The environmental importance of the marshes lies in their capacity to filter pollutants, retard erosion, and help maintain a natural balance among the critters.

Award-winning photographer Dorothy Monnelly captures the yet-unspoiled beauty of one of the last natural ecosystems in the Northeast. In this collection of 57 large format, black and white photographs, the salt marsh is a solemn force rendered dramatically with crisp scans of Monnelly's original gelatin silver prints. As a native of Ipswich, Massachusetts, Monnelly executes her work with a familiarity and grace evocative of Ansel Adams. Her work is described in the forward by Jeanne Adams, director of the Ansel Adams Trust as capturing the marsh's "amazing sculptural quality." "Between Land and Sea" is grounded with an essay by journalist Doug Stewart, a regular contributor to "Smithsonian" and other magazines. Stewart's words provide a rich context for the images, as well as a strong case for preserving the marshlands. "Standing in an upland clearing overlooking a vast prairie of marsh grass, you can easily believe that a salt marsh is the closest thing a landscape comes to eternity. Even the Grand Canyon is eroding, after all, but a healthy salt marsh is renewed with each rising tide." Monnelly's book is indispensable to those who are conscious of the threat to our planet's sustainability. 57 black and white illustrations.

Inspired by the author’s childhood experience in the deep countryside of his native country, the Republic of the Congo, Tales from the Great Marsh represents a collection of short stories which illustrate a complex picture of life in a contemporary African society still rooted in its traditional beliefs and practices. Through short fictional stories, the author explores the complexity of social, cultural as well as religious, and spiritual experiences of a Bantu rural society when confronted with the challenges posed by specific existential situations such as death and modern politics, as well as the challenges posed by the encounter with the otherness. These fictional stories which marry myth and reality, are deployed towards producing knowledge that takes into account the surviving cultural aspects of old African societies formerly considered minor in studies of the continent’s past and present.

A new edition of an exquisitely crafted homage to the Massachusetts coast In this new edition of Between Land and Sea: The Great Marsh (first published by Braziller in 2007), the award-winning, Ipswich, MA-based landscape photographer Dorothy Kerper Monnelly conveys the surprising, ever-changing drama of the vast tidal wetlands known as the Great Marsh. For over 40 years, Monnelly has come to know this region intimately, one of the last unspoiled wilderness areas in the urban Northeast. Her timeless, visionary photographs are joined in this edition by an essay from acclaimed author Terry Tempest Williams reflecting on our relationship to liminal spaces like the marsh. Although salt marshes are among the most productive ecosystems on earth, these wetlands are threatened throughout the world by human activity and have disappeared from much of the American seacoast. The Great Marsh, despite threats from development, pollution, and now rising seas, is a pristine remnant of this ancient coastal environment.

Under the corn and soybean fields of southern Minnesota lies the memory of vast, age-old wetlands, drained away over the last 130 years in the name of agricultural progress. But not everyone saw wetlands as wasteland. Before 1900, Freeborn County’s Big Marsh provided a wealth of resources for the neighboring communities. Families hunted its immense flocks of migrating waterfowl, fished its waters, trapped muskrats and mink, and harvested wood and medicinal plants. As farmland prices rose, however, the value of the land under the water became more attractive to people with capital. While residents fought bitterly, powerful outside investors overrode local opposition and found a way to drain 18,000 acres of wetland at public expense. Author Cheri Register stumbled upon her great-grandfather’s scathing critique of the draining and was intrigued. Following the clues he left, she uncovers the stories of life on the Big Marsh and of the “connivers” who plotted its end: the Minneapolis land developer, his local fixer, an Illinois banker, and the lovelorn local lawyer who did their footwork. The Big Marsh, an environmental history told from a personal point of view, shows the enduring value of wild places and the importance of the fight to preserve them, both then and now.

"Stemming from research in the three upper Great Lakes basins (Superior, Michigan, and Huron), the volume is organized by geologic time, beginning with the reconstructed drainage for glacial Lake Minong southward across Michigan's Upper Peninsula and ending with the use of remote sensing and geospatial analysis in monitoring Lake Michigan coastal dunes"--

Renown landscape photographer Dorothy Monnelly discovered a box of her mother's poems in the attic of their home when she was still a teenager. Those poems are presented here in a sequence that follows her mother's life - from memories of childhood on through maturity, marriage, children and struggles with breast cancer. Her mother left these poems as her "creative" legacy for her daughters. They are shown here to evidence a dialogue between a mother and a daughter - each pursuing their own art forms. Dorothy Kerper Monnelly is a well known photographer whose last publication, Between Land & Sea: The Great Marsh(Braziller, 2007) earned her the following rave review: 'No landscape photographer at work today has done more to focus attention on the spectacular beauty of New England's threatened coastal marshes than Dorothy Kerper Monnelly.' Legendary naturalist Edward O. Wilson had called her 'the Ansel Adams of the wetlands.' SELLING POINTS: *A beautiful pairing of a mother's poetry, written for her daughters, with photographs inspired by the poems, taken by her daughter, Dorothy Monnelly ILLUSTRATIONS: 35 b/w photographs

Toward the end of her life, Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) made a surprising disclosure. Instead of the critically lauded The Country of the Pointed Firs, Jewett declared her "best story" to be A Marsh Island (1885), a little-known novel. Why? One reason is that it demonstrates Jewett's range. Known primarily for her vignettes, Jewett accomplished in these pages a truly great novel. Undoubtedly, another reason lies in the novel's themes of queer kinship and same-sex domesticity, as enjoyed by the flamboyant protagonist Dick Dale. Written a few years into Jewett's decades-long companionship with Annie Fields, A Marsh Island echoes Jewett's determination to split time between her family home in Maine and Fields's place on Charles Street in Boston. The novel follows the adventures of Dale, a Manhattanite landscape painter in the Great Marsh of northeastern Massachusetts and envisions the latter region's saltmarsh as a figure for dynamic selfhood: the ever-shifting boundaries between land and sea a model for valuing both individuality and a porous openness to the gifts of others. Jewett's works played a major role in popularizing the genre of American regionalism and has garnered praise, both in her time and ours, for her skill in rendering the local landscapes and fishing villages along or near the coasts of New England. Just as Jewett brought attention to the unique beauty and value of the Great marsh region, editor Don James McLaughlin reveals a convergence of regionalism and sexuality in Jewett's work in his introduction. A Marsh Island reminds us that queer kinship has a long tradition of being extended to incorporate queer ecological belonging, and that the meaning of "companionship" itself is enriched when we acknowledge its indebtedness to environment.