Following his return to America after twenty years in Britain, Bill Bryson decided to reacquaint himself with his native country by walking the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail, which stretches from Georgia to Maine. The "AT" offers an astonishing landscape of silent forests and sparkling lakes--and to a writer with Bryson's comic genius, it also provides endless opportunities to test his own powers of ineptitude and to witness the majestic silliness...

From the interactive clockwork world of geology, tides, Northwest weather, and snow, to the hidden roles of dirt, stream life, and mosses and lichens, William Dietrich explores the natural splendors of the Pacific Northwest. His topics include alder and cedar; jellyfish, geoducks, crabs, and killer whales; mosquitoes and spiders; gulls, crows, raccoons, possums, deer, and cougars. This book is intended as a primer for people who are curious about...

"100 million years ago, the continents of Asia, North America, and Africa interacted to create an island archipelago that would later become the Europe we know today. It was on these ancient tropical lands that the first distinctly European organisms evolved... Tim Flannery explores the monumental changes wrought by the devastating comet strike and shows how rapid atmospheric shifts transformed the European archipelago into a single landmass during...

"On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian...

A guide identifying and describing the rocks, landforms, plants, and animals of the Grand Canyon.