Allan Burns

Aldo Leopold's "A Sand County Almanac" is perhaps the greatest classic of 20th-century American nature writing and conservation literature. It distills a lifetime of experience and hard-earned wisdom, including years of work with the U.S. Forest Service, into a single compact volume. Divided into three sections, it moves from the concrete to the abstract and from the local to the universal, culminating in the great, immensely influential essay "The Land Ethic." Along the way, Leopold offers some of the finest writing about the outdoors in all American literature in classic and unforgettable sketches such as "Great Possessions," "Marshland Elegy," and "Thinking Like a Mountain." Often charming in detail but ultimately quite poignant as well as breathtaking in scope, the book is a must-read for anyone who cares about quality writing and the environment we inhabit (and shouldn't that be all of us?).