In the early 1980s, novelist John Nichols wrote a trilogy of memoirs about his adopted home: Taos, New Mexico. At the heart of the trilogy is this masterpiece, The Last Beautiful Days of Autumn, which revels in the ripe, earthy fullness of the season tainted with the bittersweet awareness of waste and decay and inevitable death. 

Nichols writes as a man in love with life lived out in the open, exposed to the elements and enriched by them. Like a young lover, he is by turns both bawdy and sensitive. He describes the Southwestern heaven as "so blue you could eat it on a silver spoon and shit perfect periwinkles for a week." Then, in another essay he spends hours watching cloud formations: 

"Utterly fascinated, I watched a cloud tear apart, undergoing mitosis I suppose, until it had dispersed into shapeless wisps about to evaporate. But then the winds reversed direction, and all those dissolving filaments, as if in a film being run backward, rebunched together, forming nearly the same-shaped cloud that I had seen disintegrate." 

This volume of Nichols' memoirs is a paean to crisp mornings, cutting firewood, fishing, falling leaves, hunting, scrambling through desert canyons and climbing mountain peaks. It is also about memorable characters with a similar closeness to nature and a lust for living. 

Spiced with melancholic decay and open-faced joy, it is best read in a mature season, preferrable late autumn.

from The New York Times (Joe Cain) 
On the singular facts of Mendel's life, ''The Monk in the Garden'' makes easy reading. But as a larger effort to represent Mendel to 21st-century readers, it is deficient. Henig, the author of half a dozen books on science, does little to anchor Mendel in his times or training. She fails to consider the influence contemporary biology and horticulture had on him. For example, the pea experiments were part of larger arguments against the origin of new species through hybridization, but Henig does not make this clear.

Along Montana & Idaho's Continental Divide Trail 
The Continental Divide Trail Series 
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Fly Fishing The Henry's Fork 
by Mike Lawson 
$11.96 

Fodor's Road Guide USA 
Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming  
$16.00  

North American Guide to Nude Recreation 
The Most Comprehensive Listing of Nude Recreation Resorts and Clubs  
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Fly Fishing The Henry's Fork

Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Brad Knickerbocker reports that for many contemporary nature writers, the environment is more than just a setting. It is a character, a part of the plot and, sometimes, even the protagonist of a story.  

"This broadened view of nature writing, coupled with the growth in environmental activism (particularly since the first Earth Day in 1970), has led to a new academic discipline called eco-criticism," Knickerbocker writes.  

"The number of scholars now focusing on this area has grown from just 30 as recently as 1992 to more than 1,000 today. Most are Americans (and most of them are here in the West), but interest is growing abroad - particularly in England and Japan."  
 

All literature, by illuminating the full nature of human 
existence, asks a single question: How shall we live? 

In our age, that question has taken its most urgent form in 
relation to the natural environment. Because it has never been 
more necessary, the voice of nature writing has never been 
stronger than it is today.

American Aquarium Fishes 
by Robert J. Goldstein 
Available through Amazon.com for $79.96 

Recovering the Prairie 
edited by Robert F. Sayre 
$37.95 

The View from Bald Hill 
by Carl E. Bock and Jane H. Bock 
Available through Amazon.com for  

 More recently published Natural Histories

 
Hardcover. 225 pages. $37.95

 More recently published Nature Writing