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The Last Empty Places

Author: Peter Stark

Publisher: Mountaineers Books

Published: 2023-02-07

Total Pages: 459

ISBN-13: 1680516434

". . . intriguing, both a solid refresher on our savage colonial history and a smart rumination on what it means to get lost. ― Outside First time in paperback, ebook, and audio editions Part travel adventure, part history, part exploration Features four specific "blank spots" from across the country and delves into our human relationships with place In The Last Empty Places, bestselling author Peter Stark takes the reader to four of the most remote, wild, and unpopulated areas of the United States outside of Alaska and mainly not part of protected wilderness: the rivers and forests of Northern Maine; the rugged, unpopulated region of Western Pennsylvania that lies only a short distance from the East’s big cities; the haunting canyons of Central New Mexico; and the vast, arid basins of Southeast Oregon. Stark discovers that the places he visits are only "blank" in terms of a lack of recorded history. In fact, each place holds layers of history, meaning, and intrinsic value and is far from being blank. He also finds that each region has played an important role in shaping our American idea of wilderness through the influential "natural philosophers" who visited these places and wrote about their experiences--Henry David Thoreau, William Bartram, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold. It’s a fascinating look at the value of nature, the ways humans use and approach it, and what it means to seek out empty places in today’s world.

Empty Places

Author: Kathy Cannon Wiechman

Publisher: Boyds Mills Press

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1629795607

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It is 1932, in Harlan County, Kentucky. Times are tough in the mining community, especially for thirteen-year-old Adabel Cutler's family. As they fight to survive, Adabel has to figure out her own identity while dealing with her volatile father, her dutiful sister, her defiant brother, and her mother's disappearance, which she can't seem to remember. This is a beautifully written and deeply felt coming-of-age novel by the acclaimed author of Like a River. Includes an author's note, bibliography, and archival images.

The Solace of Open Spaces

Author: Gretel Ehrlich

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2017-02-21

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13: 1504042883

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These transcendent, lyrical essays on the West announced Gretel Ehrlich as a major American writer—“Wyoming has found its Whitman” (Annie Dillard). Poet and filmmaker Gretel Ehrlich went to Wyoming in 1975 to make the first in a series of documentaries when her partner died. Ehrlich stayed on and found she couldn’t leave. The Solace of Open Spaces is a chronicle of her first years on “the planet of Wyoming,” a personal journey into a place, a feeling, and a way of life. Ehrlich captures both the otherworldly beauty and cruelty of the natural forces—the harsh wind, bitter cold, and swiftly changing seasons—in the remote reaches of the American West. She brings depth, tenderness, and humor to her portraits of the peculiar souls who also call it home: hermits and ranchers, rodeo cowboys and schoolteachers, dreamers and realists. Together, these essays form an evocative and vibrant tribute to the life Ehrlich chose and the geography she loves. Originally written as journal entries addressed to a friend, The Solace of Open Spaces is raw, meditative, electrifying, and uncommonly wise. In prose “as expansive as a Wyoming vista, as charged as a bolt of prairie lightning,” Ehrlich explores the magical interplay between our interior lives and the world around us (Newsday).

At the Mercy of the River

Author: Peter Stark

Publisher:

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13:

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Even in this age of extreme sports and made-for-TV survival games, there still exist places on earth where the most intrepid among us can plunge into truly unknown territory. The acclaimed adventure writer Peter Stark had waited all his life for just such an opportunity. But when he was invited to Africa to join a small expedition kayaking down Mozambique’s Lugenda River, he balked. The 750-kilometer rivercourse was largely uncharted–dotted with rapids, waterfalls, and home to deadly crocodiles and hippos; two of his four travel companions were not skilled kayakers; and he had a family to think of, (not to mention that at forty-eight, he himself was feeling a bit old for the life untamed). Suppressing inner doubts and driven by that most human of urges–to see what lies beyond the next bend–Stark signed on for the adventure of a lifetime. At the Mercy of the River is Stark’s harrowing, insightful account of this venture into the unknown. “Why,” he muses between capsizes in the Lugenda’s croc-infested waters, “are humans compelled to explore?” The expedition’s five distinct–and sometimes clashing–personalities provide individual answers to that question. Equipped with only the most rudimentary comforts and lacking the customary explorer’s gun, the party encounters breathtaking natural splendor, rich wildlife, and villages little affected by modern life. Ever aware that they are following in the metaphorical footsteps of great explorers of the past–Vasco da Gama, Mungo Park, Ibn Battuta, David Livingstone, and other men of adventure who bridged Africa and the West–Stark shares these explorers’ stories with us, finding a common thread linking his experience with theirs. Using their accounts, his travails on the Lugenda River, and the insights of wilderness philosophers such as Henry David Thoreau, Stark attempts to understand the very nature of “exploration” while pondering the question, Where will we go when our wilderness vanishes? At the Mercy of the River is at turns inspiring, heart-thumping, and even amusing. But most of all, it is a riveting adventure story for a time when adventure is in danger of losing its meaning.

Destiny in Empty Places

Author: Apostle Wanda N. Williams

Publisher: Xlibris Corporation

Published: 2009-04-13

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9781462820221

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For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the LORD, plans to prosper you and not harm you, plans to give you hope, and a future. Then you will call upon me, and I will listen to you, you will seek me, with all your heart. (Jeremiah 29:1113) Destiny in Empty Places is a book that is a result of every man and womans journey, a journey many lives follow every day, going through life just merely existing. The average life is lived trying to seek out and fulfill a purpose, looking for meaning and seeking an understanding of the broken pieces in their lives. The average life in humanity is also void for years and years without a single purpose. One never knows where his or her absolute destiny lies. We spend a lifetime fulfilling either our parents dreams or that which we think we should be. We have even convinced ourselves that our chosen purpose is clearly what we were created to be. If one would go beyond their past and look beyond their natural essence, back to their spiritual essence, one would then find purpose for his or her own life. This book, Destiny in Empty Places, challenges every traveler on the road of destiny. Your road to destiny is predetermined but not by you who travels it. This simply means that God has given you a destiny that is predetermined. Whether or not you will travel or find that road of destiny will be up to your wisdom, knowledge, and understanding of God, of who he is, and your purpose in destiny. According to statistical research, there are approximately 6,670,985,957 people in the world who live their lives from day to day without purpose, plan, or form. Purpose is the intent that is set up for us as an object or an end to attain; the intention at the end; a resolution, determination, the action in course of execution. People have arrived at a place in life where it looks like they are not accomplishing anything. Their lives are spent as if they are traveling in a circle. People are seeking out randomly, striving to fill the void in their lives, leaving them discouraged and vacillated into an empty place. This emptiness is only on the surface of the face of the deep. At your choice lies your destiny.

The Immeasurable World

Author: William Atkins

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2018-07-24

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0385539894

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Winner of the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year (UK) "William Atkins is an erudite writer with a wonderful wit and gaze and this is a new and exciting beast of a travel book."—Joy Williams In the classic literary tradition of Bruce Chatwin and Geoff Dyer, a rich and exquisitely written account of travels in eight deserts on five continents that evokes the timeless allure of these remote and forbidding places. One-third of the earth's surface is classified as desert. Restless, unhappy in love, and intrigued by the Desert Fathers who forged Christian monasticism in the Egyptian desert, William Atkins decided to travel in eight of the world's driest, hottest places: the Empty Quarter of Oman, the Gobi Desert and Taklamakan deserts of northwest China, the Great Victoria Desert of Australia, the man-made desert of the Aral Sea in Kazkahstan, the Black Rock and Sonoran Deserts of the American Southwest, and Egypt's Eastern Desert. Each of his travel narratives effortlessly weaves aspects of natural history, historical background, and present-day reportage into a compelling tapestry that reveals the human appeal of these often inhuman landscapes.

Empty

Author: Susan Burton

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks

Published: 2021-07-06

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 081298272X

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An editor at This American Life reveals the searing story of the secret binge-eating that dominated her adolescence and shapes her still. “Her tale of compulsion and healing is candid and powerful.”—People NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MARIE CLAIRE For almost thirty years, Susan Burton hid her obsession with food and the secret life of compulsive eating and starving that dominated her adolescence. This is the relentlessly honest, fiercely intelligent story of living with both anorexia and binge-eating disorder, moving past her shame, and learning to tell her secret. When Burton was thirteen, her stable life in suburban Michigan was turned upside down by her parents’ abrupt divorce, and she moved to Colorado with her mother and sister. She seized on this move west as an adventure and an opportunity to reinvent herself from middle-school nerd to popular teenage girl. But in the fallout from her parents’ breakup, an inherited fixation on thinness went from “peculiarity to pathology.” Susan entered into a painful cycle of anorexia and binge eating that formed a subterranean layer to her sunny life. She went from success to success—she went to Yale, scored a dream job at a magazine right out of college, and married her college boyfriend. But in college the compulsive eating got worse—she’d binge, swear it would be the last time, and then, hours later, do it again—and after she graduated she descended into anorexia, her attempt to “quit food.” Binge eating is more prevalent than anorexia or bulimia, but there is less research and little storytelling to help us understand it. In tart, soulful prose Susan Burton strikes a blow for the importance of this kind of narrative and tells an exhilarating story of longing, compulsion and hard-earned self-revelation.

Young Washington

Author: Peter Stark

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2018-05-01

Total Pages: 610

ISBN-13: 0062416081

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FINALIST FOR THE GEORGE WASHINGTON BOOK PRIZE A new, brash, and unexpected view of the president we thought we knew, from the bestselling author of Astoria Two decades before he led America to independence, George Washington was a flailing young soldier serving the British Empire in the vast wilderness of the Ohio Valley. Naïve and self-absorbed, the twenty-two-year-old officer accidentally ignited the French and Indian War—a conflict that opened colonists to the possibility of an American Revolution. With powerful narrative drive and vivid writing, Young Washington recounts the wilderness trials, controversial battles, and emotional entanglements that transformed Washington from a temperamental striver into a mature leader. Enduring terrifying summer storms and subzero winters imparted resilience and self-reliance, helping prepare him for what he would one day face at Valley Forge. Leading the Virginia troops into battle taught him to set aside his own relentless ambitions and stand in solidarity with those who looked to him for leadership. Negotiating military strategy with British and colonial allies honed his diplomatic skills. And thwarted in his obsessive, youthful love for one woman, he grew to cultivate deeper, enduring relationships. By weaving together Washington’s harrowing wilderness adventures and a broader historical context, Young Washington offers new insights into the dramatic years that shaped the man who shaped a nation.

Research Bulletin

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 1918

Total Pages: 872

ISBN-13:

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Die Empty

Author: Todd Henry

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2015-04-28

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1591846994

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“A must-read for anyone interested in moving from inspiration to action.” —Cal Newport, author of So Good They Can’t Ignore You Most of us fill our days with frantic activity, bouncing from task to task, scrambling to make deadlines and chase the next promotion. But by the end of each day we’re often left wondering if any of it really mattered. We feel the ticking of the clock, but we’re unsure of the path forward. Die Empty is a tool for people who aren’t willing to put off their most important work for another day. Todd Henry explains the forces that lead to stagnation and introduces practices that will keep you on a true and steady course. The key is embracing the idea that time is finite, so you should focus on the unique contribution to the world that only you can make. Henry shows how to sustain your enthusiasm, push through mental barriers, and unleash your best work each day.