$7.96
Paperback – March 31, 2016
by Stephen J. Pyne (Author)
The coastal sage and shrublands of California burn. The mountain-encrusting chaparral burns. The conifer forests of the Sierra Nevada, Cascades, and Trinity Alps burn. The rain-shadowed deserts after watering by El Niño cloudbursts and the thick forests of the rumpled Coast Range—all burn according to local rhythms of wetting and drying. Fire season, so the saying goes, lasts 13 months.
In this collection of essays on the region, Stephen J. Pyne colorfully explores the ways the region has approached fire management and what sets it apart from other parts of the country. Pyne writes that what makes California’s fire scene unique is how its dramatically distinctive biomes have been yoked to a common system, ultimately committed to suppression, and how its fires burn with a character and on a scale commensurate with the state’s size and political power. California has not only a ferocity of flame but a cultural intensity that few places can match. California’s fires are instantly and hugely broadcast. They shape national institutions, and they have repeatedly defined the discourse of fire’s history. No other place has so sculpted the American way of fire.
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Audible Audiobook – Unabridged
Kyle Dickman (Author), Will Damron (Narrator), Random House Audio (Publisher)
Paperback – January 1, 1994
by Rollo Arnold (Author)
Paperback – July 17, 2014
by Joyce Butler (Author)
Paperback – June 2, 1997
by Stephen Ambrose (Author)
From the New York Times bestselling author of Band of Brothers and D-Day, the definitive book on Lewis and Clark’s exploration of the Louisiana Purchase, the most momentous expedition in American history and one of the great adventure stories of all time. In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson selected his personal secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, to lead a voyage up the Missouri River to the Rockies, over the mountains, down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean, and back. Lewis and his partner, Captain William Clark, made the first map of the trans-Mississippi West, provided invaluable scientific data on the flora and fauna of the Louisiana Purchase territory, and established the American claim to Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Ambrose has pieced together previously unknown information about weather, terrain, and medical knowledge at the time to provide a vivid backdrop for the expedition. Lewis is supported by a rich variety of colorful characters, first of all Jefferson himself, whose interest in exploring and acquiring the American West went back thirty years. Next comes Clark, a rugged frontiersman whose love for Lewis matched Jefferson’s. There are numerous Indian chiefs, and Sacagawea, the Indian girl who accompanied the expedition, along with the French-Indian hunter Drouillard, the great naturalists of Philadelphia, the French and Spanish fur traders of St. Louis, John Quincy Adams, and many more leading political, scientific, and military figures of the turn of the century. High adventure, high politics, suspense, drama, and diplomacy combine with high romance and personal tragedy to make this outstanding work of scholarship as readable as a novel.
Paperback – May 20, 2014
by Elias Colbert (Author), Everett Chamberlin (Author)
This book is about the devastating Great Chicago Fire that ravaged the city. From the intro: "The terrible conflagration in Chicago will long be remembered as one of the most prominent events of the nineteenth century. In the evening of Sunday, October 8, 1871, a stable took fire, and within twenty-four hours thereafter the flames had swept over an area of more than twenty-one hundred acres, destroying nearly three hundred human lives, reducing seventeen thousand five hundred buildings to ashes, rendering one hundred thousand persons homeless, and sweeping out of existence two hundred million dollars' worth of property. Without a peer in her almost magical growth to what seemed to be an enduring prosperity, the city of Chicago experienced a catastrophe almost equally without a parallel in history, and the sad event awakened into active sympathy the whole civilized world. Such intense anxiety to catch every item of intelligence about the great conflagration, such a spontaneous outburst of liberality in aiding the sufferers, has never before been exhibited, except in times of national disaster. And, indeed, the calamity was universally recognized as affecting every one, not only in the United States, but in other countries. As the greatest primary market for produce on the face of the globe, Chicago had long been regarded as the cornucopia of modern civilization, while the energy and enterprise of her citizens had made her an object of envy to many other cities, and the wonder of the world. Her fame had spread far and near, and not even Solomon, in all his glory, ever excited so much admiration among those who went to see and found that the half had not been told them. The present volume is intended to supply the wide-spread popular desire to obtain full and accurate information, in permanent form, about Chicago in her prosperity and affliction. It contains a concise resume of her previous history; a statement of her condition just before the fire; a graphic account of the great conflagration; a carefully revised summary of losses of life and property; a description of the aspect of the city after the sad event; a history of the exertions made to aid the sufferers; with a review of the subsequent efforts made to rebuild the city ‘mid the ashes of its former greatness."
Annotated Edition, Kindle Edition
by Rocky Barker (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
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