Fungi are having a moment. Research shows psychedelics can be a powerful tool to treat mental health issues, and local, state, and federal governments are open to decriminalizing shrooms or exploring medical applications. But, as Merlin Sheldrake enthusiastically shows, fungi…
Kaliane Bradley
A near-future British government has time travel and no idea what to do with it, so it pulls a handful of people out of history moments before they would have died and assigns each one a “bridge” — a civil…
Art Davidson
In February 1967, eight men attempted Denali in winter, which nobody had done. Three of them reached the summit late in the day, then got pinned at Denali Pass by a storm that lasted six days — no tent, in…
David Darlington
Darlington spent years driving and walking the Mojave in the years around the fight over the California Desert Protection Act, and the book is built out of the people who live there and can’t agree on anything. Miners who see…
Edward Abbey
Four people meet on a river trip and decide to start wrecking things: a Vietnam surgeon with three ex-wives, a Mormon river guide with three current ones, a Bronx kid turned desert fanatic, and a woman from the Bronx who…
Oliver Morton
Morton is a science writer and this is the moon from every angle at once: how it formed and why that mattered for life here, what Apollo was as a political project, the geology of a dead world and what…
Huw Lewis-Jones
Portraits of the great mountaineers — Mallory, Shipton, Tilman, Hillary and Tenzing, Bonington, Messner, Boardman and Tasker, Lynn Hill, Steve House, and others — each with photographs, a short bio, and a passage in their own words. Lewis-Jones is a…
Keith McCloskey
In February 1959, nine experienced backcountry skiers died on a slope in the northern Urals. They cut their way out of the tent from the inside and ran into a blizzard at night in bare feet and underwear. Some froze;…
Joseph L. Sax
Sax was a law professor, and his argument is that parks aren’t a commodity to be delivered to consumers efficiently,and that the fight over what to allow in them — helicopters, tramways, snowmobiles, developed lodges — isn’t about elitism but…
Katy Bowman
Bowman is a biomechanist, and her argument is that exercise isn’t movement. An hour at the gym followed by nine hours in a chair leaves most of your body loaded exactly the same way all day, and cells respond to…
Lena Valencia
Ten stories, most of them set in the Desert Southwest, most of them about women in situations that tilt just past ordinary. A wellness retreat that goes wrong. Influencers in a canyon. A boarding school. A woman on the road…
Robert G. Bednarik
Bednarik is a self-taught Australian researcher with more than a thousand papers and no formal degree, and he has spent his career telling the rock art field it is making things up. This is the catalog of that. Natural cracks…
George R. Stewart
This book outlines where every major American place name came from, told as a narrative rather than a dictionary. Stewart runs the whole sweep — Native words remade by the English, Spanish saints, French traders, Dutch New York, the Puritans…
Kathleen DuVal
A thousand years of Native North America told as the history of powerful nations rather than as a prelude to colonization. DuVal opens at Cahokia, the city on the Mississippi bigger than London at the time, and works forward through…
Lawrence R. Walker and Frederick H. Landau
This is the only modern natural history of the Mojave, which makes it the standard by default, but it’s also thorough, engaging, and well-written. There’s the geology and how the basins and ranges got there, climate and why so little…
Diane Ackerman
Ackerman is a poet who reports like a naturalist, and she built this as five long sections, one per sense, with a short final piece on synesthesia. She starts with smell because it is the oldest sense and the one…
David B. Williams
David Williams spent nine years in Moab, working as a ranger at Arches and teaching for the Canyonlands Field Institute, and this is the field guide that came out of it, illustrated in line drawings by Gloria Brown. It covers…
Marc G. Berman
In 2018, Florence Williams’s The Nature Fix showed the science behind some of the positive effects of the natural world on human health. Now, neuroscientist Marc Berman takes us deeper, much deeper, into the fundamental wiring proving us creatures of…
James L. Gould; Carol Grant Gould
Animals navigate better than they should be able to and we still can’t fully explain it. The authors track through the evidence: Bees using polarized light and dancing directions to a hive, monarchs three generations removed finding one Mexican forest,…
Steve Hawk
A small nuclear device goes off beside a highway in West Virginia — low yield, few dead, and the first act of nuclear terrorism in history. Months later, on a rough stretch of Northern California coast, a surfer and lifeguard…
Diane Cook
Many dream of the camping trip that never ends. Surely our best selves are found in nature, right? In Diane Cook’s novel The New Wilderness, a mother saves her daughter from pollution-induced asthma by moving to the Wilderness State, an…
Antoine de Sainte-Exupery
Saint-Exupéry flew the mail in South America, and this is the night operation: Three planes converging on Buenos Aires from Patagonia, Chile, and Paraguay, and Rivière, who’s the man on the ground sending them out. One pilot flies into a…
Sara Herchenroether
In 1983, hikers in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest find the bodies of a woman and two children in barrels. Thirty years later, nobody has a name for any of them. Laura MacDonald, a librarian and genealogist in Connecticut going…
Anu Partanen
Partanen moved from Finland to New York, married an American, and found herself suddenly anxious in ways she never had been — about health insurance, about childcare, about student debt, about what happens if a job ends. Her argument is…
Daniel Mason
This is the story of one house in the western Massachusetts woods, told across four centuries by everyone who passed through it. Two lovers fleeing a Puritan colony. An apple-obsessed English soldier. Twin spinster sisters. A landscape painter, a schizophrenic…
