Describes the day-to-day experience of a teenage cocaine culture in Spanish Harlem and explores the fiscally motivated sale of cocaine by teenagers and the unlikelihood of a change until other roads to opportunity are made available.

The Cocaine Kids: The Inside Story Of A Teenage Drug Ring

Politics & Social Sciences

Williams, Terry Tempest

Social Sciences

Da Capo Press

The author finds a desperate heart beating in the abandoned buildings and empty apartments used as crack houses in New York City

Crackhouse: Notes From The End Of The Line

Sociology

Addison-Wesley

The Future of Conservation in America: A Chart for Rough Water

This is a turbulent time for the conservation of America’s natural and cultural heritage. From the current assaults on environmental protection to the threats of climate change, biodiversity loss, and disparity of environmental justice, the challenges facing the conservation movement are both immediate and long term. In this time of uncertainty, we need a clear and compelling guide for the future of conservation in America, a declaration to inspire the next generation of conservation leaders. This is that guide—what the authors describe as “a chart for rough water.” Written by the first scientist appointed as science advisor to the director of the National Park Service and the eighteenth director of the National Park Service, this is a candid, passionate, and ultimately hopeful book. The authors describe a unified vision of conservation that binds nature protection, historical preservation, sustainability, public health, civil rights and social justice, and science into common cause—and offer real-world strategies for progress. To be read, pondered, debated, and often revisited, The Future of Conservation in America is destined to be a touchstone for the conservation movement in the decades ahead.

Science & Math

Jarvis, Jonathan B.

Machlis, Gary E.

Earth Sciences

University of Chicago Press

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement - now in one complete set\nOver the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As humans have driven the living planet to the brink of collapse, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend it. Their words have endured, becoming the classics that define the environmental movement today.\nFrom art, literature, food and gardening, to technology, economics, politics and ethics, each of these short books deepens our sense of our place in nature; each is a seed from which a bold activism can grow. Together, they show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

Green Ideas Slipcase

CARSON, Rachel

McKibben, Bill

WILSON, EDWARD O.

Pollan, Michael

Klein, Naomi

Ghosh, Amitav

LOVELOCK, James

Berry, Wendell

Monbiot, George

Thunberg, Greta

Qing, Dai

Leopold, Aldo

FUKUOKA, MASANOBU

FLANNERY, Tim

Kimmerer, Robin Wall

Morton, Timothy

Maathai, Wangari

Naess, Arne.

DIAMOND, JARED

Biological Sciences

Penguin Classics

Fierce, timely, and unsettling essays from an important and beloved writer and conservationist 
Terry Tempest Williams's fierce, spirited, and magnificent essays are a howl in the desert. She sizes up the continuing assaults on America's public lands and the erosion of our commitment to the open space of democracy. She asks: "How do we find the strength to not look away from all that is breaking our hearts?"
We know the elements of erosion: wind, water, and time. They have shaped the spectacular physical landscape of our nation. Here, Williams bravely and brilliantly explores the many forms of erosion we face: of democracy, science, compassion, and trust. She examines the dire cultural and environmental implications of the gutting of Bear Ears National Monument―sacred lands to Native Peoples of the American Southwest; of the undermining of the Endangered Species Act; of the relentless press by the fossil fuel industry that has led to a panorama in which "oil rigs light up the horizon." And she testifies that the climate crisis is not an abstraction, offering as evidence the drought outside her door and, at times, within herself.
These essays are Williams's call to action, blazing a way forward through difficult and dispiriting times. We will find new territory―emotional, geographical, communal. The erosion of desert lands exposes the truth of change. What has been weathered, worn, and whittled away is as powerful as what remains. Our undoing is also our becoming.
Erosion is a book for this moment, political and spiritual at once, written by one of our greatest naturalists, essayists, and defenders of the environment. She reminds us that beauty is its own form of resistance, and that water can crack stone.

Erosion: Essays of Undoing

Self-Help

Death & Grief

Sarah Crichton Books

America’s national parks are breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why more than 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the environmental classic Refuge and the beloved memoir WhenWomen Were Birds, returns with The Hour of Land, a literary celebration of our national parks, an exploration of what they mean to us and what we mean to them.
From the Grand Tetons in Wyoming to Acadia in Maine to Big Bend in Texas and more, 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 a manifesto on why wild lands matter to the soul of America.

The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

The beloved author of Refuge returns with a work that explodes and startles, illuminates and celebrates Terry Tempest Williams’s mother told her: “I am leaving you all my journals, but you must promise me you won’t look at them until after I’m gone.” Readers of Williams’s iconic and unconventional memoir, Refuge, well remember that mother. She was one of a large Mormon clan in northern Utah who developed cancer as a result of the nuclear testing in nearby Nevada. It was a shock to Williams to discover that her mother had kept journals. But not as much of a shock as what she found when the time came to read them. “They were exactly where she said they would be: three shelves of beautiful cloth-bound books . . . I opened the first journal. It was empty. I opened the second journal. It was empty. I opened the third. It too was empty . . . Shelf after shelf after shelf, all of my mother’s journals were blank.” What did Williams’s mother mean by that? In fifty-four chapters that unfold like a series of yoga poses, each with its own logic and beauty, Williams creates a lyrical and caring meditation of the mystery of her mother's journals. When Women Were Birds is a kaleidoscope that keeps turning around the question “What does it mean to have a voice?” Note: blank pages are intentional.

When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

“It is a simple equation,” writes Terry Tempest Williams, “place + people = politics.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in the American West, where millions of acres of wilderness are at stake in the redrock desert of southern Utah. “How are we to find our way toward conversation?” she asks. One story at a time. Red traces Williams’s lifelong love of and commitment to the desert, as she explores what draws us to a place and keeps us there. It brings together the lyrical evocations of Coyote’s Canyon and Desert Quartet with new essays of great power and originality, essays that range from a family discussion on the desert tortoise to an investigation of slowness to startling encounters with Anasazi artifacts (including a ceremonial sash made of scarlet macaw feathers). Pursuing the question of why America’s redrock wilderness matters to the soul of this country, Red bridges the divide between the political and the poetic and shows how this harshest and most fragile of landscapes inspires a soulful return to “wild mercy.” The preservation of wildness is not simply a political process but a spiritual one. With grace, humor, and the subtleties of her perception, Williams reminds us of what we have forgotten in the chaos of our lives and what can be reclaimed in the stillness of the desert. Red is further proof that the writings of Terry Tempest Williams possess a revelatory power and an emotional intelligence at once rare and authentic.

Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert

History

Americas

Pantheon

In her most original, provocative, and eloquently moving book since Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams gives us a luminous chronicle of finding beauty in a broken world. Always an impassioned and far-sighted advocate for a just relationship between the natural world and humankind, Williams has broadened her concerns over the past several years to include a reconfiguration of family and community in her search for a deeper understanding of what it means to be human in an era of physical and spiritual fragmentation. Williams begins in Ravenna, Italy, where “jeweled ceilings became lavish tales” through the art of mosaic. She discovers that mosaic is not just an art form but a form of integration, and when she returns to the American Southwest, her physical and spiritual home, and observes a clan of prairie dogs on the brink of extinction, she apprehends an ecological mosaic created by a remarkable species in the sagebrush steppes of the Colorado Plateau. And, finally, Williams travels to a small village in Rwanda, where, along with fellow artists, she joins survivors of the 1994 genocide and builds a memorial literally from the rubble of war, an act that becomes a spark for social change and healing. A singular meditation on how the natural and human worlds both collide and connect in violence and beauty, this is a work of uncommon perceptions that dares to find intersections between arrogance and empathy, tumult and peace, constructing a narrative of hopeful acts by taking that which is broken and creating something whole.

Finding Beauty in a Broken World

Philosophy

In this potent collage of stories, essays, and testimony, Williams makes a stirring case for the preservation of America’s Redrock Wilderness in the canyon country of southern Utah. As passionate as she is persuasive, Williams, the beloved author of Refuge, is one of the country’s most eloquent and imaginative writers. The desert is her blood. Here she writes lyrically about the desert’s power and vulnerability, describing wonders that range from an ancient Puebloan sash of macaw feathers found in Canyonlands National Park to the desert tortoise–an animal that can “teach us the slow art of revolutionary patience” as it extends our notion of kinship with all life. She examines the civil war being waged in the West today over public and private uses of land–an issue that divides even her own family. With grace, humor, and compassionate intelligence, Williams reminds us that the preservation of wildness is not simply a political process but a spiritual one.

Vintage

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Books by Williams, Terry Tempest