Download or read book The Language of Cottonwoods written by Clay Jenkinson and published by . This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: North Dakota is regarded as flyover country, but extraordinary narratives play out on this improbable Great Plains landscape. North Dakota is the home of one of the world's largest nuclear missile fields, one of the first mosques in America, a zany collection of roadside attractions, resurgent Native American communities, one of the nation's most productive oil fields, and the magnificent Little Missouri River badlands. Join Clay Jenkinson as he searches for spirit of place, cultural identity, sacred landscapes, and a future for rural America at the center of the continent, where Lewis and Clark wintered, Sitting Bull resisted the conquest, and Theodore Roosevelt became America's leading conservationist and the exemplar of the strenuous life. Part travelogue, part love song to the prairie, and above all, a vision for a cultural renaissance at the heart of the continent, The Language of Cottonwoods will make you laugh, cry, and think, and inspire you to visit North Dakota.
Download or read book The Cottonwood Tree written by Kathleen Cain and published by Big Earth Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: And so poet and naturalist Kathleen Cain fell in love with the cottonwood tree. Regarded by many as a nuisance, a "trash tree," the cottonwood not only has a fascinating history, it has served noble purposes as well. Ranging from Vermont to Arizona to Alaska, this native North American tree, in various sizes, shapes, and subspecies, has been a sacred symbol, a shelter providing relief from both heat and cold, a signpost for the lost and weary-and underneath its branches many dreams have been born. In a magical blend of art and science, the author looks not only at the cottonwood-how it grows, how it travels, and what it says-but at the roles it has played and continues to play in the art, health, and history of North America. If you need the science, you will find it here-if you need the human heart, you will find it here as well. "Champion" means winner, defender, something outstanding-a hero. After reading The Cottonwood Tree: An American Champion you will see why this remarkable tree stands so tall in the American landscape. Book jacket.
Download or read book For the Love of North Dakota and Other Essays written by Clay Jenkinson and published by Dakota Institute. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compilation of the first seven years (2005-2011) of a column published every Sunday in the Bismarck Tribune on life in North Dakota and the growing influence of the oil boom.
Download or read book Cottonwood Whispers written by Jennifer Erin Valent and published by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.. This book was released on 2013-06-07 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this sequel to Jennifer’s award-winning debut novel Fireflies in December, Jessilyn Lassiter and her best friend Gemma Teague have survived prejudice and heartache in their lifelong friendship, but the summer of 1936 threatens to tear them apart yet again. Gemma’s job with the wealthy Hadley family leads to a crush on their youngest son. But Jessilyn’s insistence that he’s no good and that no rich white man would ever truly fall for a poor black girl like Gemma puts them at odds. Tragedy strikes when Jessilyn’s cherished neighbor girl is hit by a car and killed. Things get worse when an elderly friend is falsely accused of the crime, and the only way to clear his name is to put her family’s livelihood in jeopardy. For Jessilyn, this is a choice too hard to bear and she wonders where to turn for answers, especially when an angry mob threatens vigilante justice. Jennifer’s third book, Catching Moondrops, releases in Fall 2010.
Download or read book Repairing Jefferson s American A Guide to Civility and Enlightened Citizenship written by Clay S. Jenkinson and published by Koehler Books. This book was released on 2020-06 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was the greatest idealist of the Founding Fathers of America. He believed that average citizens are up to the challenge of governing themselves. He envisioned a republic of well-educated, well-informed, engaged, and vigilant citizens. Jefferson's dream of a semi-utopian American republic has nearly been swallowed up by cynical partisanship, government gridlock, consumer materialism, and the corrosive power of money in American politics. Jefferson believed in civility, majority rule, the primacy of science and reason, and harmony in all of our public and private relations. Public humanities scholar Clay S. Jenkinson believes we can return to Jeffersonian principles both in our private lives and the public sphere. Repairing Jefferson's America is a clear and concise guide for those who wish to live more rational, purposeful, and enlightened lives.
Download or read book Cottonwood written by R. Lee Smith and published by . This book was released on 2019-02-17 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They never meant to come to Earth. They were never allowed to leave...Welcome to Cottonwood.Excerpt:"You should have heard it, Kate. It was subtle, but it wasn't my imagination. The guy spent five hours essentially telling us that the aliens are retarded.""Oh come on.""Not in so many words, but--hang on." Sarah moved the paz to her other hand so that she could lay her right arm over Fagin's back, since he was being insistent about it. "But he just really drilled it in," she continued, resigned. "Over and over, really soft and gentle. 'They're not smart, they don't take care of themselves, they need to be controlled.'"Kate's tiny image on the screen flickered as she shifted her own paz and had trouble restabilizing. The two weren't exactly compatible anymore. She really needed to get a new one. "So? Maybe they do.""And maybe they don't. Kate!" she said, trying to laugh through her frustration. "These people came to us in a spaceship! A planet full of stupid layabouts does not master intergalactic space travel!"Kate's image flickered again and snapped to black. She didn't need it. She could hear the distraction in Kate's voice, and the tight I'm-pretending-I'm-not-angry tone that had been her default setting pretty much since Sarah told her she was really moving to Cottonwood. "Okay, so the guy who's been studying them for twenty years is wrong and Sarah Fowler, who hasn't even met one yet, is right. Congratulations. You're that good."Sarah felt herself blush. "It didn't sound right, that's all I'm saying. Some of the little things he said just...just really got to me.""Like what?" Kate asked, sounding concerned now and not big-sister patronizing."Like...Like he said that if their claspers came off, they'd die."A short pause. "What are claspers?""Oh, that's not the point, they're like tiny little extra arms that smell things. The point is, how many aliens had to lose their claspers and die without having any other...What's the word I want? Variables?"Kate was quiet for a while. The picture tried to come back a few times, showing Sarah glimpses of her sister through a haze of multi-colored distortion. "These guys are professionals, Sarah. It's their job to make connections that people like us miss.""Yeah, but how did so many aliens lose their claspers in the first place, that's what I really want to--""Did your house come with a phone?""Huh? Um, yeah." She twisted to look up at it, clinging to the wall like a shiny, black beetle. "But it's patched into the IBI switchboard. I can't figure out how to get a line outside the village. I could look it up in the manual, but--" She laughed. "--I'm kind of manualed-out. I had to set everything, you have no idea. All the faucets are TruTouch. Who the heck even knows off-hand how many degrees they like their shower? Or their drinking water? Plus, I got my Fahrenheit and my Celsius screwed up and practically steamed-cooked my face off the first time I...Why?" She checked the paz's signal, but it looked good. "Can't you hear me okay?""I hear you. I was just curious. So this is your own paz?""Yeah," said Sarah, still trying to see where this was going. "But they scanned it in through the company server when I got here. You know. So I can't take pictures or blog about company policy or stuff. They said it wouldn't affect my performance. I mean, I can barely see you, but--""That's normal for the fossil you're using," Kate agreed. In a new, hearty voice, she added, "TruTouch faucets, those are awesome!"
Download or read book Finding the Mother Tree written by Suzanne Simard and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the world's leading forest ecologist who forever changed how people view trees and their connections to one another and to other living things in the forest—a moving, deeply personal journey of discovery Suzanne Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence; her TED talks have been viewed by more than 10 million people worldwide. In this, her first book, now available in paperback, Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths--that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp, but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own. Simard writes--in inspiring, illuminating, and accessible ways—how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved, how they learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication, characteristics ascribed to human intelligence, traits that are the essence of civil societies--and at the center of it all, the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them. And Simard writes of her own life, born and raised into a logging world in the rainforests of British Columbia, of her days as a child spent cataloging the trees from the forest and how she came to love and respect them. And as she writes of her scientific quest, she writes of her own journey, making us understand how deeply human scientific inquiry exists beyond data and technology, that it is about understanding who we are and our place in the world.
Download or read book The Deepest Peace written by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel and published by Parallax Press. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This beautiful glimpse into the mind of a modern Zen priest shows us how we can cultivate and experience peace through silence, stillness, and practice. “A balm for our troubled hearts and minds . . . soulful, warm, and welcoming, and—at times—heartbreaking.” —Lion's Roar While there is suffering in the world and in each of us, there is also the possibility and the experience of peace. As Zenju Earthlyn Manuel—a Zen priest and disciple of Thich Nhat Hanh who has written at length on race, gender, sexual orientation, and homelessness—writes in the introduction: “I have testified many times of my suffering. Before I die, I must speak of peace.” The Deepest Peace is a poetic, lyrical ode to the ways contemplative practice illuminates daily life. It is at once a window into Zenju’s personal practice and an invitation to begin our own.
Download or read book The Ploughmen written by Kim Zupan and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An NPR Best Book of 2014 A Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection A "bleak and brilliant" (Minneapolis Star Tribune) debut novel ,"one of the finest evocations of life in Western America in recent memory, a book that stands alongside Richard Ford's Rock Springs, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, James Welch's Fools Crow." (William Kittredge) Steeped in a lonesome Montana landscape as unyielding and raw as it is beautiful, Kim Zupan's The Ploughmen is a new classic in the literature of the American West. At the center of this searing, fever dream of a novel are two men—a killer awaiting trial, and a troubled young deputy—sitting across from each other in the dark, talking through the bars of a county jail cell: John Gload, so brutally adept at his craft that only now, at the age of 77, has he faced the prospect of long-term incarceration and Valentine Millimaki, low man in the Copper County sheriff's department, who draws the overnight shift after Gload's arrest. With a disintegrating marriage further collapsing under the strain of his night duty, Millimaki finds himself seeking counsel from a man whose troubled past shares something essential with his own. Their uneasy friendship takes a startling turn with a brazen act of violence that yokes together two haunted souls by the secrets they share, and by the rugged country that keeps them.
Download or read book So Quietly the Earth written by David Lee and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "One can only wish for more poets like David Lee."--Chowder Review Set in the American Southwest, So Quietly the Earth is a book of landscape meditations on philosophical, theological and environmental issues. Radically departing from his justly famous narratives of rural life, David Lee weaves the archetypal elements of earth, fire, water, and air throughout his poems as he explores spiritual connections to the natural world. David Lee, author of 15 books of poems, was named Utah's first Poet Laureate and in 2001 was a finalist for the United States Poet Laureate. A former seminary candidate, semi-pro baseball player and hog farmer, he recently retired as the head of the languages and literature department at Southern Utah University.
Download or read book James Madison written by Jay Cost and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intellectual biography of James Madison, arguing that he invented American politics as we know it How do you solve a problem like James Madison? The fourth president is one of the most confounding figures in early American history; his political trajectory seems almost intentionally inconsistent. He was both for and against a strong federal government. He wrote about the dangers of political parties in the Federalist Papers and then helped to found the Republican Party just a few years later. This so-called Madison problem has occupied scholars for ages. As Jay Cost shows in this incisive new biography, the underlying logic of Madison’s seemingly mixed record comes into focus only when we understand him primarily as a working politician. Whereas other founders split their time between politics and other vocations, Madison dedicated himself singularly to the work of politics and ultimately developed it into a distinctly American idiom. He was, in short, the first American politician.
Download or read book A Vast and Open Plain written by Meriwether Lewis and published by . This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book presents chronologically the writings - journal entries, reports and letters - of all the members of the Lewis and Clark expedition, allowing for examination the 215 days the Corps of Discovery spent in the state from several perspectives.--Publisher's description.
Download or read book Mary and the Trail of Tears written by Andrea L. Rogers and published by Stone Arch Books. This book was released on 2020 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is June first and twelve-year-old Mary does not really understand what is happening: she does not understand the hatred and greed of the white men who are forcing her Cherokee family out of their home in New Echota, Georgia, capital of the Cherokee Nation, and trying to steal what few things they are allowed to take with them, she does not understand why a soldier killed her grandfather--and she certainly does not understand how she, her sister, and her mother, are going to survive the 1000 mile trip to the lands west of the Mississippi.
Download or read book Theodore Roosevelt Naturalist in the Arena written by Char Miller and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-03 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theodore Roosevelt's scientific curiosity and love of the outdoors proved a defining force throughout his hectic life as a rancher and explorer, police commissioner and governor of New York, vice president and president of the United States. Conservation and natural history were parts of a whole for this driven, charismatic public servant, and Roosevelt approached the natural world with joy and a passionate engagement. Drawing on an array of approaches--biographical, ecological and environmental, literary and political, Theodore Roosevelt, Naturalist in the Arena analyzes this energetic man's manifold encounters with the great outdoors. George Bird Grinnell, Gifford Pinchot, John Muir, and William Hornaday were among the many conservationists with whom Roosevelt corresponded, collaborated, hiked, and governed--and in turn, inspired. Together, Roosevelt and his contemporaries developed a progressive argument for the conservation of natural resources as a way to construct a more democratic nation-state. This legacy also comes with some troubling domestic and global implications, as Roosevelt fused his call for the conservation of resources--natural and human, domestically and internationally--with a deep-seated conviction that some were more fit than others to control the world and define its future.
Download or read book Rescuing Socrates written by Roosevelt Montas and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-21 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Dominican-born academic tells the story of how the Great Books transformed his life—and why they have the power to speak to people of all backgrounds What is the value of a liberal education? Traditionally characterized by a rigorous engagement with the classics of Western thought and literature, this approach to education is all but extinct in American universities, replaced by flexible distribution requirements and ever-narrower academic specialization. Many academics attack the very idea of a Western canon as chauvinistic, while the general public increasingly doubts the value of the humanities. In Rescuing Socrates, Dominican-born American academic Roosevelt Montás tells the story of how a liberal education transformed his life, and offers an intimate account of the relevance of the Great Books today, especially to members of historically marginalized communities. Montás emigrated from the Dominican Republic to Queens, New York, when he was twelve and encountered the Western classics as an undergraduate in Columbia University’s renowned Core Curriculum, one of America’s last remaining Great Books programs. The experience changed his life and determined his career—he went on to earn a PhD in English and comparative literature, serve as director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum, and start a Great Books program for low-income high school students who aspire to be the first in their families to attend college. Weaving together memoir and literary reflection, Rescuing Socrates describes how four authors—Plato, Augustine, Freud, and Gandhi—had a profound impact on Montás’s life. In doing so, the book drives home what it’s like to experience a liberal education—and why it can still remake lives.
Download or read book Riders of the Purple Sage written by Zane Grey and published by . This book was released on 1912 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After inheriting a southern Utah estate from her Mormon father, Jane Withersteen becomes the victim of a cruel frontier law.
Download or read book Slouching Towards Bethlehem written by Joan Didion and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1990 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A RICH DISPLAY OF SOME OF THE BEST PROSE WRITTEN TODAY IN THE USA.
