Showing titles in Outdoors & Nature

In 1983, at the age of 56, Gerry Clark set out from New Zealand in his 10-meter homemade wooden yacht to circumnavigate Antarctica in a quest for new information about seabirds. In this graphic account of the ensuing three-year-eight-month voyage, he describes his adventures in some of the remotest, wildest, and most spectacularly beautiful parts of the world.

By the time life had finished hitting Rick Crandall from all sides, he was at the lowest point of his life, both personally and professionally. His wife, Pamela, makes an astute and life-changing suggestion: "Let's get a dog." So begins the story of Emme, a 200-pound Saint Bernard trapped in the body of a five-pound Australian terrier puppy. Soon, Emme and Rick hit the hiking trails around Aspen, Colorado. While she is groomed to be a show dog, it's soon obvious that her heart is in the hills and with Rick, who decides to add more challenging hikes to the mix.

A "normal" Caribbean hurricane travels from east to west, but Lenny was anything but normal. Spawned south of Cuba in 1999, this late-season storm defied all predictions by moving steadily east toward the Leeward Islands. Eventually building almost to Category 5 strength, Lenny squatted for two days between the Virgin Islands and St. Martin, whipping the ocean with 155 mile-per-hour winds and sixty-foot seas.

Since the 1987 publication of Diet for a New America, beef consumption in the United States has fallen a remarkable 19 percent. While many forces are contributing to this dramatic shift in our habits, Diet for a New America is considered to be one of the most important. Diet for a New America is a startling examination of the food we currently buy and eat in the United States and the astounding moral, economic, and emotional price we pay for it.

Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, home to only a handful of people, is a harsh and lonely place. So when James Campbell's cousin Heimo Korth asked him to spend a summer building a cabin in the rugged Interior, Campbell hesitated about inviting his 15-year-old daughter, Aidan, to join him. Would she be able to withstand clouds of mosquitoes, the threat of grizzlies, bathing in an ice-cold river, and hours of grueling labor peeling and hauling logs? But once there, Aidan embraced the wild.

It all started with a Hob Nob. As Dr Matt Morgan, an intensive care consultant, examined a patient who had suffered a cardiac arrest after inhaling some biscuit crumbs, he saw a flock of birds fly past the window. They must inhale objects all the time when flying, how do they survive? he thought to himself. This began an investigation that spanned continents, species and millennia. For animal science has so much to teach us about human medicine. While some of the overlaps and parallels are obvious, there is so much more that we have learnt from the animal world.

Born out of a desire to know and understand the mysteries of this material, the spiritual and practical applications of clay in both its micro and macro histories, Clay: A Human History is a book of wonder and insight, a hybrid of archaeology, history and lived experience as an amateur potter.

There is the Cornwall Lamorna Ash knew as a child – the idyllic, folklore-rich place where she spent her summer holidays. Then there is the Cornwall she discovers when, feeling increasingly dislocated in London, she moves to Newlyn, a fishing town near Land’s End. This Cornwall is messier and harder; it doesn’t seem like a place that would welcome strangers. Before long, however, Lamorna finds herself on a week-long trawler trip with a crew of local fishermen, afforded a rare glimpse into their world, their warmth and their humour.

It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn't happening at all, and if your anxiety about it is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.

With a husband and two children, 1200 sheep and 400 cattle, farm dogs and pet lambs, pigs bent on excavation and a goat bent on escape, country life is never dull. From calving cows to constipated dogs, weddings to weaning lambs, daffodils to ducklings to droughts, each season brings new challenges and delights. Sometimes it's exhausting but it's almost always a lot of fun - anyway, it's all part and parcel of the life of a Kiwi mother, farmer's wife and vet.

Chris and Chrissy Rouse, an experienced father-and-son scuba diving team, hoped to achieve widespread recognition for their outstanding but controversial diving skills. Obsessed and ambitious, they sought to solve the secrets of a mysterious, undocumented World War II German U-boat that lay under 230 feet of water, only a half day's mission from New York Harbor. In doing so they paid the ultimate price in their quest for fame.

Calming, thought-provoking, poetic and honest, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm is a collection of writing and musing by documentary-maker, environmentalist and author of Waterlog Roger Deakin. For the last six years of his life, Roger Deakin kept notebooks. In them, he wrote his daily thoughts, feelings and observations about and around his Suffolk home, Walnut Tree Farm. Collected here are the very best of these writings, capturing his extraordinary, restless curiosity about nature as well as his impressions of our changing world.

Riding Home:The Power of Horses to Heal, is the first and only audiobook to scientifically and experientially explain why horses have the extraordinary ability to emotionally transform the lives of thousands of men, women and children, whether they are horse lovers, or suffering from deep psychological wounds. It is an audiobook for anyone who wants to experience the joy, wonder, self-awareness and peace of mind that comes from creating a horse/human relationship, and it puts forth and clarifies the principles of today's Natural Horsemanship....

With two years experience behind him, James Herriot still feels privileged working on the beautiful Yorkshire moors as assistant vet at the Darrowby practice. Time to meet yet more unwilling patients and a rich cast of supporting owners. Full of hilarious tales of his unpredictable boss Siegfreid Farnon, his charming student brother Tristan, the joys of spring lambing, a vicious cat called Boris and James' jinxed courtship of the lovely Helen, this third volume of memoirs is sure to delight hardened fans.

Platypuses are mammals unlike any other on earth. They lay eggs, ooze milk through their skin, and can sense electricity. In this episode, we travel with a platypus as he moves through his nightly routine on the island of Tasmania. He uses electroreceptors to hunt underwater and does a synchronized swimming courtship ritual with his mate, who then digs a burrow 40 feet deep into the riverbank to nest.

A preeminent geneticist hunts the Neanderthal genome to answer the biggest question of them all: what does it mean to be human? What can we learn from the genes of our closest evolutionary relatives? Neanderthal Man tells the story of geneticist Svante Pbo’s mission to answer that question, beginning with the study of DNA in Egyptian mummies in the early 1980s and culminating in his sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2009.

For the first time, HRH The Prince of Wales shares his views on how our most pressing modern challenges - from climate change to poverty - are rooted in mankind's disharmony with nature, presenting a compelling case that the solution lies in our ability to regain a balance with the world around us. With its holistic approach, this provocative and well-reasoned book takes the discussion of sustainability and climate change in a new direction.

Botany For Dummies gives you a thorough overview of the fundamentals of botany, but in simple terms that anyone can understand. Great for supplementing your botany coursework or brushing up before an exam, this book covers plant evolution, the structure and function of plant cells, and plant identification. Plus, you'll learn about how plants of different types are changing and adapting in response to changing climates. This new edition goes into more detail on fungi—not technically plants, but no one is holding that against them.

With an introduction from Prince William and contributions from Sir David Attenborough, Shakira Mebarak, Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, Naoko Yamazaki and Christiana Figueres, Earthshot shows us how, by working together, we can solve Earth’s greatest challenges.

After Paul Stutzman lost his wife to breast cancer, he sensed a tug on his heart - the call to a challenge, the call to pursue a dream. With a mixture of dread and determination, Paul left his job, traveled to Georgia, and took his first steps on the Appalachian Trail. What he learned during the next four and a half months changed his life and can change yours as well. In Hiking Through, you'll join Paul on his remarkable 2,176-mile trip through 14 states in search of peace and a renewed sense of purpose.