Aldo Leopold Distinguished Lectures @ UNI

Terry Tempest Williams presents a sharp-edged perspective on the ethics and politics of place, spiritual democracy, and the responsibilities of citizen engagement. By turns elegiac, inspiring, and passionate, The Open Space of Democracy offers a fresh perspective on the critical questions of our time.

America's national parks are breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing. This is why more than 300 million people visit the parks each year. In The Hour of Land, Terry Tempest Williams, author of the environmental classic Refuge and the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, offers a gift of celebration: an exploration of our national parks, and what they mean to us and we mean to them. From the Grand Tetons in Wyoming to Acadia in Maine to Big Bend in Texas, Williams captures the unique grandeur of each place while unearthing what it means to shape a landscape with its own evolutionary history into something of our own making. Part memoir, part natural history, and part social critique, The Hour of Land is a meditation and a manifesto on why wild lands matter to the soul of America.* Now a nominee for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence* For readers of Peter Matthiessen, Barry Lopez, and Annie Dillard* Beautiful paperback repackage with flaps makes this a perfect gift

NATIONAL BESTSELLER AKansas City Star Best Book of the Year "Brilliant, meditative, and full of surprises, wisdom, and wonder."--Ann Lamott, author ofImperfect Birds "I am leaving you all my journals, but you must promise me you won't look at them until after I'm gone." This is what Terry Tempest Williams's mother, the matriarch of a large Mormon clan in northern Utah, told her a week before she died. It was a shock to Williams to discover that her mother had kept journals. But not as much of a shock as it was to discover that the three shelves of journals were all blank. In fifty-four short chapters, Williams recounts memories of her mother, ponders herown faith, and contemplates the notion of absence and presence art and in our world.When Women Were Birds is a carefully crafted kaleidoscope that keeps turning around the question: What does it mean to have a voice?