As a young boy in Sweden at the beginning of the twentieth century, bookworm Sven Ormson was obsessed with polar adventure, but decades of lethargy and dead-end jobs have led to a man who is, at best, stuck. Spurred by…
Cassidy Randall
Yes, gender is critical to the story of the 1970 Denali Damsels expedition on North America’s tallest summit. The six women just wanted to climb mountains, and in the late 1960s they had to fight male misogyny and suspicion to…
Ken Ilgunas
Ilgunas walked the Keystone XL route across the Plains, most of it on other people’s land, and came out with a question: When did Americans lose the run of their own country? His answer is that they had it and…
Christopher Ketcham
Ketcham spent years reporting on the four hundred fifty million acres the federal government holds in the West and came back angry. The core of it is livestock grazing on public land — how few operators there are, how little…
Tiffany Crum
Tiffany Crum’s debut mystery is about Benny Abbott and Joy Moore, best friends who host a hit podcast built on “against all odds” survival stories — near-death experiences told with a lot of gallows humor. Their show is on the…
Anil Ananthaswamy
Recommended by a friend of a friend who’s a working physicist. You know the experiment. Shine light through two slits and it makes an interference pattern, like waves. Fire it one particle at a time and the pattern still builds…
Carrot Quinn
The Pacific Crest Trail, 2,660 miles, told as the daily blog she actually kept — which is why it reads nothing like a reflective memoir. It’s feet, water carries, hunger, weather, town stops, and the trail family that forms and…
Martin Amis
The book runs backward. It opens with a man dying in America and moves the wrong way down his life, narrated by a consciousness riding inside him that can’t control anything and doesn’t understand what it sees. So doctors take…
Rosalie Haizlett
With luck, Tiny Worlds will trigger FOMO—and point you toward the miraculous web of beauty seen at foot level and strolling speed. Plagued by chronic migraines as a teenager, West Virginia watercolorist Rosalie Haizlett started taking long walks in nature…
Stuart M. Kaminsky
Toby Peters is a broke Los Angeles private detective in the 1940s whose specialty is doing quiet jobs for movie stars. In this one the client is Cary Grant, being blackmailed with a photograph and tangled up in wartime counterintelligence…
Eowyn Ivey
In 1885, shortly after the Alaska Purchase from Russia and before the gold rush, the U.S. Army’s Lieutenant Henry T. Allen was ordered on a twelve-hundred-mile expedition to map the Copper and Tanana rivers of Alaska’s interior. Little was known…
Gabrielle Zevin
Sam and Sadie meet as kids in a hospital game room in Los Angeles, fall out, and meet again in a Cambridge subway station in the nineties. They make a video game together in a borrowed apartment over one summer…
Joe Simpson
Simpson and Simon Yates climbed the west face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes, the first ascent, and on the way down Simpson shattered his leg. Yates lowered him a thousand feet at a time until Simpson went over…
Ian Frazier
Frazier caught what he calls Russia-love and spent years going back, culminating in a nine-thousand-mile drive across Siberia in a used van with two Russian guides who argued the whole way. The book is that trip plus the whole history…
Kory Stamper
Kory Stamper spent decades writing dictionaries at Merriam-Webster, and she kept getting stuck on the color entries in Webster’s Third, which are gloriously nuts. Begonia is defined as a deep pink that’s bluer than fiesta and stronger than sweet william.…
Franny Moyle
J.M.W. Turner was the son of a Covent Garden barber, sold his first drawings out of the shop window, got into the Royal Academy at fourteen, and became the most radical painter in England — and stayed a rough, secretive,…
Gary Ferguson
Ponderosa is the tree that makes the Southwest the Southwest— cinnamon bark, high open groves you can ride a horse through, vanilla smell in the sun. In the last decade, from Santa Fe to the Sierra, more than two hundred…
Colum McCann
Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and failing novelist, gets an assignment about the undersea cables that carry the internet, and joins a repair ship off the west coast of Africa. The chief of mission is John Conway, a freediver and…
Velma Wallis
During a harsh winter, a nomadic tribe makes the difficult decision to leave two elderly women behind. At first the women are devastated, but they come to realize they don’t have to give up on life without a fight. To…
David
Longtime National Geographic photographer David Doubilet has spent more than twenty-seven thousand hours underwater, often in pursuit of the images that have become synonymous with his name: over/unders, above and belows, or, as he calls them, half-and-halfs. Enabled by domed…
Richard Henry Dana
Dana was a Harvard student whose eyes gave out, so in 1834 he shipped out of Boston as a common sailor rather than a passenger, rounded the Horn, and spent two years working the hide trade on the California coast…
Leslie Kean
The 2010 book that changed the conversation, subtitled “Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record,” and that’s literally the structure. Kean got firsthand accounts from people with names and ranks: A Belgian air force general, an Iranian fighter…
Colson Whitehead
Cora is a teenager on a Georgia cotton plantation, working a patch of dirt her grandmother claimed, abandoned by a mother who ran and never sent word. When Caesar asks her to go with him, she says no, then says…
Robert Macfarlane
Rob Mac tackles what’s under foot, in three parts: what we shelter, what we yield, what we dispose of. He peers into a dark matter lab under a Yorkshire hill, the wood wide web and the fungal networks trading sugar…
Quan Barry
Striker is a Black film scout on a luxury Antarctic cruise, photographing locations for a big-budget movie about Shackleton, and she’s the only Black passenger aboard among tech money and blended families she watches with a very dry eye. Then…
