A study of seven autobiographies by women who defied the domestic ideology of 19th-century America by serving as itinerant preachers. Literally and culturally homeless, all of them used their autobiographies to construct plausible identities as women and Christians.

A stunning combination of landscape photography and thematic essays exploring how the concept of wilderness has evolved over time Our ideas of wilderness have evolved dramatically over the past one hundred and fifty years, from a view of wild country as an inviolable "place apart" to one that exists only within the matrix of human activity. This shift in understanding has provoked complicated questions about the importance of the wild in American environmentalism, as well as new aesthetic expectations as we reframe the wilderness as (to some degree) a human creation. Wild Visions is distinctive in its union of landscape photography and environmental thought, a merging of short, thematic essays with a striking visual narrative. Often, the wild is viewed in binary terms: either revered as sacred and ecologically pure or dismissed as spoiled by human activities. This book portrays wilderness instead as an evolving gamut of understandings, a collage of views and ideas that is still in process.

A stunning combination of landscape photography and thematic essays exploring how the concept of wilderness has evolved over time Our ideas of wilderness have evolved dramatically over the past one hundred and fifty years, from a view of wild country as an inviolable “place apart” to one that exists only within the matrix of human activity. This shift in understanding has provoked complicated questions about the importance of the wild in American environmentalism, as well as new aesthetic expectations as we reframe the wilderness as (to some degree) a human creation. Wild Visions is distinctive in its union of landscape photography and environmental thought, a merging of short, thematic essays with a striking visual narrative. Often, the wild is viewed in binary terms: either revered as sacred and ecologically pure or dismissed as spoiled by human activities. This book portrays wilderness instead as an evolving gamut of understandings, a collage of views and ideas that is still in process.

Explores the development of natural history since the Renaissance and contextualizes current discussions of biodiversity.

George Masa's Wild Vision recounts the incredible, overlooked life of the photographer George Masa. Self-taught photographer George Masa (born Masahara Iizuka in Osaka, Japan), arrived in Asheville, North Carolina at the turn of the twentieth century amid a period of great transition in the southern Appalachians. Masa's photographs from the 1920s and early 1930s are stunning windows into an era where railroads hauled out the remaining old-growth timber with impunity, new roads were blasted into hillsides, and an activist community emerged to fight for a new national park. Masa began photographing the nearby mountains and helping to map the Appalachian Trail, capturing this transition like no other photographer of his time. His images, along with his knowledge of the landscape, became a critical piece of the argument for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, compelling John D. Rockefeller to donate $5 million for initial land purchases. Despite being hailed as the "Ansel Adams of the Smokies," Masa died, destitute and unknown, in 1933. In George Masa's Wild Vision: A Japanese Immigrant Imagines Western North Carolina, poet and environmental organizer Brent Martin explores the locations Masa visited, using first-person narratives to contrast, lament, and exalt the condition of the landscape the photographer so loved and worked to interpret and protect. The book includes seventy-five of Masa's photographs, accompanied by Martin's reflections on Masa's life and work.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed comes a brave, frank, and exquisitely written memoir that will change the way you see the world. Barbara Ehrenreich is one of the most important thinkers of our time. Educated as a scientist, she is an author, journalist, activist, and advocate for social justice. In Living With a Wild God, she recounts her quest-beginning in childhood-to find ""the Truth"" about the universe and everything else: What's really going on? Why are we here? In middle age, she rediscovered the journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence, which records an event so strange, so cataclysmic, that she had never, in all the intervening years, written or spoken about it to anyone. It was the kind of event that people call a ""mystical experience""-and, to a steadfast atheist and rationalist, nothing less than shattering. In Living With a Wild God, Ehrenreich reconstructs her childhood mission, bringing an older woman's wry and erudite perspective to a young girl's impassioned obsession with the questions that, at one point or another, torment us all. The result is both deeply personal and cosmically sweeping-a searing memoir and a profound reflection on science, religion, and the human condition. With her signature combination of intellectual rigor and uninhibited imagination, Ehrenreich offers a true literary achievement-a work that has the power not only to entertain but amaze.

In their successful, internationally published book A Boat in Our Baggage, Maria Coffey and Dag Goering described their year-long, worldwide expedition by kayak. Since then, they have continued to travel many parts of the globe, including some of the last truly wild places of the British Columbia coast. Their latest adventure - a 1,000-plus kilometre journey circumnavigating Vancouver Island in its entirety - is detailed and illustrated in Visions of the Wild. Coffey and Goering set off from their home on Protection Island, BC, in July 1999. For three months they confronted some of the most exposed, storm-battered coastlines British Columbia has to offer: infamous places such as Cape Scott, Estevan Point and the imposing Brooks Peninsula, all of which have become the sites of shipwrecks and fatalities. The voyagers experienced deadly currents, whirlpools and enormous waves, were buffeted relentlessly by wind and rain and spent many a wet, miserable camping trip ashore. But they also explored the serene waters of Nootka Sound, the Gulf Islands and the Broken Group Islands, where they saw stands of ancient rainforests interspersed with raw clearcuts, and spectacular vistas of ocean and sky juxtaposed with intricate coves, rocks and reefs. They had encounters with whales, bears, wolves, sea lions and puffins; and as they stopped at different Native villages, fishing ports and old homesteads, they made friends with many of the diverse people who call the island home. Brimming with breathtaking colour photographs and compelling journal entries from all stages of their exciting kayaking journey, Visions of the Wild is at once an inspiring chronicle of the adventure of a lifetime, and a beautiful book of photographs that rejoices in the untamed spirit of Canada's west coast.