"In this remarkable journey, Mark Woods captures the essence of our National Parks: their serenity and majesty, complexity and vitality--and their power to heal." --Ken Burns Many childhood summers, Mark Woods piled into a station wagon with his parents and two sisters and headed to America's national parks. Mark’s most vivid childhood memories are set against a backdrop of mountains, woods, and fireflies in places like Redwood, Yosemite, and Grand Canyon national parks. On the eve of turning fifty and a little burned-out, Mark decided to reconnect with the great outdoors. He'd spend a year visiting the national parks. He planned to take his mother to a park she'd not yet visited and to re-create his childhood trips with his wife and their iPad-generation daughter. But then the unthinkable happened: his mother was diagnosed with cancer, given just months to live. Mark had initially intended to write a book about the future of the national parks, but Lassoing the Sun grew into something more: a book about family, the parks, the legacies we inherit and the ones we leave behind.

"In this remarkable journey, Mark Woods captures the essence of our National Parks: their serenity and majesty, complexity and vitality--and their power to heal." --Ken Burns For many childhood summers, Mark Woods piled into a station wagon with his parents and two sisters and headed to America's national parks. Mark’s most vivid childhood memories are set against a backdrop of mountains, woods, and fireflies in places like Redwood, Yosemite, and Grand Canyon national parks. On the eve of turning fifty and a little burned-out, Mark decided to reconnect with the great outdoors. He'd spend a year visiting the national parks. He planned to take his mother to a park she'd not yet visited and to re-create his childhood trips with his wife and their iPad-generation daughter. But then the unthinkable happened: his mother was diagnosed with cancer and given just months to live. Mark had initially intended to write a book about the future of the national parks, but Lassoing the Sun grew into something more: a book about family, the parks, and the legacies we inherit and the ones we leave behind.

A Navy admiral’s firsthand account of the Allied salvage operation that played a key role in recovering North Africa from the Nazis during World War II. By 1942, Mussolini’s forces were on the run in East Africa. In order to slow the Allied advance, the Italians used audacious tactics—including making ports inoperable, leaving the Allies without the infrastructure necessary to continue the war effort. At Massawa, Eritrea, the fleeing Italians left the largest mass wreck in the world, turning a vital port into a tangle of shattered ships, cranes, sunken dry docks, and dangerous booby traps. In order to continue the war effort and push back the Axis powers in Africa, the Allies enlisted a naval salvage expert known as Commander Ellsberg. Ellsberg, a veteran miracle worker in raising sunken ships, was given his toughest assignment yet: Reopen the port with no budget, no men, and no tools. The British had claimed the task was impossible—Massawa couldn’t be cleared. But a determined Ellsberg navigated complicated American and British bureaucracies to build a ragtag group of international civilians and pull off a historic feat of engineering. This is his account of that crucial operation—the largest of its kind the world had ever seen—accomplished in the searing heat of Eritrea.

S¿ren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) stood apart from the other philosophers of his day. He was less concerned with debates over abstract concepts of philosophy than with the working out of how one should live one's daily life. He believed that living Christianly should not be a matter of whether one holds the correct beliefs or dogma; Christianity is an experience, something which we must choose to live each day. Kierkegaard's thoughts and ideas apply directly to our fractured society today, explains Michael Stark. As the modern world has become smaller, it has become more divisive and argumentative. It seems that the more information we have access to, the more fearful we--Christian communities included--are becoming. Through an examination of topics such as truth, faith, selfhood, and love, Stark introduces us to the teaching of Kierkegaard and demonstrates how this prophetic voice from the past can help us navigate the hostile and combative climate of today.

Here, at last, is the massively updated and augmented second edition of this landmark encyclopedia. It contains approximately 1000 entries dealing in depth with the history of the scientific, technological and medical accomplishments of cultures outside of the United States and Europe. The entries consist of fully updated articles together with hundreds of entirely new topics. This unique reference work includes intercultural articles on broad topics such as mathematics and astronomy as well as thoughtful philosophical articles on concepts and ideas related to the study of non-Western Science, such as rationality, objectivity, and method. You’ll also find material on religion and science, East and West, and magic and science.

The selected poems from over fifty years by the great poet and biographer and friend of Miles Davis. Quincy Troupe writes poetry in great waves. The words are just notes. It's the music you make with them that matters. He's not a wordsmith, he's a shaman conjuring long repetitive lines, cadences of looking across the sea towards Africa and haunted by the legacy of slavery and racism, or of remembering fellow conjurers, poets and musical artists, celebrating, always celebrating, but never only that. In the fifty-page, incantatory poem, "Ghost Voices," there is a longing to be reconnected to the past, and a longing too to be free of it. In the short title poem, "Duende: For García Lorca and Miles Davis," there lies, nakedly, Troupe's credo: "...secrets, mystery infused in black magic / that enters bodies in forms of music, art/ poetry imbuing language with sovereignty / in blood spooling back through violent centuries..." The version of the great poem "Avalanche (number 3)" that appears here is different from the version of the same poem he published nearly 25 years ago--in exactly the same way that a jazz artist picks up his horn to play the same song a little differently every time. Troupe is a generous and gregarious poet in this giant offering that includes many new poems, as well as a selection chosen from across his eleven previously published volumes. What's remarkable is the constancy, the energy, and how he's always looking right at you in the here and now, and at the same time sees something over your shoulder that others don't see yet, maybe a distant storm gathering over the waters, something we're going to need to rise up and face soon enough.

A master storyteller transforms sixty-five myths and legends from various cultures around the world into an opportunity for spiritual nourishment.

The Emmy-winning CBS Sunday Morning correspondent chronicles his year traveling to every one of our National Parks, discovering the most beautiful places and most interesting people that America has to offer. When Conor Knighton decided to spend a year wandering through America's "best idea," he was worried the whole thing might end up being his worst idea. But after a broken engagement and a broken heart, Conor desperately needed a change of scenery. The ambitious plan he cooked up went a bit overboard in that department; Knighton set out to visit every single one of America's National Parks, from Acadia to Zion. Leave Only Footprints is the memoir of his year spent traveling across the United States, a journey that yielded his "On the Trail" series, which quickly became one of CBS Sunday Morning's most beloved segments. In this smart, informative, and entertaining book, he shares how his journey through these natural wonders ended up changing his worldview on everything from God and love to politics and technology. Whether he's waking up early for a naked scrub in a historic bathhouse or staying up late to stargaze along our loneliest highway, Knighton goes behind the scenery to provide an unfiltered look at our country. In doing so, he reveals the unforgettable stories behind the often beautiful, always fascinating lands that all Americans share.