Recommended Summer Reading | Laramie County Community College

1) Women in wonderland: lives, legends and legacies of Yellowstone National Park

Author

Watry, Elizabeth A

2) Empire of shadows: the epic story of Yellowstone

Author

Black, George, 1949-

Summary

In a radical reinterpretation of the 19th-century West, George Black casts Yellowstone's creation as the culmination of three interwoven strands of history: the passion for exploration, the violence of the Indian Wars, and the "civilizing" of the frontier. Yellowstone, Wyoming, was landscape uninhabited, inaccessible, and shrouded in myth in the aftermath of the Civil War. Black charts its course through the lives of those who sought to lay bare its...

3) Engineering Eden: the true story of a violent death, a trial, and the fight over controlling nature

Author

Smith, Jordan Fisher

Summary

When Harry Walker was killed by a bear in Yellowstone Park in 1972, the civil trial prompted by his death became a proxy for bigger questions about American wilderness management that had been boiling for a century. At immediate issue was whether the Park Service should have done more to keep bears away from humans, but what was revealed as the trial unfolded was just how fruitless our efforts to regulate nature in the parks had always been. Tracing...

4) The overstory: a novel

Author

Powers, Richard, 1957-

Summary

An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four,...

5) Letters from Yellowstone

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Summary

Members of an 1898 botanical expedition to Yellowstone receive a shock when one of their party turns out to be a woman. While scientifically competent, she wanders off and is caught in a snow storm. A man sent to save her has an accident and she saves him.

6) The last ranger: a novel

Author

Heller, Peter, 1959-

Summary

Officer Ren Hopper is a ranger with the Nationall Park Service, tasked with duties both mundane and thrilling: breaking up campgroundss, saving clueless tourists from moose attacks, and attempting to broker an uneasy peace between the wealthy vacationers who tromp through the park with cameras and the residents of hardscrabble Cooke City who want to carve out a meaningful living. When Ren, hiking hrough the backcountry on his day off, encounters a...

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Summary

Having recently lost his job as a Wyoming game warden, Joe Pickett is recruited by the devious governor Rulon to oversee a murder investigation involving a confessed killer and overlapping jurisdictions that enabled the man's release.

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Summary

After the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano destroys his city and its surroundings, fifteen-year-old Alex must journey from Cedar Falls, Iowa, to Illinois to find his parents and sister, trying to survive in a transformed landscape and a new society in which all the old rules of living have vanished.

9) Braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants

Author

Kimmerer, Robin Wall, 1953-

Summary

An inspired weaving of indigenous knowledge, plant science, and personal narrative from a distinguished professor of science and a Native American whose previous book, Gathering Moss, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing. As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders,...

10) An indigenous peoples' history of the United States

Author

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, 1938-

Summary

"Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told...

11) The Sioux Chef's indigenous kitchen

Author

Sherman, Sean, 1974-

Summary

Locally sourced, seasonal, "clean" ingredients and nose-to-tail cooking are nothing new to Sean Sherman, the Oglala Lakota chef and founder of The Sioux Chef. In his first cookbook, Sherman shares his approach to creating boldly-seasoned foods that are vibrant, healthful, at once elegant and easy. Sherman dispels outdated notions of Native American fare -- no fry bread or Indian tacos here -- and no European staples such as wheat flour, dairy products,...

12) Indigenous peoples, national parks, and protected areas: a new paradigm linking conservation, culture, and rights

Summary

"This passionate, well-researched book makes a compelling case for a paradigm shift in conservation practice. It explores new policies and practices, which offer alternatives to exclusionary, uninhabited national parks and wilderness areas and make possible new kinds of protected areas that recognize Indigenous peoples' rights and benefit from their knowledge and conservation contributions"-- Provided by publisher.

13) Last stand: George Bird Grinnell, the battle to save the buffalo, and the birth of the new West

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Summary

The dramatic history of the extermination and resurrection of the American buffalo, by #1 bestselling author of The Revenant Michael Punke's The Last Stand tells the epic story of the American West through the lens of the American bison and the man who saved these icons of the Western landscape. Over the last three decades of the nineteenth century, an American buffalo herd once numbering 30 million animals was reduced to twelve. It was the...

14) Saving Yellowstone: exploration and preservation in Reconstruction America

Author

Nelson, Megan Kate, 1972-

Summary

"From historian and critically acclaimed author of The Three-Cornered War comes the propulsive and vividly told story of how Yellowstone became the world's first national park amid the nationwide turmoil and racial violence of the Reconstruction era. Each year nearly four million people visit Yellowstone National Park--one of the most popular of all national parks--but few know the fascinating and complex historical context in which it was established....

15) Pretty-shield: medicine woman of the Crows

Author

Linderman, Frank Bird, 1869-1938

Summary

"In the spring of 1931, Pretty-shield, a grandmother and medicine healer in the Crow tribe, met Frank Linderman for a series of interviews. When Linderman asked Pretty-shield about her life, the old woman relaxed and laughed. "We shall be here until we die." In this rich account, Linderman, using sign language and an interpreter, pieces together the story of Pretty-shield's extraordinary life, from her youth migrating across the High Plains with her...

16) The three-cornered war: the Union, the Confederacy, and native peoples in the fight for the West

Author

Nelson, Megan Kate, 1972-

Summary

"A dramatic, riveting, and deeply researched narrative account of the epic struggle for the West during the Civil War, revealing a little-known, vastly important episode in American history. In 'The Three-Cornered War', Megan Kate Nelson reveals the fascinating history of the Civil War in the American West. Exploring the connections among the Civil War, the Indian wars, and western expansion, Nelson reframes the era as one of national conflict--involving...

17) A field of their own: women and American Indian history, 1830-1941

Author

Rhea, John M., 1967-

Summary

"One hundred and forty years before Gerda Lerner established women's history as a specialized field in 1972, a small group of women began to claim American Indian history as their own domain. A Field of Their Own examines nine key figures in American Indian scholarship to reveal how women came to be identified with Indian history and why they eventually claimed it as their own field. From Helen Hunt Jackson to Angie Debo, the magnitude of their research,...

18) Searching for Yellowstone: ecology and wonder in the last wilderness

Author

Schullery, Paul

19) Do (not) feed the bears: the fitful history of wildlife and tourists in Yellowstone

Author

Wondrak Biel, Alice

20) The alpha female wolf: the fierce legacy of Yellowstone's 06

Author

Summary

"Book Four in the Award-Winning Alpha Wolves of Yellowstone Series Following five generations of female wolves--including the famous 06--this gripping family saga set in Yellowstone National Park reveals the pivotal role that female wolves play in pack life. "Rick's writing is so vivid, so powerful, that I feel I have been right there with him among the wolves of Yellowstone. And I urge you, the reader, to come with us and discover the magic of wolf...