Description Details
volunteers bring you 20 recordings of The Open Window by Edward Rowland Sill. This was the Fortnightly Poetry project for February 27th, 2011. Edward Rowland Sill, American poet and educator, was born in Windsor, Connecticut. He was a modest and charming man, a graceful essayist, a sure critic. His contribution to American poetry is small but of fine quality. His best poems, such as The Venus of Milo, The Fool's Prayer and Opportunity, gave him a high place among the minor poets of America, which might have been higher but for his early death. (summary from Wikipedia)...

Excerpt Details
Humor, Nature, Philosophy, Poetry

Description Details
volunteers bring you 15 recordings of Adam and Eve (From “Paradise Lost,” Fourth Book) by John Milton. This was the Weekly Poetry project for Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. It was originally published in 1667 (though written nearly ten years earlier) in ten books, with a total of over ten thousand individual lines of verse. A second edition followed in 1674, redivided into twelve books (in the manner of the division of Virgil's Aeneid) with minor revisions throughout and a note on the versification; most of the poem was written while Milton was blind, and was transcribed for him. Milton first presents Adam and Eve in Book IV with impartiality. The relationship between Adam and Eve is one of mutual dependence, not a relation of domination or hierarchy. While the author does place Adam above Eve in regard to his intellectual knowledge, and in turn his relation to God, he also grants Eve the benefit of knowledge through experience. ( Summary from Wikipedia)...

Excerpt Details
Nature, Philosophy, Religion, Poetry

Description Details
Richard Jefferies (1848 – 1887) was born and spent his childhood on a farm at Coate,Wiltshire. He joined the ‘Wiltshire and Gloucestershire Standard’ in 1868 and also started to write articles and pamphlets on various agricultural issues and local history topics. He is best known for his depiction of English rural life in essays, books of natural history, and novels. This classic of English nature writing gives an idea of the life of a gamekeeper in southern England in the second half of the nineteenth century. (Summary by AJM)...

Excerpt Details
Animals, Nature, Biography

Description Details
You may think that Mother Nature, like the famous old woman who lived in the shoe, has so many children that she doesn't know what to do. But you will know better when you become acquainted with her, and learn how strong she is, and how active; how she can really be in fifty places at once, taking care of a sick tree, or a baby flower just born; and, at the same time, building underground palaces, guiding the steps of little travellers setting out on long journeys, and sweeping, dusting, and arranging her great house,--the earth. And all the while, in the midst of her patient and never-ending work, she will tell us the most charming and marvellous stories of ages ago when she was young, or of the treasures that lie hidden in the most distant and secret closets of her palace; just such stories as you all like so well to hear your mother tell when you gather round her in the twilight. (Summary from Chapter One of The Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children )...

Excerpt Details
Nature, Children, Science

Description Details
The Land of Little Rain is a book of sketches which portray the high desert country of southern California, where the Sierras descend into the Mojave Desert. Mary Austin finds beauty in the harsh landscape: This is the sense of the desert hills--that there is room enough and time enough. . . The treeless spaces uncramp the soul. Her story begins with the water trails that lead toward the few life giving springs--the way marked for men by ancient Indian pictographs. Life and death play out at these springs. Rabbits fall prey to the coyote; buzzards hang heavily in the sky above. She then writes of individuals who eke out their living in this land of scarce resources--an itinerant gold prospector, a sheepherder, a blind Indian basket maker. Austin's spare prose creates unforgettable vignettes: Choose a hill country for storms. . . I remember one night of thunderous rain made unendurably mournful by the houseless cry of a cougar whose lair, and perhaps his family, had been buried under a slide of broken boulders . . . Anyone who sees beauty in the Southwestern deserts, or who just enjoys good nature writing, will savor The Land of Litt...

Excerpt Details
Animals, Nature, Travel

Description Details
volunteers bring you 13 recordings of Song of the Kicking Horse by Bliss Carman. This was the Fortnightly Poetry project for September 26th, 2010.

Excerpt Details
Nature, Philosophy, Poetry

Description Details
The Harvester is one of Gene Stratton-Porter’s romantic novels which combine a love of nature, high moral ideals and a good plot. This is the story of a young man who lives in the country side with his dog and other animals and grows herbs to sell to medical drug supply houses. One evening, he has a vision of his Dream Girl and this is the story of his search for her and what happens when he finds her. (Summary by Readaholic)...

Excerpt Details
Teen/Young adult, Nature, Romance

Description Details
In The Outline of Science, Thomson gives us a window into scientific thinking as it stood in 1922 on the big, the little, and the biological. With straightforward language intended for a general audience, this book covers astronomy from the Solar System to the Milky Way, the submicroscopic makeup of matter from protons and electrons, and the evolution of simple living beings into the varied fauna of the world today. Thomson cites many examples that would have been familiar to his readers of the day and notes where scientific understanding leaves off and conjecture begins. He clearly shows how the accumulation of observation and experiment stacked up to form the body of knowledge reported in the book. For even the scientifically well-versed, there will be interesting nuggets, for investigation into how the world came to be as it was, was both wide and deep. To a modern listener, what was not known may be as interesting as what was. With the 100-inch Mt. Wilson reflector the largest telescope in the world, the existence of galaxies outside the Milky Way was suspected but not confirmed. Neutrons, soon to become important in the field o...

Excerpt Details
Nature, Science

Description Details
Geology is a science of such rapid growth that no apology is expected when from time to time a new text-book is added to those already in the field. The present work, however, is the outcome of the need of a text-book of very simple outline, in which causes and their consequences should be knit together as closely as possible,—a need long felt by the author in his teaching, and perhaps by other teachers also. The author has ventured, therefore, to depart from the common usage which subdivides geology into a number of departments,—dynamical, structural, physiographic, and historical,—and to treat in immediate connection with each geological process the land forms and the rock structures which it has produced. (from book preface)...

Excerpt Details
Instruction, Nature, Science

Description Details
The journal of nature-lover John Muir who spent the summer of 1869 walking California’s Sierra Nevada range. From French Bar to Mono Lake and the Yosemite Valley, Muir was awestruck by everything he saw. The antics of the smallest “insect people” amazed him as much as stunted thousand-year old Juniper trees growing with inconceivable tenacity from tiny cracks in the stone. Muir spent the rest of his life working to preserve the high Sierra, believing that “the clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.” John Muir (1838-1914) was born in Dunbar, Scotland and grew up in Wisconsin, USA. This recording commemorates the 140th anniversary of that first summer. (Summary by Adrian Praetzellis)...

Excerpt Details
Memoirs, Nature, Biography

Description Details
Henry Gray's classic anatomy textbook was first published in 1858 and has been in continuous publication ever since, revised and expanded through many successive editions. This recording is of the public-domain 1918 US edition (some information may be outdated). The illustrations can be found in the online text at bartleby.com. For the recording, we have divided the book into five parts. Part 1 includes the Embryology and Osteology sections. (summary by Laurie Anne Walden)...

Excerpt Details
Nature, Science, Instruction

Description Details
Sidelights on Relativity contains ETHER AND THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY, an address delivered on May 5th, 1920, in the University of Leyden; and GEOMETRY AND EXPERIENCE, an expanded form of an address to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin on January 27th, 1921. (Intro from Project Gutenberg)...

Excerpt Details
Nature, Science

Description Details
Robert Sterling Yard was an American writer, journalist, and wilderness activist. Born in Haverstraw, New York, Yard graduated from Princeton University and spent the first twenty years of his career in the editing and publishing business. In 1915, he was recruited by his friend Stephen Mather to help publicize the need for an independent national park agency. Their numerous publications were part of a movement that resulted in legislative support for a National Park Service (NPS) in 1916. Yard worked to promote the national parks as well as educate Americans about their use. Creating high standards based on aesthetic ideals for park selection, he also opposed commercialism and industrialization of what he called America's masterpieces. In 1935, he became one of the eight founding members of The Wilderness Society and acted as its first president from 1937 until his death eight years later. Yard is now considered an important figure in the modern wilderness movement. In the preface to this book, published in 1919, he writes, In offering the American public a carefully studied outline of its national park system, I have two principal...

Excerpt Details
Nature, Science, History

Description Details
volunteers bring you 21 recordings of Seaside by Rupert Brooke. This was the Weekly Poetry project for August 19, 2012. Rupert Chawner Brooke (middle name sometimes given as Chaucer was an English poet known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War, especially The Soldier. He was also known for his boyish good looks, which were said to have prompted the Irish poet W. B. Yeats to describe him as the handsomest young man in England ( Summary from Wikipedia )...

Excerpt Details
Fantasy, Nature, Sea stories, Poetry

Description Details
Do you enjoy birdwatching? Would you like to learn a little more about the early conservations efforts to protect wild birds? In the Preface to The Bird Study Book, Pearson tells us “This book was written for the consideration of that ever-increasing class of Americans who are interested in acquiring a greater familiarity with the habits and activities of wild birds. Attention is also given to the relation of birds to mankind and the effect of civilisation on the bird-life of the country. ” An avid ornithologist, T. Gilbert Pearson (1873-1943) was a co-founder in 1905 of the National Association of Audubon Societies of which he was first secretary and then president for many years. He was also a pioneer of the conservation movement in the United States, international bird protection and broad nature education for school-aged children. (Audubon Magazine. 42: 370–371. Nov-Dec 1943)...

Excerpt Details
Animals, Nature, Science

Description Details
Florence Augusta Merriam Bailey (August 8, 1863 - September 22, 1948) was an American ornithologist and nature writer. She started observing bird behavior at a time when most bird study was based on collections and skins. By 1885, she began to write articles focusing on protecting birds. Her introduction of a birdwatching field guide, aimed at living birds, is considered the first in the tradition of modern bird guides. She wrote the first of these at the age of 26, initially as a series of notes in the Audubon Magazine and later as books. In A-Birding on a Bronco, she writes an engaging memoir about her several trips to study birds on a ranch in California in the late 1800's....

Excerpt Details
Memoirs, Nature

Description Details
volunteers bring you 14 recordings of Summer Evening by John Clare. This was the weekly poetry project for July 26th, 2009.

Excerpt Details
Poetry, Nature, Animals

Description Details
volunteers bring you 15 recordings of Petals by Amy Lowell. This was the Weekly Poetry project for November 27, 2011. Amy Lawrence Lowell (February 9, 1874 – May 12, 1925) was an American poet of the imagist school from Brookline, Massachusetts who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926. Lowell was born into Brookline's prominent Lowell family, sister to astronomer Percival Lowell and Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell. She never attended college because her family did not consider that proper for a woman, but she compensated with avid reading and near-obsessive book collecting. She lived as a socialite and travelled widely, turning to poetry in 1902 after being inspired by a performance of Eleonora Duse in Europe. In the post-World War II years, Lowell, like other women writers, was largely forgotten, but with the renaissance of the women's movement in the 1970s, women's studies brought her back to light. According to Heywood Broun, however, Lowell personally argued against feminism. Her poem, “Petals” is published in her collection A Dome of Many-Colored Glass (1912). (Summary adapted from Wikipedia by Bob Go...

Excerpt Details
Instruction, Nature, Philosophy, Poetry

Description Details
The Adventures of Jimmy Skunk is another in the long list children's books by the conservationist, Thornton W. Burgess. In this book, Jimmy Skunk has encounters with Reddy Fox, Peter Rabbit, Unc’ Billy Possum and other acquaintances of his in the Green Meadows and Green Forest. Along the way, we learn some of the habits of Jimmy and his friends and we learn little lessons about life such as the importance of always keeping one's temper, keeping promises and not playing practical jokes. We are also treated to a philosophical discussion by Jimmy Skunk on the advantages of defensive weaponry. (Summary by John Lieder.)...

Excerpt Details
Children, Nature, Animals

Description Details
The White Heart of the Mojave recounts a 1920's adventure in the wind and sun and big spaces of Death Valley by two independent minded women, Edna Brush Perkins and Charlotte Hannahs Jordan. Both women were early feminists, Edna as chairwoman of the greater Cleveland Woman's Suffrage Party (1916-18). At the end of the Great War, the two friends wanted nothing more than to escape to the solitariness of some wild and lonely place far from city halls, smokestacks, national organizations, and streets of little houses all alike. Their vacation started as a long motor drive through the backwoods of California (Charlotte's husband, Ned, owned the Jordan Motor Car Company). It ended with a month long trek through Death Valley in an old milk wagon drawn by a horse and a mule. Edna's descriptions of the desert are superb and from the heart--the dunes were very beautiful, with knife-edged tops ridged in pure, clean lines from which fringes of fine sand blew up like the wind tossed manes of white horses. This is a great listen for anyone who likes first-hand accounts of adventure in the Great Outdoors. (Summary by Sue Anderson)...

Excerpt Details
Memoirs, Nature, Travel

Description Details
volunteers bring you 19 recordings of The Window on the Hill by Madison Julius Cawein. This was the Weekly Poetry project for April 22, 2012. Madison Julius Cawein was born in Louisville, Kentucky, the fifth child of William and Christiana (Stelsly) Cawein. His father made patent medicines from herbs. Cawein thus became acquainted with and developed a love for local nature as a child. After graduating from high school, Cawein worked in a pool hall in Louisville as a cashier in Waddill's New-market, which also served as a gambling house. He worked there for six years, saving his pay so he could return home to write. His output was thirty-six books and 1,500 poems. His writing presented Kentucky scenes in a language echoing Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. He soon earned the nickname the Keats of Kentucky. He was popular enough that, by 1900, he told the Louisville Courier-Journal that his income from publishing poetry in magazines amounted to about $100 a month...

Excerpt Details
Nature, Romance, Poetry

Description Details
Nature is a short essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson published anonymously in 1836. It is in this essay that the foundation of transcendentalism is put forth, a belief system that espouses a non-traditional appreciation of nature. Recent advances in zoology, botany, and geology confirmed Emerson's intuitions about the intricate relationships of Nature at large. The publication of Nature is usually taken to be the watershed moment at which transcendentalism became a major cultural movement. Henry David Thoreau had read Nature as a senior at Harvard College and took it to heart. It eventually became an essential influence for Thoreau's later writings, including his seminal Walden. (Summary excerpted from Wikipedia by Neeru Iyer)...

Excerpt Details
Nature, Philosophy

Description Details
Walden by Henry David Thoreau is one of the best-known non-fiction books written by an American. Published in 1854, it details Thoreau’s life for two years, two months, and two days around the shores of Walden Pond. Walden is neither a novel nor a true autobiography, but a social critique of the Western World, with each chapter heralding some aspect of humanity that needed to be either renounced or praised. Along with his critique of the civilized world, Thoreau examines other issues afflicting man in society, ranging from economy and reading to solitude and higher laws. He also takes time to talk about the experience at Walden Pond itself, commenting on the animals and the way people treated him for living there, using those experiences to bring out his philosophical positions. This extended commentary on nature has often been interpreted as a strong statement to the natural religion that transcendentalists like Thoreau and Emerson were preaching. (Description amended from Wikipedia)....

Excerpt Details
Nature, Philosophy

Description Details
Squirrels and other Fur-Bearers, a collection of essays by American naturalist and essayist, John Burroughs, provides fascinating insight into the daily life of small woodland creatures. Included in these essays are Burrough's personal observations of squirrels, rabbits, mink, and chipmunks, as well as numerous other small mammals. Highly recommended for anyone, both young and old, with an interest in nature and wildlife. (summary by Laura Caldwell)...

Excerpt Details
Animals, Nature, Children, Essay/Short nonfiction

Description Details
Life on the Mississippi is a memoir by Mark Twain detailing his days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War. (Summary from Wikipedia)...

Excerpt Details
Nature, Biography, Memoirs

Description Details
The Adventures of Maya the Bee is an exciting tale for children of all ages. Themes of growth and development of courage and wisdom are found, as well as the extreme joy and satisfaction that Maya experiences in the beauty of creation and all creatures. Her ultimate and innate loyalty to her Nation of Bees is acted out in the final heroic scenes. This story gives us the delightful sense of having seen a small segment of the world through a Bee's eyes. (Summary by Brenda Price)...

Excerpt Details
Children, Nature, Animals, Adventure, Fantasy

Description Details
A short look at building a rock garden, right from the rocks themselves and how to arrange them, to choosing and placing the plants, touching wall and bog gardens, too. In this little monograph, the author is trying to draw the eyes of U.S. gardeners in to the intimate beauty of this neglected hobby. (The original work has a number of attractive and useful photographs and drawings.)...

Excerpt Details
Instruction, Nature

Description Details
Henry Gray's classic anatomy textbook was first published in 1858 and has been in continuous publication ever since, revised and expanded through many successive editions. This recording is of the public-domain 1918 US edition (some information may be outdated). The illustrations can be found in the online text at bartleby.com. For the recording, we have divided the book into five parts. Part 5 includes Splanchnology and Surface Anatomy and Markings. (Summary by Laurie Anne Walden)...

Excerpt Details
Science, Nature, Instruction

Description Details
Elizabeth and Her German Garden is a novel by Elizabeth von Arnim, first published in 1898; it was very popular and frequently reprinted during the early years of the 20th century. The story is a year's diary written by the protagonist Elizabeth about her experiences learning gardening and interacting with her friends. It includes commentary on the beauty of nature and on society, but is primarily humorous due to Elizabeth's frequent mistakes and her idiosyncratic outlook on life. She looked down upon the frivolous fashions of her time writing I believe all needlework and dressmaking is of the devil, designed to keep women from study.' The book is the first in a series about the same character. It is noteworthy for being published without a named author....

Excerpt Details
Fiction, Nature

Description Details
Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (publ. 1859) is a pivotal work in scientific literature and arguably the pivotal work in evolutionary biology. The book’s full title is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. It introduced the theory that populations evolve over the course of generations through a process of natural selection. It was controversial because it contradicted religious beliefs which underlay the then current theories of biology. Darwin’s book was the culmination of evidence he had accumulated on the voyage of the Beagle in the 1830s and added to through continuing investigations and experiments since his return. (Summary from Wikipedia)...

Excerpt Details
Nature, Science

Description Details
The Outline of Science was written specifically with the man-on-the-street in mind as the target audience. Covering scientific subjects ranging from astronomy to biology to elementary physics in clear, concise and easily understood prose, this popular science work is largely as relevant today as when first published in 1922. In this second volume (of four), we learn about microscopy, and the intricate workings of the human body and mind. The major part, however, is devoted to the Natural History of birds, mammals, and insects. (Summary adapted from the first volume by Availle.)...

Excerpt Details
Nature, Psychology, Science