A stunning collection of personal observations that uses images of the American West to probe larger concerns in lyrical, evocative prose that is a true celebration of the region.

Gretel Ehrlich's world is one of isolation and wonder, of pain and grace, and these elements ignite her vivid imagination. She writes of ravens and elk and prairie dogs, and eagles falling out of the sky. She tells of a voyage of discovery in northern Japan, where she finds her "bridge to heaven." She captures a "light moving down a mountain slope." One evening there is a contrapuntal dance of death: a calf she has tried to save, and a friend and mentor both die. She remembers what a painter once told her when she was twelve years old, as he was painting her portrait: "You have to mix death...

A powerful chronicle of a wounded woman's exploration of nature and self
After nature writer Gretel Ehrlich was struck by lightning near her Wyoming ranch and almost died, she embarked on a painstaking and visionary journey back to the land of the living. With the help of an extraordinary cardiologist and the companionship of her beloved dog Sam, she avidly explores the natural and spiritual world to make sense of what happened to her. We follow as she combs every inch of her new home on the California coast, attends a convention of lightning-strike victims, and goes on a seal...

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Complete with its original N.C. Wyeth illustrations is this outstanding first-person chronicle of life on the American frontier.

For the last decade, Gretel Ehrlich has been obsessed by an island, a terrain, a culture, and the treacherous beauty of a world that is defined by ice. In This Cold Heaven she combines the story of her travels with history and cultural anthropology to reveal a Greenland that few of us could otherwise imagine.
Ehrlich unlocks the secrets of this severe land and those who live there; a hardy people who still travel by dogsled and kayak and prefer the mystical four months a year of endless darkness to the gentler summers without night. She discovers the twenty-three words the Inuit...

Drinking Dry Clouds is Gretel Ehrlich's storytelling in full swing. This inspired collection opens during World War II with the stories of cowboys, waitresses, and bartenders along with Japanese Americans interned at Wyoming s Heart Mountain. Many of these characters were introduced in Ehrlich s novel Heart Mountain. As she explains, When I returned to my characters, five years after their initial appearance in my life, they seemed to want to report to me, so I let them speak in the first person. "

"In spare, lyrical prose, Ehrlich inventively recounts her 1995 spiritual trip to China and Tibet. . . . Delicate, deeply considered, and moving." --Publishers Weekly

In the spring of 1869, John Muir was looking for means of support to fund his explorations of California's Central Valley region. A ranch owner offered him a job herding sheep in the Sierra Nevada. As he explored the region, he jotted down his keen observations of the scenic countryside, and he eventually became a guide for some of Yosemite's most famous visitors, including Ralph Waldo Emerson. Muir documented these experiences in The Yosemite, first published in 1912. It is at once a vivid, accurate description of the land and a passionate homage to nature.
This Modern Library...

An inspiring, often amusing account of an Oregon rancher who dedicates himself to saving a struggling species.