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The story of a man’s deep connection with nature and his wife’s fear of it. –Summary by Amy Larch Gramour

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Fiction, Nature

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The White Heart of the Mojave recounts a 1920's adventure in the wind and sun and big spaces of Death Valley by two independent minded women, Edna Brush Perkins and Charlotte Hannahs Jordan. Both women were early feminists, Edna as chairwoman of the greater Cleveland Woman's Suffrage Party (1916-18). At the end of the Great War, the two friends wanted nothing more than to escape to the solitariness of some wild and lonely place far from city halls, smokestacks, national organizations, and streets of little houses all alike. Their vacation started as a long motor drive through the backwoods of California (Charlotte's husband, Ned, owned the Jordan Motor Car Company). It ended with a month long trek through Death Valley in an old milk wagon drawn by a horse and a mule. Edna's descriptions of the desert are superb and from the heart--the dunes were very beautiful, with knife-edged tops ridged in pure, clean lines from which fringes of fine sand blew up like the wind tossed manes of white horses. This is a great listen for anyone who likes first-hand accounts of adventure in the Great Outdoors. (Summary by Sue Anderson)...

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Memoirs, Nature, Travel

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Robert Sterling Yard was an American writer, journalist, and wilderness activist. Born in Haverstraw, New York, Yard graduated from Princeton University and spent the first twenty years of his career in the editing and publishing business. In 1915, he was recruited by his friend Stephen Mather to help publicize the need for an independent national park agency. Their numerous publications were part of a movement that resulted in legislative support for a National Park Service (NPS) in 1916. Yard worked to promote the national parks as well as educate Americans about their use. Creating high standards based on aesthetic ideals for park selection, he also opposed commercialism and industrialization of what he called America's masterpieces. In 1935, he became one of the eight founding members of The Wilderness Society and acted as its first president from 1937 until his death eight years later. Yard is now considered an important figure in the modern wilderness movement. In the preface to this book, published in 1919, he writes, In offering the American public a carefully studied outline of its national park system, I have two principal...

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Nature, Science, History