My bookshelf·Index Published

2025

55 books

No. 0128 Fiction · Eastern U.S. & Appalachia

Heartwood

Amity Gaige

How easy is it to get lost when you wander off the Appalachian Trail? Very. This extremely page-turning novel by Amity Gaige veers between the disappearance in Maine’s North Woods of thru-hiker Valerie Gillis, who is just two hundred miles…

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Heartwood
No. 0127 Narrative Nonfiction · No fixed address

Is a River Alive?

Robert Macfarlane

The question posed by the title of celebrated British nature writer Robert Macfarlane’s keenly felt study of rivers is answered in the first few pages by his nine-year-old son: “Duh.” Yet, self-evident values are not always treated self evidentally. In…

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Is a River Alive?
No. 0126 Graphic Novel · No fixed address

Insectopolis: A Natural History

Peter Kuper

A little context: Homo sapiens have been around for a few hundred thousand years. Insects? Four hundred million years. In this beautifully rendered, graphic-novel-style accounting of the natural history of bugs, artist Peter Kuper notes insects are perfectly happy without…

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Insectopolis: A Natural History
No. 0124 Narrative Nonfiction · American Southwest

The Wild Dark: Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light

Craig Childs

Eighty percent of Americans can’t see the Milky Way from home. Childs goes looking for what’s left of the actual night — sleeping out in the desert without a light, tracking how animals use darkness, sitting with astronomers and with…

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The Wild Dark: Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light