Hearn was Greek-Irish, went to Japan in 1890 as a newspaper correspondent, married into a samurai family, took the name Koizumi Yakumo, and spent the rest of his life there. This is the collection he’s known for — Japanese ghost…
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…
David Roberts
This book changed my life. Roberts was a mountaineer who fell hard for the Ancestral Puebloans and spent years walking to their sites in the canyons of southeast Utah and northeast Arizona — cliff dwellings on ledges, granaries, rock art…
Cormac McCarthy
The second McCarthy border novel — a young man crosses into Mexico to return a wolf to the wild. The wolf doesn’t survive. Neither does the old world McCarthy is eulogizing. If McCarthy’s your jam, the prose is as good…
Cormac McCarthy
John Grady Cole is sixteen when his grandfather dies and the ranch he expected to inherit gets sold out from under him. It’s 1949, and the cowboy life he wants has already ended in Texas, so he and a friend…
Terry Tempest Williams
Two things happen at once. The Great Salt Lake rises to record levels through the mid-eighties and drowns the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, where Williams has watched birds her whole life. And her mother is dying of ovarian cancer,…
Cormac McCarthy
A runaway kid out of Tennessee, fourteen years old, drifts down into Texas in 1849 and falls in with the Glanton gang — real men, scalp hunters the Mexican states paid by the head to kill Apaches, who figured out…
Edward Abbey
Abbey spent two seasons as a ranger at Arches in the late fifties, alone in a trailer at the end of a dirt road, before the pavement came. This is what he made of it, and it isn’t a nature…
Rachel Carson
Carson was already a bestselling nature writer when she turned her attention to pesticides, and she was dying of cancer while she finished this. The opening is a fable — a town where the birds have gone quiet — and…
Peter Heller
Award-winning writer Peter Heller has traveled the world as an expedition kayaker from the High Pamirs of Tajikistan to Central America to Peru. Which is to say, few can write about rivers — their shifting colors, sounds, and moods —…
Huw Lewis-Jones
In 1957 and 1958, the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition drove tractors two thousand miles across the continent through the pole, the first surface crossing ever made, with Hillary’s team laying depots from the far side. George Lowe was the expedition photographer…
Huw Lewis-Jones
Huw Lewis-Jones put this together for the 300th birthday of Robinson Crusoe. The setup is simple: He handed a bunch of illustrators from all over the world the same assignment Defoe gave himself — you washed up somewhere, now draw…
Richard Powers
I was skeptical about this book, with its nine human characters, sprawling timeline from nineteenth century New York to Occupy Wall Street, and magical realism meets science fiction meets eco-terrorism fable. Wait, what? But Richard Powers, who’s won a National…
David Roberts
Written after a cancer diagnosis at seventy-three, and it’s Roberts taking stock of a life of risk and asking what exploration was ever for. He goes through the history — polar travel, the Amazon, the great cave systems, first ascents…
David Roberts
The sequel to In Search of the Old Ones, twenty years on. He revisits sites and finds some wrecked by visitation and others still untouched, and pushes into new country — Range Creek in Utah, kept private by one family…
Jon Krakauer
Krakauer was sent to Everest by a magazine to write about the commercialization of the mountain and summited on May 10, 1996, the day a storm caught multiple teams high on the peak. Eight people died that day, including both…
Jon Krakauer
Chris McCandless graduated from Emory, gave his savings to charity, abandoned his car, burned his cash, and spent two years drifting the West under the name Alexander Supertramp before walking into the bush north of Denali in April 1992. He…
Piers Paul Read
You know the story. Maybe you saw the movie. In October 1972, a chartered plane carrying a Uruguayan rugby team, their families, and friends clipped a ridge in the Andes and went down at 11,500 feet on a glacier. Seventy-two…
Barry Lopez
Barry Lopez spent five years going north — on the ice with Inuit and Iñupiat hunters, on ships, in camps with biologists — and came back with the book that made his name. It won the National Book Award in…
Wade Davis
Wade Davis’s monumental history of the British Everest expeditions of the 1920s — and the World War I trauma that drove them. The climbers who went to Everest were survivors of the trenches. The mountain was where they went to…
John McPhee
McPhee’s California book, and the fourth of the Annals volumes. He drove I-80 across the state with Eldridge Moores, a Davis geologist who read ancient seafloor for a living, and the story they told is that California isn’t one place.…
John McPhee
McPhee went north in the mid-seventies, right as the Land Claims Act carved the state up and everybody was fighting over what would be park, what would be Native, what would stay open. The book comes in three parts. First,…
John McPhee
I think this might have been my first McPhee book. It’s three long pieces about people trying to stop geology. The Army Corps of Engineers at the Old River Control Structure in Louisiana, holding the Mississippi in its channel against…
John McPhee
McPhee spent twenty years riding shotgun with geologists up and down Interstate 80, pulling over at roadcuts, and this is his four books on the subject plus a fifth chunk stacked into one. It won the Pulitzer in 1999. He…
John McPhee
Henri Vaillancourt was in his twenties in Greenville, New Hampshire, building birchbark canoes by hand — no plans, no power tools, bark peeled off standing trees, split spruce root for lashing, pitch for the seams — because almost nobody was…
