Food has functioned both as a source of continuity and as a subject of adaptation in the course of human history. Onions have been a staple of the European diet since the Paleolithic era, while the orange is once again being cultivated in great quantities in Southern China, where it was originally cultivated. Other foods--such as the apple and pear in Central Asia, the tomato in Mexico, the chili pepper in South America, and rice in South Asia--remain staples of their original regions and of the world diet today.Still other items are now grown in places that would have seemed impossible in...

We travel the world, writes Gregory McNamee, and wherever we go there are snake stories to entertain us. Here are some fifty diverse and unusual accounts of serpents from cultures across time and around the globe: snakes that talk, jump, and dance; snakes that transform into other creatures; snakes that just . . . watch.

Many selections are drawn from the rich oral traditions of peoples in every clime that supports reptiles, from the Akimel O odham of North America to the Mensa Bet-Abrahe of Africa to the Mungkjan of Australia. Included as well are such writings as prayers from the...

Mike Burns born Hoomothya was around eight years old in 1872 when the US military murdered his family and as many as seventy-six other Yavapai men, women, and children in the Skeleton Cave Massacre in Arizona. One of only a few young survivors, he was adopted by an army captain and ended up serving as a scout in the US army and adventuring in the West. Before his death in 1934, Burns wrote about the massacre, his time fighting in the Indian Wars during the 1880s, and life among the Kwevkepaya and Tolkepaya Yavapai. His precarious position between the white and Native worlds gives his...

For sixty million years, the Gila River, longer than the Hudson and the Delaware combined, has shaped the ecology of the Southwest from its source in New Mexico to its confluence with the Colorado River in Arizona. Today, for at least half its length, the Gila is dead, like so many of the West's great rivers, owing to overgrazing, damming, and other practices. This richly documented cautionary tale narrates the Gila's natural and human history. Now updated, McNamee's study traces recent efforts to resuscitate portions of this important riparian corridor.