Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands

by Barbara Kingsolver, Annie Griffiths Belt (Photographer)

ACCLAIMED AUTHOR BARBARA KINGSOLVER brings her passion for the wilderness to bear in this striking book. Trained as a biologist, Kingsolver writes authoritatively, and movingly, about the continent's virgin pockets of desert, coast, grassland, forest, and wetland. ONE-OF-A-KIND Specially commissioned infrared photographs, taken and hand-tinted by Belt, create a painterly portrait of wild landscapes that gives this an art book appeal. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC Readers look to the Geographic as a leading expert in the geography and ecology of America. America's virgin lands are not always where you'd expect to find them - in national parks or other preserves. They're scattered in often small, sometimes barely known pockets across the continent. These are the remnants that remind us of what wildness once meant - and what will be lost if it disappears. In her moving introduction and in the essays that open each chapter, Kingsolver discusses the ways of wilderness, the threats against it, its natural imperatives and what it needs to survive in the different forms featured in the chapters - as grassland, wetland, dryland, coast, and woodland. Annie Griffiths Belt's evocative colour and hand-tinted photographs capture the essence of these diverse bioregions. The images take you from the tallgrass prairies of Kansas and Nevada to the Arctic tundra of Alaska, from the endangered coral reefs off the Florida Keys to the Pacific-pounded coast of Oregon, from the deserts of the Southwest to the sky-piercing redwoods of California.

Genres: Nonfiction, Nature, Environment, Travel

192 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2002

About the author

Barbara Ellen Kingsolver is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, essayist, and poet. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a nonfiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally. In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel Demon Copperhead. Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity, and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments.
Kingsolver has received numerous awards, including the Dayton Literary Peace Prize's Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award 2011 and the National Humanities Medal. After winning for The Lacuna in 2010 and Demon Copperhead in 2023, Kingsolver became the first author to win the Women's Prize for Fiction twice. Since 1993, each one of her book titles have been on the New York Times Best Seller list.
Kingsolver was raised in rural Kentucky, lived briefly in the Congo in her early childhood, and she currently lives in Appalachia. Kingsolver earned degrees in biology, ecology, and evolutionary biology at DePauw University and the University of Arizona, and worked as a freelance writer before she began writing novels. In 2000, the politically progressive Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize to support "literature of social change".

Reviews

[Cathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spectacular photos framed by Kingsolver's eloquent plea for us to stop despoiling the great gift that is the natural world. Both the prose and the pictures made me weep.

[Barb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Coffee table book with pretty pictures, environmentalist quotes and sentiments.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful photography book of our natural lands. Barbara Kingsolver's passages in the book were perfect reflections of the photographs. What a celebration and reverence to be paid to creation! Unfortunately I can't remember the photographer's name, but she was wonderful. The soft style of the photos left me leafing through the pages over and over again. I checked this book out from the library, but I would be interested in having it to stay on my coffee table.

[Helen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Breathtaking and heartbreaking at the same time, this photo collection and elegant words of Kingsolver present the vital need we have for all of our landscapes. Drawing on the great work of Batram, Thoreau, Muir, Leopoldo, and Abbey, this nature narrative caused me to think even more deeply about what we have wrought in the past, and continue to do today. I am immensely grateful for this incredible collection, and now will pass it along to a nature-loving friend. It is that kind of book!

[Kristina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm so glad Barbara Kingsolver has written about William Bartram...
...to be continued...
This is a beautiful book. It reminds me of how much we still have left to preserve and protect. It's lovely to look at and I hope my library gets a copy of it soon...

[Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book is full of beautiful pictures of america.it was designed to show the reader of all that we have to lose due to our neglect of the earth.this is something we need to think of now before it is too late.

[Tuck · Rating 3 out of 5]

petty pictures, pretty sentiments. a coffee table book to impress your impressionables.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely beautiful photos and text.