For the past two decades, David Quammen has followed winding trails and fresh lines of thought through the world's outback.

This book is a collection of twenty-three of Quammen's most intriguing, most exciting, most memorable pieces. In it you will meet seasoned professional kayakers on the Futaleufu River of southern Chile, where Quammen describes how it feels to travel in fast company and flail for survival in the river's maw.

You will be introduced to the commerce in pearls (and black-market parrots) in the Aru Islands of eastern Indonesia and taken ambivalently along on a lion-hunting excursion through the mountains of Montana. At the Cincinnati Zoo, there is a lesson to be learned about the ugly truth behind those beautiful white tigers, and the celebration of a fiftieth wedding anniversary serves as occasion for pondering Einstein's ideas on the relativity of time.

Even within the boundaries of smog-choked Los Angeles, Quammen finds wildness - embodied in an elusive population of urban coyotes, too stubborn and too clever to surrender to the sprawl of civilization.