William Bryant Logan

The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth

Dirt

A history of the oak tree identifies its significance in religious rites, homemaking, travel, literature, and the outcome of key military conflicts, in an account that documents the communitarian and educational nature of the oak and what it reveals about the natural world's link to science, philosophy, spirituality, and other human disciplines. Reprint.

Oak: The Frame of Civilization

The Restless Shaper of the World

Blending elements of science and philosophy, a former columnist for The New York Times creates a natural history of the soil that sustains human life, covering topics ranging from backyard gardening to the evolution of Planet Earth. Reprint.

Arborist William Bryant Logan recovers the lost tradition that sustained human life and culture for ten millennia.

Tending the Everlasting Gift of Trees

Sprout Lands

This extraordinary compendium provides extensive information and critical comment on the books, periodicals, catalogues, nurseries, societies, and services for every aspect of home gardening.

The Gardener's Book of Sources

The Story of Oak is at the root of everything we know. William Bryant Logan combines science, philosophy, spirituality, and history with a quirky curiosity about why the natural world works the way it does.

The Frame of Civilization

The author of Dirt and Oak brings to life this quickest, most sustaining, most communicative element of the earth. Air sustains the living. Every creature breathes to live, exchanging and changing the atmosphere. Water and dust spin and rise, make clouds and fall again, fertilizing the dirt. Twenty thousand fungal spores and half a million bacteria travel in a square foot of summer air. The chemical sense of aphids, the ultraviolet sight of swifts, a newborn’s awareness of its mother’s breast—all take place in the medium of air. Ignorance of the air is costly. The artist Eva Hesse died of inhaling her fiberglass medium. Thousands were sickened after 9/11 by supposedly “safe” air. The African Sahel suffers drought in part because we fill the air with industrial dusts. With the passionate narrative style and wide-ranging erudition that have made William Bryant Logan’s work a touchstone for nature lovers and environmentalists, Air is—like the contents of a bag of seaborne dust that Darwin collected aboard the Beagle—a treasure trove of discovery.

Air: The Restless Shaper of the World

"A gleeful, poetic book…Like the best natural histories, Dirt is a kind of prayer." —Los Angeles Times Book Review "You are about to read a lot about dirt, which no one knows very much about." So begins the cult classic that brings mystery and magic to "that stuff that won't come off your collar." John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Saint Phocas, Darwin, and Virgil parade through this thought-provoking work, taking their place next to the dung beetle, the compost heap, dowsing, historical farming, and the microscopic biota that till the soil. Whether William Bryant Logan is traversing the far reaches of the cosmos or plowing through our planet’s crust, his delightful, elegant, and surprisingly soulful meditations greatly enrich our concept of "dirt," that substance from which we all arise and to which we all must return.

William Bryant Logan

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