The High Divide

“The High Divide is a vivid reminder of why we read, and why we want to."* In 1886, Gretta Pope wakes up one morning to discover that her husband is gone. Ulysses Pope has left his family behind on the far edge of Minnesota’s western prairie, with only a brief note and no explanation for why he left or where he’s heading. It doesn’t take long for Gretta’s young sons, Eli and Danny, to set off after him, leaving Gretta no choice but to search out the boys and their father and bring them all home. Enger’s breathtaking portrait of the vast plains landscape is matched by the rich expanse of the story’s emotional terrain, in which pivotal historical events coincide with the intimate story of a family’s sacrifice and devotion. “A deeply moving, gripping novel about one man’s quest for redemption and his family’s determination to learn the truth . . . Layered with meaning, this remarkable novel deserves to be read more than once. The High Divide proves Enger’s chops as a masterful storyteller.” —Ann Weisgarber, author of The Promise “Blends adventure, two boys coming of age and an exploration of trust in marriage . . . The story captures the splendor of the 19th-century West.” —St. Paul Pioneer Press “A compelling story of a house divided, of a man’s haunting pursuit of forgiveness, and a family’s search for the husband they thought they knew—but never really did.” —*True West Magazine “A captivating story . . . Once you start turning the pages, there’s no setting the book down.” —The Denver Post “Enger’s novel is told in beautifully exact, liquid language . . . Highly recommended.” —Library Journal, starred review

Brother and sister Gary L. Peterson and Glynda Peterson Schaad share stories about their grandmother Minnie "the Packer" Peterson who led trails of horses through the wilderness for Sierra Club, scientists and other individuals, taking her last packing trip in 1978 at age 80.

SPECIAL FREE PREVIEW! “A deeply moving, gripping novel about one man’s quest for redemption and his family’s determination to learn the truth . . . Layered with meaning, this remarkable novel deserves to be read more than once. The High Divide proves Enger’s chops as a masterful storyteller.” —Ann Weisgarber, author of The Promise In 1886, Gretta Pope wakes one morning to discover that her husband is gone. Ulysses Pope has left his family behind on the far edge of Minnesota’s western prairie, with only the briefest of notes and no explanation for why he left or where he’s headed. It doesn’t take long for Gretta’s young sons, Eli and Danny, to set off after him, following the scant clues they can find, jumping trains to get where they need to go, and ending up in the rugged badlands of Montana. Short on money and beleaguered by a treacherous landlord, Gretta has no choice but to seek out her sons and her husband as well, leading her to the doorstep of a woman who seems intent on making Ulysses her own. While out in the wilderness, the boys find that the closer they come to Ulysses’s trail, the greater the perils that confront them. Enger’s breathtaking portrait of the vast Plains landscape is matched by the rich expanse of his characters’ emotional terrain, as pivotal historical events—the turmoil of expansionism, the near total demise of the bison herds, and the subjugation of the Plains Indians—blend seamlessly with the story of a family’s sacrifice and devotion. “Lin Enger sets out from the conventions of the traditional Western and brings the reader into new emotional territory, that of the soul of an exquisitely drawn American family. Told with caring patience and precise language, The High Divide is a novel to get lost in.” —James Scott, author of The Kept “The High Divide, a novel about a family in peril, is haunting and tense but leavened by considerable warmth and humanity. Lin Enger writes with durable grace about a man’s quest for redemption and the human capacity for forgiveness.” —Benjamin Percy, author of Red Moon

Now in paperback—a bold reinvention of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and a hair-bristling story of betrayal, revenge, and the possibilities of forgiveness On a cold November afternoon in northern Minnesota, seventeen-year-old Jesse Matson finds his hunting partner—his father—sprawled on the forest floor, dead of a rifle wound. Authorities rule it a suicide, but Jesse is not convinced. Haunted by the ghost of his dad, and compelled by recently unearthed secrets, he is forced to wrestle with questions of justice and retribution even as he tries to hold his family, and himself, together.

One of America’s most esteemed natural history writers takes to the hills of the Pacific Northwest in search of Bigfoot—and finds the wildness within ourselves. “A unique book in the bigfoot literature . . . that understands what most lifetime bigfooters eventually come to know: that bigfooting is about the journey more than the destination.” —Cliff Barackman, field researcher and star of Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to investigate the legends of Sasquatch, Yale–trained ecologist Dr. Robert Pyle treks into the unprotected wilderness of the Dark Divide near Mount St. Helens, where he discovers both a giant fossil footprint and recent tracks. On the trail of what he thought was legend, he searches out Indians who tell him of an outcast tribe, the Seeahtiks, who had not fully evolved into humans. A handful of open–minded biologists and anthropologists counter the tabloids Pyle studies, while rogue Forest Service employees and loggers swear of a vast conspiracy to deep–six true stories of unknown, upright hominoid apes among us. He attends Sasquatch Daze, where he meets scientists, hunters, and others who have devoted their lives to the search, only to realize that “these guys don't want to find Bigfoot―they want to be Bigfoot!” Where Bigfoot Walks was the inspiration for the 2020 film The Dark Divide, starring David Cross and Debra Messing. Since the book’s original publication, Pyle’s fresh experiences and findings have been added to his original work through an updated chapter. With an evaluation of recent DNA evidence from Bigfoot hair and scat, the study of speech phonemes in the “Sierra Sounds” purported Bigfoot recordings, an examination of the impact of the wildly popular Animal Planet series Bigfoot Hunters, the reemergence of the famous Bob Gimlin into the Bigfoot community, and more, Walking With Bigfoot keeps every Bigfoot enthusiast’s mind wide open to one of the biggest questions in the land and brings Pyle’s work on the “legend” of Bigfoot into the new century.

Growing up on a dairy farm in Sussex, England, Stephen Pern was fascinated by the American West. As an adult, he spent six months walking 2,500 miles through the West, along the Continental Divide. Here is his irreverent, engaging account of the trek--a story of blisters and beauty, of off-beat characters and surprising insights.

Trekking the Continental Divide from the U.S. border to Kakwa Lake is a demanding adventure. In this revised and updated guidebook devoted to Canada's 1,200-kilometre Great Divide Trail (GDT), Dustin Lynx helps hikers piece together the myriad individual routes that form a continuous trail along the Divide. Outlining the six major sections of the GDT, Lynx breaks the trail into shorter, more attainable segments and thoroughly describes the terrain and condition of each. Not only are these trail segments invaluable for planning shorter trips along the GDT, Lynx's pre-trip planning advice will also prove indispensable for long-distance hikers overcoming such daunting logistical challenges as resupply, navigation and access.

An account of the authors' walk across the Great Divide from Mexico to the Canadian border describes the people, the pertinent political and environmental issues, the history of the areas, and other important topics

No ordinary guidebook, Sierra High Route leads you from point to point through a spectacular 195-mile timberline route in California's High Sierra. The route follows a general direction but no particular trail, thus causing little or no impact and allowing hikers to experience the beautiful sub-alpine region of the High Sierra in a unique way.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST, NPR, AND KIRKUS REVIEWS A scathing portrait of an urgent new American crisis Over the last two decades, America has been falling deeper and deeper into a statistical mystery: Poverty goes up. Crime goes down. The prison population doubles. Fraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world’s wealth. The rich get massively richer. No one goes to jail. In search of a solution, journalist Matt Taibbi discovered the Divide, the seam in American life where our two most troubling trends—growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration—come together, driven by a dramatic shift in American citizenship: Our basic rights are now determined by our wealth or poverty. The Divide is what allows massively destructive fraud by the hyperwealthy to go unpunished, while turning poverty itself into a crime—but it’s impossible to see until you look at these two alarming trends side by side. In The Divide, Matt Taibbi takes readers on a galvanizing journey through both sides of our new system of justice—the fun-house-mirror worlds of the untouchably wealthy and the criminalized poor. He uncovers the startling looting that preceded the financial collapse; a wild conspiracy of billionaire hedge fund managers to destroy a company through dirty tricks; and the story of a whistleblower who gets in the way of the largest banks in America, only to find herself in the crosshairs. On the other side of the Divide, Taibbi takes us to the front lines of the immigrant dragnet; into the newly punitive welfare system which treats its beneficiaries as thieves; and deep inside the stop-and-frisk world, where standing in front of your own home has become an arrestable offense. As he narrates these incredible stories, he draws out and analyzes their common source: a perverse new standard of justice, based on a radical, disturbing new vision of civil rights. Through astonishing—and enraging—accounts of the high-stakes capers of the wealthy and nightmare stories of regular people caught in the Divide’s punishing logic, Taibbi lays bare one of the greatest challenges we face in contemporary American life: surviving a system that devours the lives of the poor, turns a blind eye to the destructive crimes of the wealthy, and implicates us all. Praise for The Divide “Ambitious . . . deeply reported, highly compelling . . . impossible to put down.”—The New York Times Book Review “These are the stories that will keep you up at night. . . . The Divide is not just a report from the new America; it is advocacy journalism at its finest.”—Los Angeles Times “Taibbi is a relentless investigative reporter. He takes readers inside not only investment banks, hedge funds and the blood sport of short-sellers, but into the lives of the needy, minorities, street drifters and illegal immigrants. . . . The Divide is an important book. Its documentation is powerful and shocking.”—The Washington Post “Captivating . . . The Divide enshrines its author’s position as one of the most important voices in contemporary American journalism.”—The Independent (UK) “Taibbi [is] perhaps the greatest reporter on Wall Street’s crimes in the modern era.”—Salon