It all started because of a rifle. The Rifle is an inspirational story and hero’s journey of a 28-year-old U.S. Marine, Andrew Biggio, who returned home from combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, full of questions about the price of war. He found answers from those who survived the costliest war of all -- WWII veterans. It began when Biggio bought a 1945 M1 Garand Rifle, the most common rifle used in WWII, to honor his great uncle, a U.S. Army soldier who died on the hills of the Italian countryside. When Biggio showed the gun to his neighbor, WWII veteran Corporal Joseph Drago, it unlocked memories Drago had kept unspoken for 50 years. On the spur of the moment, Biggio asked Drago to sign the rifle. Thus began this Marine’s mission to find as many WWII veterans as he could, get their signatures on the rifle, and document their stories. For two years, Biggio traveled across the country to interview America’s last-living WWII veterans. Each time he put the M1 Garand Rifle in their hands, their eyes lit up with memories triggered by holding the weapon that had been with them every step of the war. With each visit and every story told to Biggio, the veterans signed their names to the rifle. 96 signatures now cover that rifle, each a reminder of the price of war and the courage of our soldiers.

* One of the Boston Globe's Best Books of 2020 * Winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Li-Young Lee The More Extravagant Feast focuses on the trophic exchanges of a human body with the world via pregnancy, motherhood, and interconnection—the acts of making and sustaining other bodies from one’s own, and one’s own from the larger world. Leah Naomi Green writes from attentiveness to the vast availability and capacity of the weedy, fecund earth and from her own human place within more-than-human life, death, and birth. Lyrically and spiritually rich, striving toward honesty and understanding, The More Extravagant Feast is an extraordinary book of awareness of our dependency on ecological systems—seen and unseen.

This is the first anthology of nature writing that celebrates California, the most geographically diverse state in the union. Readers—be they naturalists or armchair explorers—will find themselves transported to California's many wild places in the company of forty noted writers whose works span more than a century. Divided into sections on California's mountains, hills and valleys, deserts, coast, and elements (earth, wind, and fire), the book contains essays, diary entries, and excerpts from larger works, including fiction. As a prelude to the collection, editor Steven Gilbar presents two California Indian creation myths, one a Cahto narrative and the other an A-juma-wi story as told by Darryl Babe Wilson. Familiar names appear in these pages—John Muir, Robert Louis Stevenson, John McPhee, M.F.K. Fisher, Gretel Ehrlich—but less familiar writers such as Daniel Duane, Margaret Millar, and John McKinney are also included. Among the gems in this treasure trove are Jack Kerouac on climbing Mt. Matterhorn, Barry Lopez on snow geese migration at Tule Lake, Edward Abbey on Death Valley, Henry Miller on Big Sur, and Joan Didion on the Santa Ana winds. Gary Snyder's inspiring Afterword reflects the spirit of environmentalism that runs throughout the book. Natural State also reveals the many changes to California's landscape that have occurred in geological time and in human terms. More than a book of "nature writing," this book is superb writing about nature.

FIELD & STREAM, America’s largest outdoor sports magazine, celebrates the outdoor experience with great stories, compelling photography, and sound advice while honoring the traditions hunters and fishermen have passed down for generations.

Three college students embark on a journey and will discover that their world is a facade with a darker secret to hide. Along the way, they will encounter a series of unexplained events happening all over town. Crossing paths with the extraterrestrial who has traveled universes, they learn of a diabolical plan set forth with a negative agenda for planet Earth. What is the ET's motive? Time is of the essence as nature will take what it wants.

From the musket to the M-16, rifles have played a major role in battle—sometimes tilting the scales in a pivotal moment of war. Yet all too often, poor decisions and ill-conceived "innovations" resulted in putting inappropriate weapons into ill-trained hands, with disastrous consequences. Ranging primarily from the late 18th century to the present, this richly illustrated volume tells the fascinating, sometimes problematic, history of rifled weapons and ammunition for military use. Battle to battle, readers will see how faster-loading, more accurate rifles changed the battlefield. Readers will also encounter many instances where decisionmakers chose to issue rifles ill-suited for the task at hand when better options were available. Author David Westwood has handled every weapon he describes, from muskets to breechloaders, from repeaters and bolt-action rifles to semiautomatics and self-loaders. His exhaustive research reveals new insights into both the successes and failures of rifled weapons. The result is a fresh look at a common weapon's most uncommon story.

FIELD & STREAM, America’s largest outdoor sports magazine, celebrates the outdoor experience with great stories, compelling photography, and sound advice while honoring the traditions hunters and fishermen have passed down for generations.