In 1940 Steinbeck sailed in a sardine boat with his great friend the marine biologist, Ed Ricketts, to collect marine invertebrates from the beaches of the Gulf of California. The expedition was described by the two men in SEA OF CORTEZ, published in 1941. The day-to-day story of the trip is told here in the Log, which combines science, philosophy and high-spirited adventure. An exhilarating and highly entertaining read.

Get the Summary of John Steinbeck's The Log from the Sea of Cortez in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. John Steinbeck's "The Log from the Sea of Cortez" chronicles an expedition to the Gulf of California, where Steinbeck and his crew meticulously plan their journey, facing challenges such as unreliable maps, securing a vessel, and preparing supplies. They charter the Western Flyer, captained by Tony Berry, and set sail, despite consuming their medicinal whisky prematurely. The crew collects marine specimens, with Steinbeck reflecting on the human connection to boats and the innate violence in humanity. The narrative details their encounters with marine life, including porpoises, sea turtles, and red rock-lobsters, and their navigation through treacherous waters...

Celebrates the American writer who in his works confronted and explored the social fabric of the United States in the early 20th century. More than 500 entries include synopses of his novels, short stories, and nonfiction; descriptions of his characters, details about family, friends, and associates.

John Steinbeck is one of the most popular and important writers in American literature. Novels such as The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men,and East of Eden and the journal Travels with Charley convey the core of Steinbeck’s work—fiction that is reflective and compassionate. The Nobel prize winner cared deeply about people, and his writing captured the spirit, determination, and willingness of individuals to fight for their rights and the rights of others. His art of caring is critical for today’s readers and as a touchstone for our collective future. In Citizen Steinbeck: Giving Voice to the People, Robert McParland explains how the author’s work helps readers engage in moral reflection and develop empathy. McParland also looks at the ways educators around the world have used Steinbeck’s writings—both fiction and nonfiction—to impart ideals of compassion and social justice. These ideals are weaved into all of Steinbeck’s work, including his journalism and theatrical productions. Drawing on these texts—as well as interviews with secondary-level teachers—this book shows how Steinbeck’s work prompts readers to think critically and contextually about our values. Demonstrating the power a single author can have on generations of individuals around the world, Citizen Steinbeck enables readers to make sense of both the past and the present through the prism of this literary icon’s inspirational work.

Although the creative impulse surges in revolt against everyday reality, breaking through its confines, it makes pacts with that reality’s essential laws and returns to it to modulate its sense. In fact, it is through praxis that imagination and artistic inventiveness transmute the vital concerns of life, giving them human measure. But at the same time art’s inspiration imbues life with aesthetic sense, which lifts human experience to the spiritual. Within these two perspectives art launches messages of specifically human inner propulsions, strivings, ideals, nostalgia, yearnings prosaic and poetic, profane and sacral, practical and ideal, while standing at the fragile borderline of everydayness and imaginative adventure. Art’s creative perduring constructs are intentional marks of the aesthetic significance attributed to the flux of human life and reflect the human quest for repose. They mediate communication and participation in spirit and sustain the relative continuity of culture and history.

The desert islands in the Sea of Cortez are little known except to a few intrepid tourists, sailors, and fishermen. Though at first glance these stark islands may appear barren, they are a refuge for an astounding variety of plants and animals. While many of the species are typical of the greater Sonoran Desert region, some are endemic or unique to one or two islands. For example, Isla Santa Catalina is home to the worldÕs only rattlesnake that has lost its ability to grow a rattle. Other islands host nesting birds, such as Isla Rasa, a tiny, flat flow of basalt lava that attracts nearly half a million elegant and royal terns and HeermannÕs gulls each spring. The Desert Islands of MexicoÕs Sea of Cortez is one of the few books devoted to the biogeography of this remarkable part of the world. The book explores the geologic origin of the gulf and its islands, presents some of the basics of island biogeography, details insular lifeÑincluding residents of the intertidal zone Ñand provides a brief outlook for preserving this area. More than a simple guidebook, AitchisonÕs writing will take both actual and armchair travelers through a gripping tale of natural history. Like the rest of our fragile planet, the Sea of Cortez and its islands are threatened by humans. Overfishing has eliminated or greatly diminished many fish stocks, and dams on rivers that once flowed into the gulf prevent certain nutrients from reaching the sea. The tenuousness of this area makes the bookÕs extraordinary photographs and the firsthand descriptions by a well-known teacher, writer, and photographer all the more compelling.

This collection reviews what has been categorized as the 'good' and the 'bad' of Steinbeck's short novels, looking beyond the careless labeling that has characterized a great deal of commentary on Steinbeck's writing to the true strengths and weaknesses of the works.

Environmental Justice in Contemporary US Narratives examines post-1929 US artistic interrogations of environmental disruption. Tracing themes of pollution, marine life, and agricultural production in the work of a number of historically significant writers including John Steinbeck, Ruth Ozeki, and Cherríe Moraga, this book outlines a series of incisive dialogues on transnational flows of capital and environmental justice. Texts ranging from The Grapes of Wrath (1939) to Body Toxic (2001) represent the body as vulnerable to a host of environmental risks. They identify "natural disasters" not just as environmental hazards and catastrophes, but also as events intertwined with socioeconomic issues. With careful textual analysis, Athanassakis shows how twentieth- and twenty-first-century US writers have sought to rethink traditional understandings of how the human being relates to ecological phenomena. Their work, and this study, offer new modes of creative engagement with environmental degradation – engagement that is proactive, ambivalent, and even playful. This book contributes to vital discussions about the importance of literature for social justice movements, food studies, ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities. The core argument of the book is that artistically imaginative narratives of environmental disturbance can help humans contend with ostensibly uncontrollable, drastic planetary changes.

“There is no greater gift to man than to understand nothing of his fate”, declares poet-philosopher Paul Valery. And yet the searching human being seeks ceaselessly to disentangle the networks of experiences, desires, inward promptings, personal ambitions, and elevated strivings which directed his/her life-course within changing circumstances in order to discover his sense of life. Literature seeks in numerous channels of insight the dominant threads of “the sense of life”, “the inward quest”, “the frames of experience” in reaching the inward sources of what we call ‘destiny’ inspired by experience and temporality which carry it on. This unusual collection reveals the deeper generative elements which form sense of life stretching between destiny and doom. They escape attention in their metamorphic transformations of the inexorable, irreversibility of time which undergoes different interpretations in the phases examining our life. Our key to life has to be ever discovered anew.

Exciting new essays provide an important model for ecological criticism and an enriched appreciation of the Steinbeck canon.