Category Archives: Library of America

The Unexpected Universe – Loren Eiseley & William Cronon

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The Unexpected Universe

A Library of America eBook Classic

Loren Eiseley & William Cronon

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $8.99

Publish Date: November 15, 2016

Publisher: Library of America

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


“No one has ever managed to make the pursuit of knowledge feel more soulful or more immediate than Loren Eiseley . . . ” —Ben Cosgrove,  The Daily Beast   At the height of a distinguished career as a paleontologist, Loren Eiseley turned from fieldwork and scientific publication to the personal essay. Here, in  The Unexpected Universe , he displays his far-reaching knowledge and searching curiosity about the natural world, and the qualities that led many to hail him as a “modern Thoreau.” Fascinating accounts of the journeys of Odysseus, Captain Cook, and Charles Darwin frame Eiseley’s more modest wanderings as a suburban naturalist, attentive to the lives of small creatures. Sometimes he travels no further than the local dump. And yet, like Homer’s hero or these great explorers, he continually finds a universe “not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

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The Unexpected Universe – Loren Eiseley & William Cronon

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A Sand County Almanac: With Other Essays on Conservation from Round River – Aldo Leopold

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A Sand County Almanac: With Other Essays on Conservation from Round River

Aldo Leopold

Genre: Nature

Price: $8.99

Publish Date: December 31, 1968

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Seller: The Chancellor, Masters and Scholars of the University of Oxford trading as Oxford University Press


First published in 1949 and praised in The New York Times Book Review as "a trenchant book, full of vigor and bite," A Sand County Almanac combines some of the finest nature writing since Thoreau with an outspoken and highly ethical regard for America's relationship to the land. Written with an unparalleled understanding of the ways of nature, the book includes a section on the monthly changes of the Wisconsin countryside; another part that gathers informal pieces written by Leopold over a forty-year period as he traveled through the woodlands of Wisconsin, Iowa, Arizona, Sonora, Oregon, Manitoba, and elsewhere; and a final section in which Leopold addresses the philosophical issues involved in wildlife conservation. As the forerunner of such important books as Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, and Robert Finch's The Primal Place, this classic work remains as relevant today as it was forty years ago.

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A Sand County Almanac: With Other Essays on Conservation from Round River – Aldo Leopold

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Mark Twain, Groucho Marx, and the Importance of Comedy

Mother Jones

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This essay will appear in “Comedy,” the Winter 2014 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. This slightly adapted version story first appeared on the TomDispatch website with the kind permission of that magazine.

Well, humor is the great thing, the saving thing, after all. —Mark Twain

Twain for as long as I’ve known him has been true to his word, and so I’m careful never to find myself too far out of his reach. The Library of America volumes of his Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays (1852-1910) stand behind my desk on a shelf with the dictionaries and the atlas. On days when the news both foreign and domestic is moving briskly from bad to worse, I look to one or another of Twain’s jests to spring the trap or lower a rope, to summon, as he is in the habit of doing, a blast of laughter to blow away the “peacock shams” of the world’s “colossal humbug.”

Laughter was Twain’s stock in trade, and for 30 years as bestselling author and star attraction on America’s late-nineteenth-century lecture stage, he produced it in sufficient quantity to make bearable the acquaintance with grief that he knew to be generously distributed among all present in the Boston Lyceum or a Tennessee saloon, in a Newport drawing room as in a Nevada brothel. Whether the audience was sober or drunk, topped with top hats or snared in snakebitten boots, Twain understood it likely in need of a remedy to cover its losses.

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Mark Twain, Groucho Marx, and the Importance of Comedy

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