"Amid an alarming rise in xenophobia, Ana Maria Spagna stumbled upon a story: one day in 1875, on a high bluff over the Columbia River, a group of local Indigenous people murdered a large number of Chinese Miners and pushed their bodies off a cliff into the river. The incident was dubbed the Chelan Falls Massacre. Despite having lived in the area for decades, Spagna had never before heard of this event. In Pushed, she sets out to discover what really...

Fourteen-year-old Charlotte moves from the Rocky Mountains of Colorado to Washington's Cascade Mountains, where she hopes to continue training for the national snowboarding championships. After her father signs an anti-development petition, she loses access to the local resort and takes to the backcountry, where she meets nature on its own terms. When adventure turns to tragedy, Charlotte learns that even our deepest scars can be lucky ones.

"For many years, Ana Maria Spagna has stayed put, mostly, in a small mountain valley at the head of a glacier-carved lake. You're so lucky to live there, people say. She is lucky. But she is also restless. In Uplake she takes road trips, flies to distant cities, fantasizes about other people's lives, and then returns home again to muse on rootedness, yearning, commitment, ambition, wonder, and love. These engaging, reflective essays celebrate the...

Poems from a life spent up close and personal with nature chronicle humanity's effect on the earth, and just as importantly, the earth's effect on us. A clear-eyed, and open-hearted reckoning with contemporary life in the Anthropocene. -- Amazon.com.