditates on his own calling and on the spirituality that moves ordinary people to reject violence and seek reconciliation. Drawing on his twenty-five years of experience in the field he explores the evolution of his understanding of peacebuilding and points the way toward the future of the art." http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0616/2004011794-d.html.