John Leland

A thanksgiving and lament for life on the South Carolina coast; ""Columbus knew no greater thrill than I, a ten-year-old discovering new creeks and branches and islands and mainland hideaways...I resolved to make my living as an explorer and said so in school when we were all asked what we planned to do upon our growing up."" John Leland lived a Huckleberry Finn sort of boyhood that most children would envy. A fifth-generation lowcountry native, he grew up fishing, swimming, and hunting arrowheads on a tidal creek just north of Charleston, South Carolina. With admirable freedom, he poled his bateau through the maze of oyster banks and the tangle of salt waterways known as Porcher's Creek. He spent years learning where the conchs congregated, where the clams kept secret rendezvous, and which hole hid the sweetest crabs. He became a naturalist by studying heron, frogs, and porpoises. Leland's existence was so interwined with Porcher's Creek that he lived, slept, and ate by its tides and seasons - until exiled by family misfortune and suburban encroachment. Leland combines nature writing and reminiscence with a heartfelt examination of change along the South Carolina coast. He celebrates Porcher's Creek as a watery refuge that links him to his childhood and ancestry, weaving together his family's story with that of the creek. He chronicles both the geographic dispersal of his family and the abandonment of traditional lowcountry ways of life. Leland takes his readers back to a time not so long ago, before golf courses, concrete, and speedboats transformed Porcher's Creek. With eloquence and humor, he dissects the life histories of its creatures - fiddler crabs, alligators, marsh hens, and more - and threads through the narrative of his own life history. On the surface a nature-lover's elegy, Porcher's Creek is in fact Leland's treatise on mankind's ambiguous place in the natural world.

A New York Times Bestseller An extraordinary look at what it means to grow old and a heartening guide to well-being, Happiness Is a Choice You Make weaves together the stories and wisdom of six New Yorkers who number among the "oldest old"--those eighty-five and up. In 2015, when the award-winning journalist John Leland set out on behalf of The New York Times to meet members of America's fastest-growing age group, he anticipated learning of challenges, of loneliness, and of the deterioration of body, mind, and quality of life. But the elders he met took him in an entirely different direction. Despite disparate backgrounds and circumstances, they each lived with a surprising lightness and contentment. The reality Leland encountered upended contemporary notions of aging, revealing the late stages of life as unexpectedly rich and the elderly as incomparably wise. Happiness Is a Choice You Make is an enduring collection of lessons that emphasizes, above all, the extraordinary influence we wield over the quality of our lives. With humility, heart, and wit, Leland has crafted a sophisticated and necessary reflection on how to "live better"--informed by those who have mastered the art.