Read-alikes
Check out these read-alike suggestions for the 2024 selection This America of Ours.
The Hour of Land
by Terry Tempest Williams
Williams captures the majesty, history, and evolution of America’s wild lands, from the Grand Tetons to Acadia, Big Bend and more. The Hour of Land is a collection of essays includes poetry, stories, and conversations and serves as much as a record of Williams’ personal journey as a meditative guidebook. This personal topography celebrates America’s national parks and explores what they mean to the soul of America. Readers will enjoy the captivating blend of memoir, natural history, and social critique.
Crossings
by Ben Goldfarb
While the roadways encircling the globe may seem practically invisible to humans, their impacts on wildlife and ecology are anything but. In Crossings, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb investigates how roads have transformed our planet and how we can create a better future for all living creatures. Besides the millions killed by cars daily, animal migration patterns have been disrupted; invasive plants propagate by hitching rides on vehicles; road salt clouds our water sources; and traffic noise chases birds from their preferred habitats. Still, innovative road ecologists provide hope for the future. Goldfarb interviews the astounding minds behind such feats as bridges for mountain lions and tunnels for toads, logging road deconstruction, and caretakers for car-ophaned wallabies.
Silent Spring Revolution
by Douglas Brinkley
Silent Spring Revolution is a comprehensive history of the rise of environmental activism. Brinkley recounts the characteristics and efforts of the indomitable generation that saved the natural world, from the 1940s through the first Earth Day in 1970. Of critical importance was Rachel Carson’s controversial book Silent Spring, which described the devastating impact of artificial chemicals and launched an eco-revolution. Environmental justice warriors like Coretta Scott King, Cesar Chavez, and Robert F. Kennedy pushed John F. Kennedy to use the federal government to punish chemical polluters, save seashore habitats, and regulate the use of toxic pesticides. Their actions further inspired landmark legislation during Lyndon Johnson's and Richard Nixon's presidencies.
We Loved It All
by Lydia Millet
Endangered species advocate Lydia Millet offers intimate portraits of the remarkable animals we live among, as well as ones no longer living among us, while also weaving in stories of her globe-trotting parents, family and friends. In this genre-defying work, Millet explores the majesty of nature, our complicated position in the animal kingdom, and our capacity for love and destruction. Her musings depict how incredibly interlinked our spiritual and emotional lives are to nonhuman creatures.
Saving Yellowstone
by Megan Kate Nelson
Saving Yellowstone charts the establishment of Yellowstone as the world’s first national park following the Civil War. In 1871, geologist Ferdinand Hayden’s team of scientists embarked on a survey that led to the passage of the Yellowstone Act in 1872. While this was a national project meant to give Americans a sense of achievement and unity in the wake of a destructive civil war, leaders with other ambitions were also present. These included Lakota leader Sitting Bull, who asserted his peoples’ claim to their homelands, and financier Jay Cooke, who sought to build the Northern Pacific Railroad. Hayden, Cooke, and Sitting Bull staked their claims to Yellowstone when the Ulysses S. Grant Administration and Congress were testing the reach and purpose of federal power. Saving Yellowstone reveals how Yellowstone was a metaphor for the nation during Reconstruction, one which was simultaneously beautiful and terrible, fragile and powerful.
Grinnell
by John Taliaferro
Taliaferro tells the incredible life story of George Bird Grinnell and how his tireless efforts sparked America’s conservation movement, leaving nothing out. From the times Grinnell dug for dinosaurs on the Great Plains and helped map Yellowstone to when he scaled the peaks and glaciers of what would later be called Glacier National Park and founded the first Audubon Society. In an era when Native Americans were mistreated and misunderstood, Grinnell lived among tribes, producing books such as The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Ways of Life and calling for reform from Congress and the White House. In addition to being a renowned anthropologist, historian, naturalist, and conservationist, Taliaferro shows how Grinnell was dear friend and inexhaustible defender to many.
Advocate
by Eddie Ahn
This full-color graphic novel memoir about environmental justice attorney Eddie Ahn explores the juxtapositions between immigration and activism, opportunity and obligation, and familial duty and community service. Born in Texas to Korean immigrants, his family impressed upon Eddie the values of hard work and economic success. He earned a law degree in San Francisco but later left his economically successful position to enter the nonprofit world, alienating his parents who were unable to understand this new path in his life. While working as an environmental justice attorney confronting the devastating effects of Californian wildfires to economic inequality, he also battled racial prejudice and sought to reconnect with his parents and show them the value of a life of service.
Before It's Gone
by Jonathan Vigliotti
Discussion of the climate crisis frequently suffers from a problem of abstraction, so CBS News correspondent Jonathan Vigliotti traveled across the country to interview the countless Americans impacted by massive forest fires in California, hurricanes in Louisiana, receding coastlines in Massachusetts and devastated fisheries in Alaska. Vigliotti shares the genuine impacts of climate change with urgency and personal touch, showing that these are not warnings of a future impacted by climate but signs that the climate catastrophe is already here.
Every Living Thing
by Jason Roberts
In the 18th century, Doctor Carl Linneaus, a Swedish doctor, and Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocrat, separately dedicated their lives to identifying all life on Earth. Linnaeus believed that life could be divided into tidy, constant categories while Buffon considered life as a dynamic, shifting thing. Linneaus shared such concepts as mammal, primate and homo sapiens while denying species change and subscribing to racist pseudo-science. Buffon coined the term reproduction, created prototypes of evolution and genetics, and decried prejudice with fervor. Their divergence of perspective and deep rivalry created aftershocks that still resound today. This astounding true tale demonstrates how enduring legacies can affect insights and discoveries for centuries.
Prairie Fires
by Caroline Fraser
In this historical biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the beloved Little House on the Prairie series, Fraser reveals the truth of Wilder’s harsh childhood. Wilder grew up in conditions of constant struggle, rootlessness, and poverty. It was not until her sixties that she recast her childhood as a triumphant story of homesteading with cozy and content moments. Drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records, Fraser goes further to chronicle Wilder’s tumultuous relationship with Rose Wilder Lane, her journalist daughter. Prairie Fires provides a unique perspective on American history and our national mythology of self-reliance.
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