Bill Bryson, a best-selling American author, writes books on language, science, and travel. His book, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, is a humorous account of his time spent on one of America's longest hiking trails. The reader will stumble upon many insightful dos and don’ts as Bryson and his companion learn through experience on their 2100+ mile adventure. The book is laugh-out-loud hilarious in many places, but it also serves as a valuable trail guide and resource. Bryson has done his research and it shows. This book provides a large breadth of interesting facts about the trail, its surrounding areas/parks, and its history, as well as references to further reading on America’s East-coast beauties. I found this book to be one of the most side-splitting reads I’ve picked up in a while (especially as some of Bryson’s problems have at one point or another been my own). Even after having logged over 300 miles on the trail myself I was able to look at its boundless radiance through a new lens. Being an easy, fast read at about 275 pages, this one is a must before your next hiking trip, especially if you’re headed for the AT.           ~ Alexander S.

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Wild . . . surly . . . pugnacious . . .  these are some of the first words that come to mind in describing the voice that is Ed Abbey in this book.  Closely following those adjectives, however, are words of a different color: thoughtful . . . reflective . . . poetic . . . eloquent . . . mellifluous.  All of these can be fairly applied to this provocative account that one reviewer has likened to “a ride on a bucking bronco.”

The famous western writer Larry McMurtry once called Abbey the “Thoreau of the American West,” and this memoir has many parallels to Walden.  Here Abbey recounts his years spent working for the Park Service in the late 1950’s just outside of Moab in what is now Arches National Park (then a National Monument).  For travelers to Arches and Canyonlands this book provides a point of entry into this extreme landscape from a man who knew the land well and loved it dearly.  Abbey’s aspiration in writing the book: “Since you cannot get the desert into a book any more than a fisherman can haul up the sea with his nets, I have tried to create a world of words in which the desert figures more as medium than as material.  Not imitation but evocation has been the goal.”      ~  C. Bryan

    Thomas Wolfe is North Carolina's most celebrated writer.  Certainly, his fame has endured since the publication of his first novel Look Homeward Angel in the early 1920's.  Look Homeward Angel, as almost every North Carolinian knows, is one of the finest “coming-of-age” novels ever written.  It is the story of Eugene Gant, who grows up in a small southern mountain city, in his mother's boarding house, close to his father's stone cutting business, always struggling to find his place in the world.

     Thomas Wolfe's life was the model for Eugene's.  He was born in Asheville where his father was a stonecutter and his mother ran a boarding house.  Wolfe entered Chapel Hill when he was 15. At first he was a misfit, but by the time he graduated he had been editor of the school newspaper and an active participant in the drama courses and productions inspired by the great teacher of “folk drama,” Frederick Koch. 

      After college, Wolfe moved to New York hoping to become a successful playwright. But his plays were too long and he failed to have them produced.  On a trip to Europe, he began writing down his memories of growing up in Asheville.  Three years later, these memories became Look Homeward Angel.  The book and its author were an immediate success. 

     Wolfe was able to devote the remaining few years of his life to writing, but it took him six years after the publication of Look Homeward Angel to complete Of Time and the River, which continued the story of Eugene Gant.  None of Wolfe's later works were as successful as Look Homeward Angel, but their rich narratives confirmed his talents and earned for him a place in any list of America’s great writers.       ~ D.G. Martin

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 “To get there, you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new.  Or was new, that day we went up it.  You look up the highway and it is straight for miles, coming at you, with the black line down the center coming at and at you, black and slick and tarry-shining against the white of the slab, and the heat dazzles up from the white slab so that only the black line is clear, coming at you with the whine of the tires, and if you don’t quit staring at that line and don’t take a few deep breaths and slap yourself hard on the back of the neck you’ll hypnotize yourself and you’ll come to just at the moment when the right front wheel hooks over into the black dirt shoulder off the slab, and you’ll try to jerk her back on but you can’t because the slab is high like a curb and maybe you’ll try to reach to turn off the ignition just as she starts the dive.”

            Got it?  Feel the pulse beating?  Want to know where you’re headed?  Straight into “All the King’s Men” by Robert Penn Warren, one of the best novels of the 20^th century.   His devotion to the roads, the towns and the rivers where his characters lived and died is as fundamental to his portrait of the South as the capture and representation of light is to impressionists.

As life becomes more frenetic and staticky with electronic interruptions, quiet and calm become seductive.  Whatever happened to the contemplation of a breeze shushing through leaves?  The shape of a rose petal in your mind?  The fall of a leaf?  Perhaps the monks are right.  Ship us all off once a year to cerebrate [cq] the perfection of a single drop of water as it forms on the bottom of a glacier in Wei-hi, Tibet.  Short of that, you might just steer your attention toward this phenomenal book by Robert Penn Warren.     ~ Loyd Little

In the early 1970’s the fate of Cumberland Island, Georgia’s southernmost barrier island, was in the lurch. Would the island remain an ecological enclave enjoyed by only a few select landowners? Or would a bridge be built to the island, making way for vast development along the lines of Hilton Head Island to the north?

In this story, McPhee, a master of creative non-fiction, recounts his travel to the island with two nemeses: David Brower, one of the leading environmentalists of the late 20th century, the “archdruid”; and Charles Frazier, the Southeast’s most famous coastal real estate developer. McPhee documents the conversations and arguments of these two unlikely traveling companions as they walk, explore, and camp on the island together. In the hands of McPhee this story unfolds in an engaging—even engrossing—way. The questions and conversations that spawn from this book are rich: To what degree are humans part of nature? When is it proper to hold land in a preserve, protected from human impact? Who decides? Are there ways to develop land that creatively integrates the human and the ecological?             ~  C. Bryan

'Walker of Time' is a fascinating story about a Hopi Indian boy and freckled-faced white boy who get rushed back to 800 AD and end up in one of the boy's ancestor's home, the cliff dwellings in Walnut Canyon which is outside of Flagstaff, Arizona. The characters are very believable and their adventures and tasks keep your heart pounding. This book made Walnut Canyon and Wupatki come alive. I could really picture the ancient ones in their homes and at work. It also made me appreciate how hard it was to survive and why they might have disappeared from their cliff homes.    ~  N. & G. Egan

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Wild . . . surly . . . pugnacious . . .  these are some of the first words that come to mind in describing the voice that is Ed Abbey in this book.  Closely following those adjectives, however, are words of a different color: thoughtful . . . reflective . . . poetic . . . eloquent . . . mellifluous.  All of these can be fairly applied to this provocative account that one reviewer has likened to “a ride on a bucking bronco.”

The famous western writer Larry McMurtry once called Abbey the “Thoreau of the American West,” and this memoir has many parallels to Walden.  Here Abbey recounts his years spent working for the Park Service in the late 1950’s just outside of Moab in what is now Arches National Park (then a National Monument).  For travelers to Arches and Canyonlands this book provides a point of entry into this extreme landscape from a man who knew the land well and loved it dearly.  Abbey’s aspiration in writing the book: “Since you cannot get the desert into a book any more than a fisherman can haul up the sea with his nets, I have tried to create a world of words in which the desert figures more as medium than as material.  Not imitation but evocation has been the goal.”  ~  C. Bryan

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It’s hard to imagine more beauty and depth making its way into a mere 104-page novella.  This is a story about the natural world of Montana, fly fishing, the mysteries of family life, and “loving completely those we don’t completely understand.”  It is also a story in which the landscape of western Montana, specifically the Big Blackfoot River, occupies a central role. 

Norman Maclean grew up in western Montana, and in his writing you can hear the voice of someone deeply in love with this extraordinary land and at the same time haunted by some of his memories inexorably tied to the place.      ~ C. Bryan

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In 1819, Nantucket, as the center of the whaling industry in America, was on its way to becoming one of the wealthiest towns in the United States.  In that year the whaleship Essex departed the island for a routine voyage to hunt whales, just as over seventy other Nantucket-based whaleships would do that season.

The story of what would become of the Essex and its crew served as the inspiration for Melville in writing Moby Dick.  Nathaniel Philbrick, a renowned Nantucket historian, draws similar inspiration from the story and retells it in an equally artful and riveting way while staying in the realm of nonfiction.  Even within the first few chapters it’s easy to see why Philbrick earned the National Book Award for this work.

I read this book just before my last trip to Nantucket and it became a key reference point for me in walking the old streets, in reading the names on tombstones, and in visiting the town’s famous whaling museum.     ~ C. Bryan

Wonderful story about a young woman and her family during the Revolutionary days in Brooklyn, NY. She has a dream to build a bridge to span the East River. It is a fictional account of a fictional Brooklyn Bridge. Takes place almost entirely in what is now Brooklyn Heights. Beautiful!       ~  elizmartin

In his poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," Whitman brings community and kinship to the unfamiliar and somewhat daunting masses of New York City. Seen through Whitman's perspective, the hoards of head-down haste-makers of present day NYC flow in unity, tied to each other and to the viewer through shared action, feeling, understanding, and purpose. By stressing the connection and similarities between each individual, Whitman forces the reader to look differently upon the businessman, the cross dresser, the cab driver, the beggar, ect. In other words, the poet breaks down the individual as an integral part of humanity, which allows the visitor, tourist, or outsider to feel connected to the city and the strangers passing quickly by. If nothing else, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is a wonderful poetic account of 19th century people watching.    ~ Josh Bryan

This story is a beautiful love story that evades sentimentality, but nonetheless grabs your heart and the rest of your guts in one firm heave.  This story is also an odyssey of one man’s struggle to return home amidst a series of extraordinary challenges, against the backdrop of the civil war-ravaged South. 

The home that the protagonist, Inman, seeks is the land just beside Cold Mountain, southwest of Asheville, in the Shining Rock Wilderness section of Pisgah National Forest.  Cold Mountain itself is a phenomenal trip for present-day hikers and backpackers, and readers of this book will spot many landmarks on Inman’s route that are recognizable today.       ~ C. Bryan

Jenny was a girl whose family was murdered by Indians when they were going to Oregon. She was left alone without anyone. She signed up to help a family with three kids. Jenny passed Indians on the way to the house and felt a renewed hatred for them only to find out that the family she is helping is part Indian!!! She soon realizes that this family is more like her than she knew. She travels with them all around the Tetons and grows to love the area. It made me grow to love the area too, even though I hadn't even been there. This book made me really excited about going to the Tetons.   ~  N. & G. Egan

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Annie Dillard, in reviewing this book, says that with Gretel Ehlrich “Wyoming has found its Whitman.”  Another reviewer describes Ehrlich’s prose “as expansive as a Wyoming vista, as charged as a bolt of prairie lightning.”  Both comments hit the mark on this beautiful little book (131 pages) about shepherding in Wyoming.

In the late 1970’s Gretel Ehrlich was a documentary filmmaker from New York working on a film about modern day sheepherders.  In the middle of the project her partner died, sending her into a deep depression.  Rather than return to New York, Ehrlich decided to stay in Wyoming and become a sheepherder herself:  “I suspect my original motive for coming here was to ‘lose myself’ in new and unpopulated territory.  Instead of producing the numbness I thought I wanted, life on the sheep ranch woke me up.  The vitality of the people I was working with flushed out what had become a hallucinatory rawness inside me.  I threw away my clothes and bought new ones; I cut my hair.  The arid country was a clean slate.  Its absolute indifference steadied me.”   So this book is, in part, about living through grief and loss.  It is just as much about the extreme landscape of Wyoming and the extreme, wonderfully idiosyncratic characters this landscape engenders.

Letters from Yellowstone is the story of a group of 1898 scientists on an expedition of discovery to catalog the flora and fauna of Yellowstone Park before tourists, the railroad, local entrepreneurs, and poachers destroy it. The novel which is written in epistolary style provides wonderful characters set in the sublime background of the Northern Rockies. The expedition proves to be one of self-discovery as much as scientific cataloguing. I also enjoyed how the characters' discussions of a number of late twentieth century concerns: wildlife management, commercialization of public lands, role of women in sciences. While not an adventure, this book is nevertheless a page turner. Read Letters From Yellowstone while the summer is still here and before you travel to the park. This book brings to life some of the park's history and grandeur as well as the magnificent landscapes.   ~ A. Egan

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Eminent geologist and ecologist, Professor Joseph LeConte recorded these “wayside notes” on his first trip to Yosemite Valley in the summer of 1870.  Departing from the University of California the day after classes ended, “Professor Joe” and his nine traveling companions ventured to Yosemite “regular pioneer style, cooking their own provisions, and sleeping under the open sky, whenever a convenient place was found; each man was to bestride his own horse, carry his own bedding behind his saddle, and his clothing, with the exception of one change of underwear, on his back.”  LeConte’s prose is vibrant and vigorous, and he manages to relay his deep scientific knowledge of the areas geology and ecology without being pretentious.

Of particular note is his record of meeting John Muir for the first time.  The two were to become close friends and colleagues as advocates for Yosemite and other wild places, but in the summer of 1870 they were just young men discovering a place (Yosemite Valley) more beautiful and sublime than they ever could have imagined.   

Author David Robertson has said this book is "perhaps second only to Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra on the all-time Yosemite best books list."           ~ C. Bryan

Today many people know of John Muir as a seminal leader of the modern environmental movement and the revered champion of Yosemite, but in 1868 he was merely a young man searching for adventure, natural beauty, and a summer job. Though he wrote many books and articles over his career, My First Summer resounds with a voice that reflects Muir’s thrill in first discovering the beauty of Yosemite Valley and Tuolumne Meadows. In his account he references many places that are recognizable to visitors today. 

Muir's prose is full of adventure and joy.  He was a man who would develop a deep love for Yosemite, and the seeds are here: "No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite."         ~ C. Bryan

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