united states

Combines an account of Robert Louis Stevenson's experiences as he traveled from New York to California by train in 1879 and a description of the building and operation of railroads in nineteenth-century America.

In this memoir, former teacher David Menasche, blind and having mobility and vision issues from cancer, recorded his travel across the United States visiting old students.

Historical photographs and text help chronicle the 1903 cross-country drive of Vermont doctor Horatio Nelson Jackson and his friend Sewall Crocker--the first automobile trip ever made across the U.S.--in a vehicle without a roof, windshield, or speeds higher than thirty miles an hour, without the aid of paved roads or streetlights.

Bryson, an Iowan transplanted to England, returns to search for the perfect American small town.

An entertaining and informative guide to where renewable energy has been, where it is today, and where it's heading.

When Pulitzer Prize?winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed in 2009 a grand home for sale, unoccupied for nearly sixty years, he stumbled through a surprising portal into American history. Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the nineteenth century with a twenty-first-century battle over a $300 million inheritance. At its heart is a reclusive heiress named Huguette Clark, a woman so secretive that, at the time of her death at age 104, no new photograph of her had been seen in decades. Though she owned palatial homes in California, New York, and Connecticut, why had she lived for twenty years in a simple hospital room, despite being in excellent health? Why were her valuables being sold off? Was she in control of her fortune, or controlled by those managing her money?.

The journey is framed by the stories of three modern-day endangered species: the polar bear, victimized by climate change and ogled by tourists outside a remote northern town; the little-known Lange?s metalmark butterfly, foundering on a shred of industrialized land near San Francisco; and the whooping crane as it?s led on a months-long migration by costumed men in ultralight airplanes. The wilderness that Wild Ones navigates is a scrappy, disorderly place where amateur conservationists do grueling, sometimes preposterous-looking work; where a marketer maneuvers to control the polar bear?s image while Martha Stewart turns up to film those beasts for her show on the Hallmark Channel. Our most comforting ideas about nature unravel. In their place, Mooallem forges a new and affirming vision of the human animal and the wild ones as kindred creatures on an imperfect planet.

Traces the history of nomads in the United States, including truckers, tramps, rodeo cowboys, concert followers, traders, and retirees, and discusses how they have influenced the development of America.

A collection of more than fifty essays and journalistic pieces in which American author John Steinbeck reflects on the world around him.