Winner of the Western History Association's 2009 Hal K. Rothman AwardFinalist in the Western Writers of America Spur Award for the Western Nonfiction Contemporary category (2008).The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the world's most beautiful cities. Despite a population of 7 million people, it is more greensward than asphalt jungle, more open space than hardscape. A vast quilt of countryside is tucked into the folds of the metropolis, ...
Drawing boundaries around wilderness areas often serves a double purpose: protection of the land within the boundary and release of the land outside the boundary to resource extraction and other development. In Drawing Lines in the Forest, Kevin R. Marsh discusses the roles played by various groups�the Forest Service, the timber industry, recreationists, and environmentalists�in arriving at these boundaries. He shows that p ...
In the years following World War II, the world�s biggest dam was almost built in Hells Canyon on the Snake River in Idaho. Karl Boyd Brooks tells the story of the dam controversy, which became a referendum not only on public-power expansion but also on the environmental implications of the New Deal�s natural resources and economic policy.Private-power critics of the Hells Canyon High Dam posed difficult questions about the ...
In the fourteenth-century Persian city of Shiraz, poets composed, scholars studied, mystics sought hidden truths, ascetics prayed and fasted, drunkards brawled, and princes and their courtiers played deadly games of power. This was the world of Shams al-Din Mohammad Hafez Shirazi, a classical poet who remains broadly popular today in his native Shiraz and in modern Iran as a whole, and among all lovers of great verse traditions.As John Limbert n ...