Bibliographies
Top Ten Books of Nature Writing
During September 2001, The World As Home hosted a month-long contest that asked our subscribers to vote for their Top Ten books of nature writing.
Here are the results, along with comments about each title from Thomas Lyon, author of This Incomparable Lande: A Guide to American Nature Writing.
1. Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey
"[Abbey's] perception of the desert is determinedly frameless and
unconventional, as is his commentary on civilization. A work steadily gaining
status as a classic."
2. Walden; Or Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau
"A world-famous text on simple living as the means and the expression of
enlightenment, and one of the purest appreciations of place and the
natural that we have."
3. A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold
"One of the modern classics, setting forth in elegantly economical prose the
author's own journey toward ecological understanding, the necessity of
wilderness to civilization, and (perhaps most revolutionary of his ideas) the
need for a 'land ethic.'"
4. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
"Observation of nature here opens up profound questions about life and
death, meaning, and identity. To the author, Tinker Creek in Virginia
represents the universe in all its spiritual complexity."
5. Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
"A major text that is still valuable, still urgent. Carson assembled the
evidence painstakingly, showing by careful reasoning and ecological insight
just what a chemicalized environment would mean. History and further
investigation have borne out her analysis."
6. Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, Terry Tempest Williams
"...as the Great Salt Lake rose to historically unprecedented levels,
drowning bird-productive lakeside marshes in salt water, the author's
mother sank toward death from cancer. Williams weaves these two
dimensions together masterfully and movingly."
7. New and Selected Poems, Mary Oliver
Winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, Mary Oliver is
best known for her poetry that speaks eloquently and clearly about the
natural world.
8. Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, Barry Lopez
"The author travels over great stretches of the Arctic, meditating upon the
great choice that is behind our eyes."
9. The Solace of Open Spaces, Gretel Ehrlich
"An appreciation of the vastness and rigor of Wyoming's High Plains
country, and of the people whose lives have been shaped by its elemental
forces."
10. The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, Henry Beston
"A year on the Great Beach of Cape Cod: one of our literature's classic
evocations of just what a year might naturally mean."
Other titles chosen during this contest (in no particular order)...
About This Life (Barry Lopez); Always Coming Home (Ursula LeGuin); An American Childhood (Annie Dillard); Andy Goldsworthy: A Collaboration with Nature (Andrew Goldsworthy); Backwater (Joan Bauer); Basin and Range (John McPhee); The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (Jonathan Weiner); The Bear (William Faulkner); Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay (William Warner); Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (Wallace Stegner, Bernard DeVoto); A Book of Bees: And How to Keep Them (Sue Hubbell); The Book of Yaak (Rick Bass); Broadsides from the Other Orders: A Book of Bugs (Sue Hubbell); Cadillac Desert (Marc Reisner); The Center of Life (Lorraine Larison Cudmore); Cold Mountain (Charles Frazier); Coming into the Country (John McPhee); Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (Edward Wilson); A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural (Wendell Berry); Coyote's Canyon (Terry Tempest Williams); Coyotes and Town Dogs (Susan Zakin); Crossing Open Ground, and Winter Count (Barry Lopez); Desert Notes/River Notes (Barry Lopez); Desert Time: A Journey Through the American Southwest (Diana Kappel-Smith); The Desert Year (Joseph Wood Krutch); Desert: The Mojave and Death Valley (Jack Dykinga and Janice Emily Bowers); Dharma Bums (Jack Kerouac); Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World (Linda Hogan); Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (Janisse Ray); Edisto (Padgett Powell); The Education of Littletree (Forrest Carter, Rennard Strickland); Edward Abbey Reader (Edward Abbey); Encounters with the Archdruid (John McPhee); Essays of E.B. White (E.B. White); Fiber (Rick Bass); Field Guide to the Birds (Roger Tory Peterson); Field Notes: The Grace Note of the Canyon Wren (Barry Lopez); Firekeeper: New and Selected Poems (Pattiann Rogers); The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places (Gary Paul Nabhan); Hatchet (Gary Paulsen); Having Everything Right: Essays of Place (Kim R. Stafford); Heaven is Under Our Feet (Don Henley); The Hidden West: Journeys in the American Outback (Robert Schultheis); The Holy Bible; Holy the Firm (Annie Dillard); Hope is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds (Christopher Cokinos); House of Light (Mary Oliver); The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain); The Immense Journey (Loren Eiseley); Immortal Wilderness (John Hay); In Service of the Wild: Restoring and Reinhabiting Damaged Land (Stephanie Mills); An Island Out of Time: A Memoir of Smith Island in the Chesapeake (Tom Horton); The Island Within (Richard Nelson); John Muir Writings (John Muir); Julie of the Wolves (Jean Craighead George); Kingbird Highway: The Story of a Natural Obsession That Got a Little Out of Hand (Kenn Kaufman); The Land of Little Rain (Mary Austin); Learning to Live in the World: Earth Poems (William Stafford, et al); Life on a Little-Known Planet (Howard
Evans); The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (Lewis Thomas); The Living: A Novel (Annie Dillard); The Long-Legged House (Wendell Berry); The Man Who Killed the Deer: A Novel of Pueblo Indian Life (Frank Waters); The Maze (Will Hobbs); The Meadow (James Galvin); Microbe Hunters (Paul De Kruif); Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors (Lynn Margulis, et al); Moby Dick (Herman Melville); The Monkey Wrench Gang (Edward Abbey); Mountains and Rivers Without End (Gary Snyder); My First Summer in the Sierra (John Muir); Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature (David Quammen); Naturalist (Edward Wilson); Nature's Year (John Hay); Never Cry Wolf (Farley Mowat); The Night Country
(Loren Eiseley, et al); Notes from the Century Before: A Journal from British Columbia (Edward Hoagland); O Pioneers! (Willa Cather); On Methuselah's Trail: Living Fossils and the Great Extinctions (Peter Douglas Ward); Payne Hollow, Life on the Fringe of Society (Harlan Hubbard); The Pine Barrens (John McPhee); Points Unknown; A Century of Great Exploration (David Roberts); The Prairie in Her Eyes: The Breaking and Making of a Dakota Rancher (Ann Daum); Ravens in Winter (Bernd Heinrich); Reading the Mountains of Home (John Elder); Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey (Jane Goodall); Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (Gary Snyder); Savages (Joe Kane); The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson, et al); Sea Fire (Judith Neeld); Selected Poems (Robinson Jeffers); The Singing Wilderness (Sigurd Olson); The Snow Leopard (Peter Matthiesen); Solar Storms: A Novel (Linda Hogan); The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions (David Quammen); Song of the World Becoming: Poems, New and Collected, 1981-2001 (Pattiann Rogers); The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgramage (Chet Raymo); The Stars, the Snow, the Fire: Twenty-Five Years in the Alaska Wilderness (John Haines); The Starship and the Canoe (Kenneth Brower); Stepping Westward (Sallie Tisdale); Tales of the Arch-Druid (John McPhee); Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (Annie Dillard); The Practice of the Wild: Essays (Gary Snyder); The Thin Edge: Coast and Man in Crisis (Anne Simon); Those of the Forest (Wallace Byron Grange); Thousand Mile Summer (Colin Fletcher); A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (John Muir); To Know a Fly (Vincent Gaston Dethier); The Trail Home: Nature, Imagination, and the American West (John Daniel); Trout Fishing in America (Richard Brautigan); Twelve Moons (Mary Oliver); Under the Apple Trees (John Burroughs); The
Unforseen Wilderness: An Essay on Kentucky's Red River Gorge (Wendell Berry); Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (Wendell Berry); An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field (Terry Tempest Williams); Walking the High Ridge: Life as Field Trip (Robert Michael Pyle); Wickerby: An Urban Pastoral (Charles Siebert); The Wild Cascades (Harvey Manning); The Wild Iris (Louise Gluck); Wild Thoughts from Wild Places (David Quammen); Wind in the
Rock: The Canyonlands of Southeastern Utah (Ann Zwinger); The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame); Winter: Notes from Montana (Rick Bass); Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod (Gary Paulsen); The Wolves of Mount McKinley (Adolph Murie)
The World As Home website - http://www.worldashome.org - sponsored and maintained by nonprofit literary publisher Milkweed Editions - http://www.milkweed.org - fosters ecological literacy and renewal by linking literary writing about the natural world to specific ecoregions and to organizations active in preserving natural landscapes or focused on the art of writing.