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Presents a geo-archeological study of New England's stone walls exploring how they were built, their physical properties, and the function and structure of the walls.
The only field guide to stone walls in the Northeast. Exploring Stone Walls is like being in Thorson's geology classroom, as he presents the many clues that allow you to determine any wall's history, age, and purpose. Thorson highlights forty-five places to see interesting and noteworthy walls, many of which are in public parks and preserves, from Acadia National Park in Maine to the South Fork of Long Island. Visit the tallest stone wall (Cliff Walk in Newport, Rhode Island), the most famous (Robert Frost's mending wall in Derry, New Hampshire), and many more. This field guide will broaden your horizons and deepen your appreciation of New England's rural history.
Walden's Shore explores Thoreau's understanding of the "living rock" on which life's complexity depends--not as metaphor but as physical science. Robert Thorson's subject is Thoreau the rock and mineral collector, interpreter of landscapes, and field scientist whose compass and measuring stick were as important to him as his plant press.
As a backyard naturalist and river enthusiast, Henry David Thoreau was keenly aware of the many ways in which humans had altered the waterways and meadows of his beloved Concord River Valley. A land surveyor by trade, he recognized that he was as complicit in these transformations as the bankers, builders, and elected officials who were his clients. The Boatman reveals the depth of his knowledge about the river as it elegantly chronicles his move from anger to lament to acceptance of how humans had changed a place he cherished even more than Walden Pond. “A scrupulous account of the environment Thoreau loved most... Thorson argues convincingly—sometimes beautifully—that Thoreau’s thi...
The first guidebook to the landscape and history of the literary shrine to Thoreau, Walden Pond.
Chronicles the history of kettle lakes in the United States, including how they form, the different ways that Americans have used them throughout history, and threats that affect their future.
From the author of lnsectopedia, a powerful exploration of loss, grief, endurance, and the absences that permeate the present. Unconformities are gaps in the geological record, physical evidence of breaks in time. For Hugh Raffles, these holes in history are also fissures in feeling, knowledge, memory, and understanding. In this endlessly inventive, riveting book, Raffles enters these gaps, drawing together threads of geology, history, literature, philosophy, and ethnography to trace the intimate connections between personal loss and world historical events, and to reveal the force of absence at the core of contemporary life. Through deeply researched explorations of Neolithic stone circles,...
Against a magnificently embroidered backdrop of 18th-century France, Schaeffer shows us Sade's incredible life of sexual appetite, adherence to Enlightenment principles, imprisonment, scandal, and above all inexhaustible imagination.
John and George Keats—Man of Genius and Man of Power—embodied sibling forms of Romanticism. George’s emigration to the U.S. frontier created an abysm of loneliness and alienation in John that would inspire his most plangent and sublime poetry. Gigante’s account places John’s life in a transatlantic context that has eluded his previous biographers.
An exhilarating, time-traveling journey to the solar system’s strangest and most awe-inspiring volcanoes. Volcanoes are capable of acts of pyrotechnical prowess verging on magic: they spout black magma more fluid than water, create shimmering cities of glass at the bottom of the ocean and frozen lakes of lava on the moon, and can even tip entire planets over. Between lava that melts and re-forms the landscape, and noxious volcanic gases that poison the atmosphere, volcanoes have threatened life on Earth countless times in our planet’s history. Yet despite their reputation for destruction, volcanoes are inseparable from the creation of our planet. A lively and utterly fascinating guide to...