Books by John Owens

A picture-book journey through the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in winter, snowshoeing the frozen lakes and silent forest with family, encountering the wonders of northern wildlife in the cold season  In winter the Boundary Waters, way up north in Minnesota, is not the same place you canoed last summer—but still it beckons and welcomes you. Grab a pack, strap on snowshoes, make a path (Oh! they take some getting used to!), and venture out across the frozen lakes and through the snowy woods. The vast wintery world here is so still and quiet, you might think you’re all alone—but no! Who made these tracks? A deer? A hare? A fox? And far off there’s a musher, making tracks with his sled dogs.It’s a magical place. The bright sun brilliant on the snow, the sparkling silence—wait, is that a wolf calling? Try to answer! And when the dark descends, the stars and pine trees holding up the night, your nose gets cold and it’s back to camp, to your warm winter tent, where Father feeds the stove with wood you gathered, Mother snuggles into her big sleeping bag, and you curl up in the fire’s glow and know that in your dreams and memories you will return again and again to this one winter up north. A wintery adventure that unfolds in pictures, John Owens’s delightful book gives readers a chance to discover—or rediscover—another season full of wonder in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

Come along to a place of wordless wonder: the wilderness of the Boundary Waters on the Minnesota-Canada border. Join a family of three as their journey unfolds, picture by picture, marking the changing light as the day passes, the stillness before the gathering storm, the shining waters everywhere, rushing here, quietly pooling there, beckoning us ever onward into nature’s infinite wildness one summer up north.

This book examines Richard Rorty's position that religious and metaphysical beliefs should simply be abandoned, and it proposes that Rorty's position is contradicted by what is a fundamental part of every human life: the phenomenon of human recognition of other people.