Synopses & Reviews
Naturalist John James Audubon found the Great Plains and their wildlife so riveting when he visited the region in 1834 that he broke off a letter to his wife because he was too excited to write. In the almost two hundred years since then, the Wyoming landscape, deemed the andldquo;Italy of Americaandrdquo; by landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, has retained its glory if not its place in the imagination of the American public. This book reminds us of the remarkable bounty contained in the wild beauty and rich history of the Wyoming grasslandsandmdash;even as these riches are under threat from both human and natural forces.
This landscape is now captured in all its spectacular diversity in the photography of Michael P. Berman and William S. Sutton, two of the modern American Westandrsquo;s most accomplished and well-known landscape photographers. Essays by Frank H. Goodyear, Jr., and Charles R. Preston provide a contextual framework for the images. Goodyear introduces us to the imagery of the American West and explains the place of Bermanandrsquo;s and Suttonandrsquo;s work within that tradition, and Preston focuses on the natural history of the grasslands, illuminating the areaandrsquo;s ecological diversity and changes through the seasons and over the years.
In 2012 Berman and Sutton launched their massive Wyoming Grasslands Photographic Project, a partnership between The Nature Conservancy, Wyoming Chapter, and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Working in the tradition of late-nineteenth-century explorers and photographers of the American West, Berman and Sutton shot more than 50,000 digital photographs of Wyoming prairie, from the Red Desert of southwestern Wyoming to the Thunder Basin National Grassland of the stateandrsquo;s northeastern corner. The best of their extraordinarily sensitive, revealing, and powerful images appear in these pages, documenting the sweep and the seasons of the Wyoming landscape.
In eloquent words and pictures, including a foreword by environmental historian Dan Flores, Wyoming Grasslands offers dramatic proof of how the land that inspired the likes of Audubon and Bierstadt, while having altered over time, still holds and demands our attention.
Synopsis
In eloquent words and pictures, including a foreword by environmental historian Dan Flores, Wyoming Grasslands offers dramatic proof of how the land that inspired the likes of Audubon and Bierstadt, while having altered over time, still holds and demands our attention.
About the Author
Frank H. Goodyear, Jr., is Guest Curator at the Draper Natural History Museum, Buffalo Bill Center of the West, in Cody, Wyoming. He is the author of numerous books, including
Contemporary American Realism since 1960 and
Neil Welliver.
Charles R. Preston is the Willis McDonald, IV, Senior Curator of Natural Science at the Draper Natural History Museum, Buffalo Bill Center of the West, in Cody, Wyoming. His publications include
Golden Eagle: Sovereign of the Skies (with G. Leppart, photographer) and
An Expedition Guide to the Nature of Yellowstone and the Draper Museum of Natural History.
Dan Flores is retired as A. B. Hammond Professor of History at the University of Montana, Missoula. He is the author of numerous books, including Visions of the Big Sky: Painting and Photographing the Northern Rocky Mountain West and The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains.
Dan Flores on PowellsBooks.Blog
Coyote stories are the original literary canon of the American experience, extending back 10,000 years into the continental past and producing a sprawling body of hundreds of stories featuring a semi-deity, Coyote Man, as a stand-in for human beings. The purpose of the stories is to hold up for scrutiny what we surely ought to call — if we are, after all, evolutionists — human nature, and Coyote is a true artiste at the task...
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