For years, America's national parks have provided public breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why close to 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now, to honor the centennial of the National Park Service, Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, returns with The Hour of Land, a literary celebration of our national parks, what they mean to us, and what we mean to them.
Through twelve carefully chosen parks, from Yellowstone in Wyoming to Acadia in Maine to Big Bend in Texas, Tempest Williams creates a series of lyrical portraits that illuminate the unique grandeur of each place while delving into what it means to shape a landscape with its own evolutionary history into something of our own making. Part memoir, part natural history, and part social critique, The Hour of Land is a meditation and manifesto on why wild lands matter to the soul of America. Our national parks stand at the intersection of humanity and wildness, and there's no one better than Tempest Williams to guide us there.
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"[T]his is a uniquely evocative, illuminating, profound, poignant, beautiful, courageous, and clarion book about the true significance of our national parks."
— Booklist Starred Review
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Terry Tempest Williams is and editor and award-winning author of more than a dozen books, poetry collections, and essay collections. She has received many awards, including the 2018 Robert Kirsch Award, the Robert Marshall Award from the Wilderness Society, the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western American Literature Association, the Wallace Stegner Award given by Center of the American West, the Lannan Literary Award, and the Sierra Club John Muir Award. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is the writer-in-residence at the Harvard Divinity School.