Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams explore through intimate and thought-provoking dialogue one of the most sought after and least understood elements of human nature: hope. Drawing on decades of work that has helped expand our understanding of what it means to be human and what we all need to do to help build a better world, the book touches on vital questions, including: How do we stay hopeful when everything seems hopeless? How do we cultivate hope...

When her thirty-year marriage broke up, Sue Hubbell found herself alone and broke on a small Ozarks farm. Keeping bees, she found solace in the natural world. She began to write, challenging herself to tell the absolute truth about her life and the things that she cared about. The result is one of the best-loved books ever written about life on the land, about a woman finding her way in middle age.

A memoir by an award-winning poet describes her retreats to a primitive mountain cabin to write in solitude and find answers to life's big questions, describing how a fire forced her to reconcile her conflicting needs for isolation and community.

When Goodall first presented her discoveries about chimpanzees at a scientific conference, she was ridiculed by the chairman. She was too young, too blond, too pretty to be a serious scientist, and worse yet, she had virtually no formal scientific training. She had been a secretarial school graduate whom Leakey had sent out to study chimps only when he couldn't find anyone better qualified. And he couldn't tell her what to do in the field--nobody...

Beatrix Potter's Gardening Life is the first book to explore the origins of Beatrix Potter's love of gardening and plants and show how this passion came to be reflected in her work. The book begins with a gardener's biography, highlighting the key moments and places throughout her life that helped define her, including her home Hill Top Farm in England's Lake District. Next, the reader follows Beatrix Potter through a year in her garden, with a season-by-season...

The author recounts his experiences fighting in Europe as a member of a Canadian regiment during World War II.

"Beginning naked in the darkness, Brian Brett takes us on a journey through a summer's day that also tells the story of his affectionately named Trauma Farm - exploring the garden, orchards, fields, the mysteries of livestock and poultry, the social intricacies of rural communities - and eventually encounters a magnificent deer in the silver moonlight of a magical pasture." "Both a memoir and a natural history of the small mixed farm, this eighteen-year-long...

"Kneeling in a muddy field, clutching something soft and blue-black, Marc Hamer vows he will stop trapping moles--forever. In this earnest, understated, and sublime work of nonfiction literature, the molecatcher shares what led him to this strange career: from sleeping among hedges as a homeless teen, to toiling on the railway, to weeding windswept gardens in Wales. Hamer infuses his wanderings with radiant poetry and stark, simple observations on...

ny garden belongs to everyone who sees it – it is like a book and everybody who visits it will find different things. Marc Hamer has designed and nurtured 12 acres of garden for over two decades. It is rarely visited so he is the only person who fully knows its secrets; but it is not his own. His relationship with the garden’s owner is both distant and curiously intimate, steeped in the mysterious connection which exists between two people who...

The Stories an Old House Can Tell came about as I traveled down the country roads and saw old houses. Imagining the people who lived, worked, and played there, I began thinking it would be fun if our house can tell my family's story. Thus began my journey to have the house we lived in for thirty-eight years remember and describe its thoughts and memories of all the people who lived and played within its walls. As you read, you will laugh and marvel...