William Butler Ogden was a pioneer railroad magnate, one of the earliest founders and developers of the city of Chicago, and an important influence on U.S. westward expansion. His career as a businessman stretched from the streets of Chicago to the wilds of the Wisconsin lumber forests, from the iron mines of Pennsylvania to the financial capitals in New York and beyond. Jack Harpster’s The Railroad Tycoon Who Built Chicago: A Biography of William B. Ogden is the first chronicle of one of the most notable figures in nineteenth-century America. Harpster traces the life of Ogden from his early experiences as a boy and young businessman in upstate New York to his migration to Chicago, where he invested in land, canal construction, and steamboat companies. He became Chicago’s first mayor, built the city’s first railway system, and suffered through the Great Chicago Fire. His diverse business interests included real estate, land development, city planning, urban transportation, manufacturing, beer brewing, mining, and banking, to name a few. Harpster, however, does not simply focus on Ogden’s role as business mogul; he delves into the heart and soul of the man himself. The Railroad Tycoon Who Built Chicago is a meticulously researched and nuanced biography set against the backdrop of the historical and societal themes of the nineteenth century. It is a sweeping story about one man’s impact on the birth of commerce in America. Ogden’s private life proves to be as varied and interesting as his public persona, and Harpster weaves the two into a colorful tapestry of a life well and usefully lived.

In The Small Nation Solution, eminent anthropologist John H. Bodley argues that the contemporary global problems of poverty, conflict, and environmental degradation are problems of scale and power. Bodley’s solution involves keeping nations small so as to limit the power of elite directors. It is a simple idea with profound implications. He spotlights successful small nations around the world as the best working models of sustainable sociocultural systems and shows how these diverse small nations can be the building blocks of a transformed global system that could save the world.

Thomas Berry is one of the most eminent cultural historians of our time. Here he presents the culmination of his ideas and urges us to move from being a disrupting force on the Earth to a benign presence. This transition is the Great Work -- the most necessary and most ennobling work we will ever undertake. Berry's message is not one of doom but of hope. He reminds society of its function, particularly the universities and other educational institutions whose role is to guide students into an appreciation rather than an exploitation of the world around them. Berry is the leading spokesperson for the Earth, and his profound ecological insight illuminates the path we need to take in the realms of ethics, politics, economics, and education if both we and the planet are to survive.

Part historical narrative, part travelogue, and part environmental plea, Selling Your Father's Bones recounts one of the most astonishing journeys in the history of the American West. The year 1877 bore witness to a broken promise. Joseph, chief of the peaceable Nez Perce band who made their home in Oregon's Wallowa Valley, had long sworn to uphold the dying words of his father: "This country holds your father's body. Never sell the bones of your mother and your father." Yet, as the U.S. government confined the tribe to ever smaller reservations in favor of miners and ranchers in their westward sprawl, the fateful decision of several young Nez Perce warriors to attack the settlers set in motion an exodus from Joseph's ancestral home. For the next eleven weeks, seven hundred Nez Perce men, women, and children traveled 1,700 miles across inhospitable wilderness, engaging the chasing army in six battles and many more skirmishes, as they drove on in search of peace and freedom. Just forty miles from the Canadian border, the tribe survived a calamitous five-day siege until Joseph could no longer bear his people's suffering and surrendered. It is said that when he died, in 1904, the cause was a broken heart. Populated with the heroes and villains of a classic conflict, Selling Your Father's Bones intercuts the Nez Perce's fight for survival with the author's own travels across this very same terrain, the mountains, forests, badlands, and prairies of modern-day Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. The imposing Bitterroot Mountains, the Lolo Pass (then and now among the toughest mountain crossings on the North American continent), and the great Montana buffalo plains retain their majesty. Yet, as Schofield reveals, ecological vandalism, unthinking corporate policies, and dubious political leadership have wrought scarred landscapes, battered communities, and toxic environments whose realities must be borne by the living descendants of both the Nez Perce warriors and the European settlers. As Schofield walks among the people who now occupy these sacred lands, he sees in the values of the Native American West -- love for homeland, for ancestry, and for Mother Nature -- a route to their, and our, salvation.