Adventures, games and crafts to get you outdoors all the year round. Playing outdoors should be an essential part of growing up; developing your imagination, keeping fit and letting the wild world weave its magic spell on you. In The Wild Year Book, Fiona and Jo have selected 70 of their favourite activities to help you enjoy spending time outdoors, season by season. Perhaps you'll want to play camouflage games in Spring and make enormous bubbles in the summer, challenge your friends to a foraging bake-off in the autumn, or create ice mobiles in the winter. With this book you will never be short of inspiration! Over 100,000 copies sold of Fiona and Jo's Going Wild series.
An illustrated guide to exploring nature, one surprising season—and plant—at a time. Whether you’re an avid nature lover or newly discovering the world outside your door, you’ll find information and inspiration in this beautifully illustrated pocket companion. Organized by season, its colorful pages are brimming with wondrous wildflowers and plants to discover as you wander, forage, and explore—from alder, foxglove, and fireweed to mistletoe, yarrow, and many more. Artist Kristyna Baczynski blends writing, research, and illustrations that celebrate more than ninety plant specimens, drawn in detail for identification, along with historical, scientific, and folkloric information highlighting the unique backstory and beauty of these everyday natural wonders. You’ll also find checklists, foraging tips, and room for field notes and sketches. Take your daily neighborhood walk or weekend hike to the next level with this vibrant and irresistible guide.
Take a journey through the seasons in this beautiful book, made entirely from hand-pressed plants. Artist Helen Ahpornsiri transforms petals, leaves and seeds into bounding hares, swooping swallows and fluttering butterflies. Turn the page to watch flowers unfold, see birds take flight or peek inside animal homes. Marvel at the magic of each moment and rediscover the wonders of a year in the wild . . .
Legend. Bum. Genius. Con Man. Devoted husband and father. Myth. Storyteller. Inspiration. Drunk. Visionary. Tom Waits is all of these things. Waits is the lifeline between the great Beat poets and today's rock & roll heroes. He's old enough to be your dad and cool enough to be your hero. One of the few truly original musicians recording today, he's also the rare singer who can actually act, and he has put together a respectable body of work in movies. Wild Years: The Music and Myth of Tom Waits retraces the long road that Waits has traveled and explores the music that made him a legend. Jay S. Jacobs looks at the towering myth that Waits has created for himself. Jay S. Jacobs follows the fate of one of America's pre-eminent artists, a very private man whose career embodies a quirky array of fulfillment and loss, beauty and strangeness. This revised and updated edition includes a new chapter, with insight on Waits' career in the 21st century thus far, as well as the most complete discography available in print. Tom's Wild Years ' a poignant, revealing celebration of the man and all his myths.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. This is the unforgettable story of how Christopher Johnson McCandless came to die. "It may be nonfiction, but Into the Wild is a mystery of the highest order." —Entertainment Weekly McCandess had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Not long after, he was dead. Into the Wild is the mesmerizing, heartbreaking tale of an enigmatic young man who goes missing in the wild and whose story captured the world’s attention. Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir. In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash. He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and, unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw the maps away. Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild. Jon Krakauer constructs a clarifying prism through which he reassembles the disquieting facts of McCandless's short life. Admitting an interest that borders on obsession, he searches for the clues to the drives and desires that propelled McCandless. When McCandless's innocent mistakes turn out to be irreversible and fatal, he becomes the stuff of tabloid headlines and is dismissed for his naiveté, pretensions, and hubris. He is said to have had a death wish but wanting to die is a very different thing from being compelled to look over the edge. Krakauer brings McCandless's uncompromising pilgrimage out of the shadows, and the peril, adversity, and renunciation sought by this enigmatic young man are illuminated with a rare understanding—and not an ounce of sentimentality. Into the Wild is a tour de force. The power and luminosity of Jon Krakauer's stoytelling blaze through every page.
“We walked toward the part of the library where the air smelled as if it had been interred for years….. Finally, we got to the hallway where the wooden floor was the creakiest, and we sensed a strange whiff of excitement and fear. It smelled like a creature from a bygone time. It smelled like a dragon.” Thirteen-year-old Juan’s favorite things in the world are koalas, eating roast chicken, and the summer-time. This summer, though, is off to a terrible start. First, Juan’s parents separate and his dad goes to Paris. Then, as if that wasn’t horrible enough, Juan is sent away to his strange Uncle Tito’s house for the entire break! Uncle Tito is really odd: he has zigzag eyebrows; drinks ten cups of smoky tea a day; and lives inside a huge, mysterious library. One day, while Juan is exploring the library, he notices something inexplicable and rushes to tell Uncle Tito. “The books moved!” His uncle drinks all his tea in one gulp and, sputtering, lets his nephew in on a secret: Juan is a Princeps Reader––which means books respond magically to him––and he’s the only person capable of finding the elusive, never-before-read Wild Book. Juan teams up with his new friend Catalina and his little sister, and together they delve through books that scuttle from one shelf to the next, topple over unexpectedly, or even disappear altogether to find The Wild Book and discover its secret. But will they find it before the wicked, story-stealing Pirate Book does?
This book tells the uplifting true story of a family who left their old life behind to spend a year living wild in a tent around Britain. With a baby and a toddler, mounting debt, work demands and stress trampling over their desire to spend time together as a family in nature, Jen and Sim Benson move out of their rented accommodation, sell up their possessions and decide to live in a tent for a year as nomads around rural Britain. This is the story of that year – the highs and the lows – the doubts, epiphanies and the weather. Detailing one family's search for a life in the wild, away from the screens and stresses of modern life, this captivating memoir is a must read for nature lovers or anyone who has dreamed of a life outdoors. It’s nature writ large with the joys and challenges of each season experienced under canvas, a story of ultimate freedom in the beautiful landscapes of Britain.
In the tradition of Wild and Tracks, one woman's story of how she left the city and found her soul. Disillusioned and burnt out by her job, Claire Dunn quits a comfortable life to spend a year off the grid in a wilderness survival program. Her new forest home swings between ally and enemy as reality – and the rain – sets in. Claire's adventure unfolds over four seasons and in the essential order of survival: shelter, water, fire and food. She arrives in summer, buoyant with idealism, and is initially confronted with physical challenges: building a shelter, escaping the vicious insects and making fire without matches. By winter, however, her emotional landscape has become the toughest terrain of all. Can she connect with her inner spirit to guide her journey onwards? Brimming with earthy charm and hard-won wisdom, My Year Without Matches is one woman's quest for belonging, to the land and to herself. When Claire finally cracks life in the bush wide open, she discovers a wild heart to warm the coldest night. ‘A brave and adventurous book ... Claire's writing is full of life and profound surprises.’ —Anne Deveson ‘An entertaining look at how Dunn survived for four seasons in a 'hundred acres of baking scrubland’ —Sun Herald ‘With earthy, expressive honesty she shares her struggles [and] the swooping highs of crafting life out of a block of unforgiving scrub... by sharing such an intimate journey, Claire has given us all a gift.’ —WellBeing Magazine
