General in The Books Store

Galen Rowell has devoted his life to photography, mountaineering, writing, and adventure. A frequent contributor to Life, National Geographic, Outside, Sports Illustrated, and many other publications both here and abroad, his award-winning work has been widely exhibited and praised. Among his many honors is the Ansel Adams Award for his outstanding contribution to outdoor photography. A recent recipient of a National Science Foundation grant to document the Antarctic, he is the author of many celebrated works including: The Yosemite, Mountains of the Middle Kingdom, In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods, My Tibet, and most recently, Galen Rowell's Vision: The Art of Adventure Photography. He lives with his wife, Barbara, in Northern California.

"One could call Mountain Light the classiest 'how-to' text on landscape color photography ever published. [It] will leave you delighted." The New York Times

"Part personal and artistic biography, part adventure story, part outdoor photography manual, [Mountain Light] is a tour de force. The images are charmed, compelling, imbued with a love of the high and wild."

San Francisco Chronicle

"Galen Rowell has a wonderful combination of qualities -- eye, energy, intelligence, sensitivity, courage both physical and moral, and above all, heart. Very seldom have I experienced so clearly defined the connection between the artist and what he sees, feels, and does with the work itself." Robert Redford

"Combine a devotion to mountains and wilderness, a sensitivity to the special quality of its pristine light, and a desire to communicate the beauty of the natural world, and you'll begin to understand what motivates photographer Galen Rowell .... In [Mountain Light], vision and technique are combined in one long paean to the marvel of the earth's wild places."

The authors build a house the way others create a natural garden. They use the oldest, most available materials imaginable—earth, clay, sand, straw, and water—and blend them to redefine the future (and past) of building. Cob (the word comes from an Old English root, meaning "lump") is a mixture of non-toxic, recyclable, and often free materials. Building with cob requires no forms, no cement, and no machinery of any kind. Builders actually sculpt their structures by hand.

Building with earth is nothing new to America; the oldest structures on the continent were built with adobe bricks. Adobe, however, has been geographically limited to the Southwest. The limits of cob are defined only by the builder's imagination.

Cob offers answers regarding our role in Nature, family and society, about why we feel the ways that we do, about what's missing in our lives. Cob comes as a revelation, a key to a saner world.

Cob has been a traditional building process for millennia in Europe, even in rainy and windy climates like the British Isles, where many cob buildings still serve as family homes after hundreds of years. The technique is newly arrived to the Americas, and, as with so many social trends, the early adopters are in the Pacific Northwest.

Cob houses (or cottages, since they are always efficiently small by American construction standards) are not only compatible with their surroundings, they ARE their surroundings, literally rising up from the earth. They are full of light, energy-efficient, and cozy, with curved walls and built-in, whimsical touches. They are delightful. They are ecstatic.

Every day hundreds of visitors to the bosque encounter flora and fauna they can't identify. Researchers and municipal, county, state, and federal resource agency personnel concerned with the bosque's management need to know how plants and animals are linked to their habitats.