In 22 wonderfully articulate essays, Kingsolver raises her voice in praise of nature, family, literature, and the joys of everyday life while examining the genesis of war, violence and poverty in the world. Illustrations.

"Although 'The Myth of Sisyphus' poses mortal problems, it sums itself up for me as a lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert. It has hence been thought possible to append to this philosophical argument a series of essays, of a kind I have never ceased writing, which are somewhat more marginal to my other books...The unity of this book, that I should like to be apparent to American reader as it is to me, resides in...

"'In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.' So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which beloved poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of...

Essays on Nate Shaw, Harry Caudill, Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, diversity, waste, eating, local culture, consumption, conservation, environmental concerns, and other topics.

"Nichols has gathered writing that span more than thirty years and range from idyllic reflections on nature to unmerciful satires on impending Armageddon. We see the author as a young man on the trip to Central America that gave him a social conscience that wouldn't quit; as a hunter, hiker, and naturalist on rivers and in mountains increasingly threatened by development; and as a novelist watching in embarrassed disbelief as his book The Milagro...

Collection of essays by the author about people, animals, and things he cares about.

Barbara Kingsolver has entertained and touched the lives of legions of readers with her critically acclaimed and bestselling novels The Bean Trees, Animal Dreams, and Pigs in Heaven. In these twenty-five newly conceived essays, she returns once again to her favored literary terrain to explore the themes of family, community, and the natural world. With the eyes of a scientist and the vision of a poet, Barbara Kingsolver writes about notions as diverse...