The National Parks, Our American Landscape

If the cover photo of The National Parks, Our American Landscape, doesn't encourage you to call in sick and head into the national parks, well, perhaps one of the hundreds of other images inside this book will.

Gracing the cover is an image Ian Shive captured in Montana of Glacier National Park, one of a lone backpacker on a rocky outcrop gazing out across a panoramic landscape of blue lakes, green forests, dramatic mountains. Flip the book over and you're looking at a similarly breathtaking image from Lake Clark National Park and Preserve in Alaska.

This is a new, paperback, version of the book by the same name that Mr. Shive published two years ago. While this edition is slightly smaller than the hardcover edition, it contains more than a few photos that didn't make the hardcover version.

For instance, while the timing, season-wise, didn't allow for the photographer to capture any images from Great Smoky Mountains National Park to include in the hardcover edition, there are four in this edition, including a two-page spread of the iconic staircase of mountains as seen at sunset from Clingmans Dome.

Other parks that are presented in this version, but not the hardcover, are Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve in Idaho, Cumberland Gap National Historical Park in Kentucky/Tennessee, Haleakala National Park, Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, and Lake Clark National Park and Preserve.

There also are new images from Mount Rainier National Park, Grand Teton National Park, Yosemite National Park, and Zion National Park, all parks that were among those featured in the hardcover edition.

Flip through this book and you'll find gorgeous photos of a foggy morning atop Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park, a bright orange garibaldi swimming in the Channel Islands Marine Sanctuary at Channel Islands National Park, a backlit fiddleneck in Yosemite, and a view into the crater of Haleakala.

And those are just the beginning of a photographic journey across the National Park System that you can use to decide which parks you want to place on your personal check-off list.