America boasts a dozen national parks as the park idea turns 50 years old. A millionaire businessman names Stephen Mather impulsively accepts the offer to oversee them for one year. Mather and his right-hand-man Horace Albright launch a campaign to publicize the parks as a unified system and to persuade Congress to create a single agency to oversee it: the National Park Service, established in 1916. Mount McKinley, Zion, Bryce Canyon, Arches, Acadia...

Historian Michael Wood chronicles the history of the Indian subcontinent, focusing especially on the diversity of its peoples, cultures and landscapes. The world's largest democracy and a rising economic giant, India is now as well known across the globe for its mastery of computer technology as it is for its many-armed gods and its famous spiritual traditions. But India is also the world's most ancient surviving civilization, with unbroken continuity...

When filthy-rich video store magnate Johnny Rose, his soap star wife Moira and their two kids -- über-hipster son David and socialite daughter Alexis -- suddenly find themselves broke, they are forced to leave their pampered lives to regroup and rebuild their empire from within the rural city limits of their only remaining asset - Schitt's Creek, an armpit of a town they once bought as a joke.

After World War II, an increasingly mobile and affluent nation begins placing demands on the parks as never before, and the parks are in danger of being "loved to death," A park service biologist names Adolph Murie argues that ingrained practices such as killing predators runs counter to the purpose of national parks, while David Brower of the Sierra Club mobilizes public opinion to defeat congressional proposals for dams in pristine places. In the...