McNamee is a witty and masterful wordsmith. Biology becomes poetry in his hands.
—Demetria Martínez, National Catholic Reporter
The following books are currently in print. For a complete list of publications and to inquire about out-of-print books, please send a note or use the search box to the right.
PixyJack Press, 2008
The clean energy economy is booming across the United States and around the world. Careers in Renewable Energy is a sophisticated—and user-friendly—guide for finding meaningful job opportunities in the renewable energy sector.
—Bill Richardson, Governor of New Mexico
Oil will eventually run out on our planet. It's only a matter of time – but it doesn't have to be the end of the world, no, it can be the way of the future and help readers find an exciting new career in the fields of renewable energy. "Careers in Renewable Energy: Get a Green Energy Job" is a guide to help environmentally conscious readers find a new career that will help them and help advance the concepts of Solar Energy, Geothermal Energy, Hydroelectric energy, Green Building, among other countless jobs available in renewable energy, providing countless references and resources to help readers get started. Any searching for a career in renewable energy and any public or business lending library catering to students or career changers will find specific and important this guide to clean energy opportunities across the country. From extensive lists of training facilities, schools, workshops, and professional organizations and societies to web sites and energy programs, this is the place for job seekers and career changers to begin. Expertly compiled and researched, "Careers in Renewable Energy: Get a Green Energy Job" is highly recommended for environmental studies collections with a crossover to career shelves.
—Midwest Book Review
I teach an undergraduate Earth Sustainability course that gets students fired up to work toward changes in the ways we produce and consume energy globally. While it's great that they have that motivation, few know where to direct it. I've shared my copy of Careers in Renewable Energy with them, and it seems to go from student to student, never making it back to my bookshelf between!
—Cortney Martin, Virginia Tech
The History, Science, and Lore of Food
Praeger Publishers, 2006
University of Nebraska Press, 2008
Of all the cultivatable ingredients, why have we chosen certain of them and rejected others? McNamee evaluates 30 of the most important ingredients, organized alphabetically, from almonds to wheat. He looks at their scientific makeup and nutritional value, as well as their social and culinary history and cultural relevance.... The author’s research is exhaustive, his pages packed with fascinating detail, and he does an excellent job of marrying the historical and scientific aspects of each ingredient.
—Kirkus Reviews
Everything we eat has a story. Knowing that story not only enhances the pleasure of the table, it also helps us regain a relationship to food—no longer as anonymous commodity, but as a critical part of our history, our culture, and the natural world we all come from. From almonds to wheat, Gregory McNamee tells us these stories with humor and intelligence in an engaging style that is both entertaining and enlightening.
—Michael Ableman
Journeys into the American Wilderness
Lyons Press, 2000
Nimble meditations on the land and a human presence that gives the land meaning and takes from it spiritual sustenance. . . . McNamee carries the reader across "the familiar furnace of the Great American Desert," a place often associated with nothingness but made vibrant by his reports from the field.
—Washington Post Book World
I've long been a fan of Gregory McNamee's work, but Blue Mountains Far Away is a specific step up into the arena of the best available.
—Jim Harrison
Elegantly distilled experiences in wild places—mostly desert, though Rome figures here, as does Kamchatka and the Burren—that have moved McNamee’s soul. . . . Experience such as these rambles, investigations, and broodings are what make up a life, estimable and visited by a curiosity that keeps it fresh and in wonder.
—Kirkus Reviews
With the passing of Edward Abbey and William Eastlake, Gregory McNamee has filled some very large shoes in the tradition of Southwestern letters and outdoor writing.
—Doug Peacock
Gregory McNamee is an engaging writer. He sees far into the landscape and becomes one with it in his spirit. Blue Mountains Far Away is an eloquent paean to the American West. These journeys into the American wilderness are worth taking and McNamee is exactly the man to take us there.
—N. Scott Momaday
A charmed book; Gregory McNamee never takes himself too seriously, or not seriously enough.
—Bill McKibben
Crown Publishers, 1994
University of New Mexico Press, 1998
This is a fine and important book, full of graceful, understated passions, and full of a natural history that has, like the river itself, been lost to us—for the time being. Gila is a gift to us from McNamee: of knowledge, insight, and the hard moral truths of our past errors.
—Rick Bass
The Gila River has been given a voice, and that voice is Gregory McNamee. We would do well to listen.
—Terry Tempest Williams
Important reading for environmentalists.
—Publishers Weekly
Photographs by Virgil Hancock
University of New Mexico Press, 2001
Las Vegas is a visceral city, an exaggerated feast for the eye, and at the same time it is a community fractured by consumerism—in which buying and selling set all our choices. No book to date offers the intense emotional experience of Las Vegas found in American Byzantium.
Johnson Books, 2004
The Alligator. Guinevere Castle. Buddha Temple. Ever wonder how the features of the Grand Canyon received their colorful and exotic names? Gregory McNamee reveals their stories in Grand Canyon Place Names. Serving as snapshots in time, the over 330 place names explored here honor the heroes and deities of many nations and cultures. Scientists (Darwin Plateau), explorers (Tyndall Dome), historical figures (Cochise Butte), and godheads (Krishna Shrine) are represented among incident names (Point Retreat) and the purely descriptive (Kangaroo Headland). Both fact- and legend-based and always fun to read, these place-name histories will heighten your experience of the Grand Canyon.—AdventurousTraveler.com
A Literary Companion
University of New Mexico Press, 2002
In his lyrical, broad-ranging introduction, McNamee concludes that deserts should not be defined by absences. Deserts, in fact, "swarm with life, albeit like that snarls, hisses, howls, bites, stings, or sticks." Apparently, they swarm with writers, too. This is a marvelous grab bag of short stories, folk tales, poems, songs and travelogues…. Desert Reader is a joy to thumb through.”
—Los Angeles Times
Confirmed desert rats will find it fascinating to see the world’s deserts as experienced by writers of world-class reputation—Jorge Luis Borges in the Patagonia Desert, for example, or Marco Polo’s encounter with the Persian Desert, or Charles Sturt on Australia’s Simpson Desert. Extremely readable; a delight.
—Books of the Southwest
Some highly original and challenging imagery enlivens the Desert Reader. From Muir to Darwin, and from Marco Polo to Borges, this literary work captures the essence of these dry but lively landscapes, spanning centuries and continents.
—E Magazine
A Literary Journey
Sierra Club Books, 2000
Broad and powerful . . . extensive and provocative: a collection that will fire in readers the need to head for the hills no matter what the weather.
—Kirkus Reviews
Mountains draw seekers of enlightenment, revelation, or adventure, as this artful anthology attests. . . . the book concentrates on the contemplative inspirations mountains evince and most suits a reader's contemplative moods.
—Booklist
A collection as shifting in content and tone as the world's jutting topography. That McNamee's anthology has grown from a deeply personal place is clear, as is his skill as an editor.
—Amazon.com
Western Writers Welcome the Wolf Home
with Gary Wockner and SueEllen Campbell
Johnson Books, 2005
winner of the 2005 Colorado Book Award
If you believe that literature has the power to change the world, then you will love Comeback Wolves. It's beautiful, important, and full of wild hope.
—Kathleen Dean Moore
Wolves are coming back to Colorado and the Southern Rockies. I think this little book will help them.
—Dave Foreman
The wolf is returning with or without us. The only thing in doubt is whether we're up to sharing the West with these native sons and daughters. Read this book and grab hold of the only future fit to live.
—Charles Bowden
This treasure of superb writing should be in the hands not only of those who support wolves, but more important, in the hands of those who don't—be sure to give a copy to someone who is unconvinced of the necessity of wolves, and help foster the understanding to bring those five-partite footprints back to Colorado.
—Ann Zwinger
Read the strong, clear voices in these pages. You will find yourself ever more resolved, or newly convinced, that western landscapes cannot be whole without the gifts that the wolf brings to the plant and animal communities—and to us.
—Charles Wilkinson
Comeback Wolves is a wonderful and timely collection of essays and poems in honor of Wolf. If only wolves could read they would surely feel much more welcomed than they frequently are. Enjoy and share this book widely.
—Marc Bekoff
Snakes in Folklore and Literature
University of Georgia Press, 2000
In his cogent and witty introduction to this collection of some fifty-five tales drawn from folklore and literature, Gregory McNamee reflects on the universality of human fascination with the serpent, throughout time and across cultures, by turns varying from admiration and respect to outright revulsion. In texts drawn from around the world, the snake is found variously to be deadly, crafty, wise, sympathetic, or symbolic, as well as an object both of scientific curiosity and whimsical speculation. Once bitten by this engaging work, the general reader will find himself charmed no less than the folklorist or natural historian.
—Virginia Quarterly Review
Photographs by Virgil Hancock
University of New Mexico Press, 1999
Provocative essayist Gregory McNamee keeps us grounded in the present, but reminds us of our 20th-century past and acts as guideposts for the uncertain future as we race toward the year 2000.
—Albuquerque Journal
and Other Fables of Aesop
Daimon Verlag, 2004
For 2,500 years, adults and children alike have been listening to the stories of Aesop. Originating in the folk wisdom of rural Asia Minor, these popular fables have been retold, repurposed, and altered over the centuries; in the process, they have sometimes been changed so much that they bear little resemblance to their simple forebears, which ask their listeners and readers to think for themselves, to supply their own conclusions. In this collection, Gregory McNamee draws on the Greek originals to provide Aesop's fables in a form that Aesop himself might recognize—ones in which fleas and foxes converse, people sometimes learn from their errors, and things are not always what they seem.
and Other Southwestern American Indian Folktales
Daimon Verlag, 2002
In this charming collection of folktales from long ago, we read of the creation of the world, of the ways of animals, of the beguiling Coyote, of the world in which we live and other worlds that hide just beyond our sight. Drawn from the oral literatures of some twenty Southwestern American Indian peoples, these stories teach us about the constants of those dry places: about how the clouds form in the sky, how the heat rises from the ground, how the animals move about from one shady spot to another, and how the people once lived their lives. All these stories show us—as the great anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss, observed— that folktales are not mere afterthoughts of literature, just pleasant stories to tell around the campfire, but rather valuable tools for reflection upon our own lives.
and Other Bushmen Folktales
Daimon Verlag, 2001
This ancient culture now teeters on the edge of extinction, but this slender volume provides their legacy in the form of stories, songs, dreams and beliefs. Collected, they hint at a way of being in the world and a mode of thought very foreign to us but familiar as dreams.
—Dallas Morning News
If you ever travel to Botswana, take The Girl Who Made Stars with you. Try to meet a Bushman. Take a walk with him. Ask him to explain what he sees in both his language and yours. Their bushcraft—survival skills, tracking, knowledge of plants and animals, ability to read weather patterns and the lay of the land—is unlike anyone else’s, and hearing Khoisan spoken is an unforgettable experience. Then settle back and read these stories with the faraway cough of the lion and the smell of Botswana sage as your companions.
—The Bloomsbury Review
A Desert Bestiary
Johnson Books, 1997
A charming mix of what McNamee calls "true statements, outrageous and odd lies, and entertaining guesses about why [desert] animals live the way they do.”
—Arizona Republic
I doubt there is any other writer who combines Gregory McNamee’s erudition, wit, and intimate knowledge of the desert.
—Stephen Bodio