Letters from Yellowstone: 30th Anniversary Edition - Couverture souple

An award-winning journalist, civil rights activist and filmmaker, Jim Carrier has written eleven books, been published in the National Geographic and the New York Times, written Denver Post series on the legacy of the atomic bomb and the Marlboro Man, and produced multimedia projects for the Southern Poverty Law Center. He has roamed by Jeep through the American West and by sailboat across the Atlantic and Mediterranean. His reporting has been broadcast on NPR, PBS and included in Best American Science and Nature Writing. Jim’s reporting from the West, as the Rocky Mountain Ranger, took him through 500,000 miles, 7,665 sunsets and 87 pairs of Levis. In 1997, he bought a sailboat, named it Ranger, and set out to sail the Pacific. He diverted to Alabama because of a hate crime against a black man. Volunteering at the Southern Poverty Law Center, he wrote Ten Ways to Fight Hate, a community guide distributed to one million officials and human rights activists. Carrier developed Tolerance.org, which won two Webbys for activist Web sites and produced the film, Faces in the Water, which shows every 30 minutes at the Civil Rights Memorial. Now based in Burlington, Vermont, his freelance work focuses on medical science, environmental justice, and human rights. Carrier is currently at work on a forensic memoir about the gut, and a film about Hank Williams fans who gather at his grave in Alabama on New Year’s Eve. He and his daughter, Amy, descend from Martha Carrier who was hanged as a witch in Salem, Massachusetts. His wife, Trish O’Kane, is a lecturer in environmental studies at the University of Vermont.

In the Spring of 1986, Jim Carrier, the Denver Post's "Rocky Mountain Ranger, traveled to Yellowstone National Park to begin a series of seventy dispatches about the park’s human and natural history. He admits he knew almost nothing about Yellowstone. Seven months later, after countless interviews, miles hiked, driven and paddled, time often shared with his daughter, Amy, he came home transformed. More than a "reporter's notebook" Carrier's letters reveal the impact the region had on him over the course of Yellowstone's four seasons. Whether hiking through grizzly country at night in search of medical help for a gravely ill colleague, or challenging the Grand Teton, Carrier's adventures will convince you that he was hardly a dispassionate correspondent. His letters demonstrate that the value of places such as Yellowstone may lie in the ways they transform all of us into more conscientious defender of the wild.