Smith chronicles his 14 years as a park ranger on a huge tract of government land in the Sierras, illuminating some startling truths about America's wild lands.

The fascinating story of a trial that opened a window onto the century-long battle to control nature in the national parks. When twenty-five-year-old Harry Walker was killed by a bear in Yellowstone Park in 1972, the civil trial prompted by his death became a proxy for bigger questions about American wilderness management that had been boiling for a century. At immediate issue was whether the Park Service should have done more to keep bears away from humans, but what was revealed as the trial unfolded was just how fruitless our efforts to regulate nature in the parks had always been. The proceedings drew to the witness stand some of the most important figures in twentieth century wilderness management, including the eminent zoologist A. Starker Leopold, who had produced a landmark conservationist document in the 1950s, and all-American twin researchers John and Frank Craighead, who ran groundbreaking bear studies at Yellowstone. Their testimony would help decide whether the government owed the Walker family restitution for Harry's death, but it would also illuminate decades of patchwork efforts to preserve an idea of nature that had never existed in the first place. In this remarkable excavation of American environmental history, nature writer and former park ranger Jordan Fisher Smith uses Harry Walker's story to tell the larger narrative of the futile, sometimes fatal, attempts to remake wilderness in the name of preserving it. Tracing a course from the founding of the national parks through the tangled twentieth-century growth of the conservationist movement, Smith gives the lie to the portrayal of national parks as Edenic wonderlands unspoiled until the arrival of Europeans, and shows how virtually every attempt to manage nature in the parks has only created cascading effects that require even more management. Moving across time and between Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier national parks, Engineering Eden shows how efforts at wilderness management have always been undone by one fundamental problem--that the idea of what is "wild" dissolves as soon as we begin to examine it, leaving us with little framework to say what wilderness should look like and which human interventions are acceptable in trying to preserve it. In the tradition of John McPhee's The Control of Nature and Alan Burdick's Out of Eden, Jordan Fisher Smith has produced a powerful work of popular science and environmental history, grappling with critical issues that we have even now yet to resolve.

Presents a collection of short stories featuring noir and crime fiction about Staten Island, New York, by such authors as Todd Craig, Linda Nieves-Powell, S. J. Rozan, and Patricia Smith.

Enter the dark welter of troubled history throughout the Americas, where a heritage of violence meets the ferocity of intent. This sharp, stylised and ambitious anthology of Native American literature sees authors of Indian heritage or blood join non-Indian authors in creating these diverse, gripping, dubious and sleazy stories. Includes contributions from award-winning author Reed Farrel Coleman and Lawrence Block, author of Hit and Run (Orion, 2009).

Offers a reference guide to film noir, extending from relevant films from before the genre was established to contemporary neonoirs and other types of film derived from the genre.

Descorchados is celebrating its 25th anniversary. It began as a guide to Chilean wines and as of 2010, it has covered the wines of South America in what is now the region’s most complete wine guide. This year we have tasted 5,159 wines, of which we have recommended 4,130 from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay in this edition, thereby presenting a wide-angle HD photograph of South America’s current wine scene. In Descorchados 2023 you’ll find reviews of more than 600 wineries and their recommended wines as well as the latest news about each country and detailed maps of their primary terroirs, plus rankings of the best wines listed by variety and origin, as well as the best values for money that we have found in our tastings this year. Descorchados is an essential tool for those who want to know more about the reality of South American wine and the people who are the major driving forces behind it.

This original anthology of noir fiction set in Maryland’s Charm City includes new stories by David Simon, Laura Lippman, Jim Fusilli, and more. As fans of the HBO series The Wire have known for years, Baltimore is home to a rich and diverse underworld that is matched by an equally rich and diverse literary tradition. This is the city where Dashiell Hammett worked as a Pinkerton agent. It’s also where Zelda Fitzgerald came for psychiatric treatment. In this sterling collection of noir fiction, some of Baltimore’s best authors “confront the full irony that is Charm City, a place where you can go from the leafy beauty of the North Side neighborhoods to the gutted ghettos of the West Side in less than twenty minutes, then find your way to the revamped Inner Harbor in another ten” (Laura Lippman, from the introduction). Baltimore Noir includes brand-new stories by David Simon, Laura Lippman, Tim Cockey, Rob Hiaasen, Robert Ward, Sujata Massey, Jack Bludis, Rafael Alvarez, Marcia Talley, Joseph Wallace, Lisa Respers France, Charlie Stella, Sarah Weinman, Dan Fesperman, Jim Fusilli, and Ben Neihart.