In 1954, 63-year-old Maine farmer Annie Wilkins embarked on an impossible journey. She had no money and no family, she had just lost her farm, and her doctor had given her only two years to live. But Annie wanted to see the Pacific Ocean before she died. She ignored her doctor’s advice to move into the county charity home. Instead, she bought a cast-off brown gelding named Tarzan, donned men’s dungarees, and headed south in mid-November, hoping to beat the snow.

Whenever middle-aged desert tour guide Forrest Bryant Johnson went out on his daily walks into the Mojave, all was usually peaceful and serene. But one beautiful summer day in 1987, Forrest heard a cry of distress. Following the cries, he came upon a small bobcat kitten, injured, orphaned, and desperately in need of help. So Forrest took his new feline friend home for a night.

In September 1960, John Steinbeck and his poodle, Charley, embarked on a journey across America, from small towns to growing cities to glorious wilderness oases. Travels with Charley is animated by Steinbeck’s attention to the specific details of the natural world and his sense of how the lives of people are intimately connected to the rhythms of nature—to weather, geography, the cycles of the seasons. His keen ear for the transactions among people is evident, too, as he records the interests and obsessions that preoccupy the Americans he encounters along the way.

In the near future, when America has become a police state, 100 boys are selected to enter an annual contest where the winner will be awarded whatever he wants for the rest of his life. Among them is 16-year-old Ray Garraty, and he knows the rules - keep a steady walking pace of four miles per hour without stopping. Three warnings and you're out - permanently.

Jeannette Walls's memoir The Glass Castle was "nothing short of spectacular" ( Entertainment Weekly). Now, in Half Broke Horses, she brings us the story of her grandmother, told in a first-person voice that is authentic, irresistible, and triumphant.

National best-selling author and New Mexico native Michael McGarrity takes listeners to the wild territory of the late 19th-century American Southwest for this epic tale. After the deaths of his wife and brother, John Kerney gives up his West Texas ranch and heads south in search of a new home. Soon Kerney is offered work trailing cattle to the New Mexico Territory - a job that will forever change his life.

A sheltered ranch wife and her friends trade their dresses for workpants to take on the rigors of a cattle drive - but the challenges are even greater than they imagined. Will they overcome with hearts and humor intact? Will they survive at all?

Ambition drove Joe Dollarhide across the parched plains from Fort Sam Houston to Dodge City. One day, he was determined to have a spread every bit as vast and impressive as his employer's. But when a wild stampede separates him from the cattle drive, it is survival that keeps him going when most would have given up. Survival and a burning need to settle the score with Benteen Calder, the cattle boss he used to worship, the man who left him for dead.

Beautiful and hilarious, tearful and rambunctious, very real, ironic, and magic-filled, Martín Prechtel’s book The Mare and the Mouse is a series of lyrical sagas in tribute to each of the native New Mexican horses that carried him through his youth on the Reservation and then again during the difficult times following his return home after over a decade in the Mayan Highlands of Guatemala.

They tried to tell him that his father had killed himself, but Kearney McRaven knew better. No matter what life had dealt him, his father would go down fighting. And as he delved deeper into the mystery, he learned that just before his father died, the elder McRaven had experienced a remarkable run of luck: he’d won nearly ten thousand dollars and the deed to a cattle ranch.

Monty Roberts' father, a traditional horse trainer, had taught his son to dominate a horse in order to "break" it. But when he was 13, Monty made a discovery that changed his life. As he watched a mare tame a rebellious colt, Monty saw that she was speaking to it through eye and body movements. Astonished, Monty realized that he could train horses by using their language, speaking to them in ways that would form trust and understanding. Developing techniques based on what he learned from the horses around him, Monty embarked on a remarkable career - one that would bring him international fame as the real Horse Whisperer.

Hewey Calloway is between a rock and a hard place: The open range and simple life of his childhood are disappearing. He can't live a cowboy life whose time has passed and he's not ready yet for the new challenges of the 20th century, like automobiles, telephones, and barbed wire fences. He and his friends, all of them good old boys, must learn that even the best choices involve some kind of sacrifice.

A nominee for the National Book Award, Ivan Doig's brilliant memoir shares the experiences and culture that shaped his early years and made him fall in love with the West. From his childhood in a family of homesteaders through the death of his mother and his move to Montana to herd sheep, Doig shows his intimate connection with the American West.

As far as the eye can see is a vast, empty horizon. Evie Teale has finally accepted that her husband won’t be coming home. To make ends meet she runs a temporary stage station. But though she is diligent and careful, Evie must prepare for the day when the passengers no longer come and she must protect her children in an untamed country where’s it’s far easier to die than to live. Miles away, another solitary soul battles for survival. Conagher is a lean, dark-eyed drifter who is not about to let a gang of rustlers push him around.

Even at the age of 14, folks were calling him the youngest bounty hunter in Texas. His pa said he was more man than most men. But now his pa lay dead in a dusty Lubbock, Texas street, back-shot by a wealthy and powerful New Mexico rancher. Over his father's grave he swore to make things right. Neither his age, impossible odds, nor a thousand miles of unforgiving desert would keep Tad Littlejohn from righting a terrible wrong.

>In 1938, 19-year-old cowboy Bud Frazer sets his sights on becoming a stunt rider in the movies. Fantasizing about rubbing shoulders with the great screen cowboys of his youth, he leaves his home in Echol Creek, Oregon, and heads for Hollywood. On the long bus ride south, Bud meets a young woman who also harbors dreams of making it in the movies, though not as a starlet but as a writer, a real writer.

In the best-selling tradition of Bill Bryson and Tony Horwitz, Rinker Buck's The Oregon Trail is a major work of participatory history: an epic account of traveling the entire 2,000-mile length of the Oregon Trail the old-fashioned way, in a covered wagon with a team of mules - which hasn't been done in a century - that also tells the rich history of the trail, the people who made the migration, and its significance to the country.

Best-selling author Michael Korda's Horse People is the story - sometimes hilariously funny, sometimes sad and moving, always shrewdly observed - of a lifetime love affair with horses, and of the bonds that have linked humans with horses for more than 10,000 years. It is filled with intimate portraits of the kind of people, rich or poor, Eastern or Western, famous or humble, whose lives continue to revolve around the horse. Korda is a terrific storyteller, and his book is intensely personal and seductive, a joy for everyone who loves horses.

A nominee for the National Book Award, Ivan Doig's brilliant memoir shares the experiences and culture that shaped his early years and made him fall in love with the West. From his childhood in a family of homesteaders through the death of his mother and his move to Montana to herd sheep, Doig shows his intimate connection with the American West.

Owen Wister’s The Virginian pre-dates the classic novels of Zane Grey and Max Brand and is considered by many to be the original Western. Dedicated to Wister’s friend and fellow outdoorsman Theodore Roosevelt, this timeless tale almost single-handedly established the cowboy archetype in literature. A quiet, noble foreman of a Wyoming cattle ranch in the 1870s, the Virginian falls for pretty schoolteacher Molly Wood. But when a rival suitor challenges his honor, the Virginian struggles to make his beloved Molly understand the harsh justice of the West.

Philip Caputo, who had just turned 70, his wife, and their two English setters took off in a truck hauling an Airstream camper from Key West, Florida, en route via back roads and state routes to Deadhorse, Alaska. The journey took four months and covered 17,000 miles, during which Caputo interviewed more than 80 Americans from all walks of life to get a picture of what their lives and the life of the nation are really about in the 21st century.

To the wild and fabulous country where the Rio Grande makes its big bend, J. O. Langford came in 1909 with his wife and daughter in search of health and a home. High on a bluff overlooking the spot where Tornillo Creek pours its waters into the turbulent Rio Grande, the Langfords built their home, a rude structure of adobe blocks in a land reputed to be inhabited only by bandits and rattlesnakes. Big Bend is the story of the Langfords' life in the rugged and spectacularly beautiful country which they came to call their own.

In 2008, 26-year-old Tik Maynard faced a crossroads not unlike that of other young adults. A university graduate and modern pentathlete, he suffered both a career-ending injury and a painful breakup, leaving him suddenly adrift. The son of prominent Canadian equestrians, Maynard decided to spend the next year as a "working student." In the horse industry, working students aspire to become professional riders or trainers, and willingly trade labor for hands-on education.

National best-selling author and New Mexico native Michael McGarrity takes listeners to the wild territory of the late 19th-century American Southwest for this epic tale. After the deaths of his wife and brother, John Kerney gives up his West Texas ranch and heads south in search of a new home. Soon Kerney is offered work trailing cattle to the New Mexico Territory - a job that will forever change his life.

On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the Earth, the ranch most of all.

Twenty-two years old Cole Morgan struggled after a career ending football injury and then the tragic loss of his parents in the winter of 1937. He felt like a man with no destination... running from lost opportunities and memories better left alone. Maybe it was for this reason he accepted the offer of a near stranger to use his education and backcountry skills to work on the Greybull, one of the largest ranches in Wyoming. With little fanfare he packed all his worldly possessions in his beloved truck and headed for the small town of Meeteetsee.

In short vignettes, Galvin gives us a deeply personal portrait of the people who lived in a mountain meadow along the Colorado-Wyoming border over its hundred-year history. His portraits illuminate the Western character and evolve a sense of place like no other.

The irresistible tale of 19-year-old Martha Lessen, a female horse whisperer trying to make a go of it in a man's world. It was thought that the only way to break a horse was to buck the wild out of it, and broken ribs and tough falls just went with the job. But over several long, hard winter months, many of the townsfolk in this remote county of eastern Oregon witness Martha's way of talking in low, sweet tones to horses believed beyond repair---and getting miraculous, almost immediate results.

Monty Roberts' father, a traditional horse trainer, had taught his son to dominate a horse in order to "break" it. But when he was 13, Monty made a discovery that changed his life. As he watched a mare tame a rebellious colt, Monty saw that she was speaking to it through eye and body movements. Astonished, Monty realized that he could train horses by using their language, speaking to them in ways that would form trust and understanding. Developing techniques based on what he learned from the horses around him, Monty embarked on a remarkable career - one that would bring him international fame as the real Horse Whisperer.

In the early 1870's, the young state of Texas was struggling to survive. Its vast, undeveloped land of over 260 thousand square miles became a haven for the lawless. Murderers, rustlers and renegade bands of hostile Indians and Comanchero roamed the vast wastelands of west Texas with only a narrow river separating them from the sanctuary of Mexico. One group of dedicated lawmen stood between this element and the law-abiding citizenry - the Texas Rangers. This is the story of one of those men.