Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands - Hardcover

Kingsolver, Barbara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0792269098 ISBN 13: 9780792269090

Publisher: National Geographic, 2002

Synopsis

ACCLAIMED AUTHOR BARBARA KINGSOLVER brings her passion for the wilderness to bear in this striking book. Trained as a biologist, Kingsolver writes authoritatively, and movingly, about the continent's virgin pockets of desert, coast, grassland, forest, and wetland. ONE-OF-A-KIND IMAGES: Specially commissioned infrared photographs, taken and hand-tinted by Belt, create a painterly portrait of wild landscapes that gives this an art book appeal. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC EXPERTISE: Readers look to the Geographic as a leading expert in the geography and ecology of America. America's virgin lands are not always where you'd expect to find them - in national parks or other preserves. They're scattered in often small, sometimes barely known pockets across the continent. These are the remnants that remind us of what wildness once meant - and what will be lost if it disappears. In her moving introduction and in the essays that open each chapter, Kingsolver discusses the ways of wilderness, the threats against it, its natural imperatives and what it needs to survive in the different forms featured in the chapters - as grassland, wetland, dryland, coast, and woodland. Annie Griffiths Belt's evocative colour and hand-tinted photographs capture the essence of these diverse bioregions. The images take you from the tallgrass prairies of Kansas and Nevada to the Arctic tundra of Alaska, from the endangered coral reefs off the Florida Keys to the Pacific-pounded coast of Oregon, from the deserts of the Southwest to the sky-piercing redwoods of California.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

In this coffee-table nature book, two ardent conservationists make an impassioned plea for the preservation of American wilderness, from sparkling seashores to pristine deserts. In her moving introduction, bestselling author Kingsolver laments the loss of untouched spaces. Like most ecologically minded people, she is an optimistic pessimist, predicting more of the same destruction but begging us to "find in ourselves the grace to do otherwise." Unfortunately, Belt's photographs-meant to bolster Kingsolver's words-can fall into greeting-card cliche. Her technique of using black-and-white infrared negative film for half the images and hand-coloring the prints results in blurred, pale pictures that share a pastel sameness. The more conventional photos are stunning, though, and Belt makes up for her experiment by capturing the essence of America the way we imagine it used to be. Kingsolver provides introductions to each of the sections devoted to broad biomes such as plains, wetlands and forests. With literary and photographic nods to the giants of conservation-Aldo Leopold, Henry David Thoreau, Edward Abbey and others-the book offers quiet evidence that there is still something better than a world where "children's adventures and glimpses of fox dwell only in books." (100 photographs)
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: National Geographic
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0792269098
• ISBN 13: 9780792269090
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192