It’s set in Kolkata, India, a few decades out, under flood and heat and a food shortage that has markets selling seaweed and synthetic fish. Ma runs a shelter, cares for her elderly father and her two-year-old daughter, and has…
John McPhee
McPhee’s first geology book, 1981, and the one that started the whole run. He rides I-80 across Nevada with Ken Deffeyes, a Princeton geologist with a beard and a scheme to make money pulling silver out of hundred-year-old mine tailings.…
John McPhee
A million acres of sand and pitch pine in the middle of the most crowded state in the country, sitting on an aquifer holding trillions of gallons of clean water, with almost nobody living in it. McPhee spent months there…
John McPhee
McPhee’s takes David Brower, the head of the Sierra Club and the most effective conservationist alive, and drops him in the field with three men who want to use the land, one at a time, then writes down what happens.…
Craig Childs
Craig Childs went looking for the first people in the Americas by walking the ground they walked, back when the map looked nothing like it does now. Sea level was four hundred feet lower, an ice sheet sat on Canada,…
Aldo Leopold
You know it from “land ethic,” but you’ll remember it for his incredible observations of nature. Aldo Leopold was a forester who spent his early career killing predators for the government, then changed his mind, and this book is the…
Craig Childs
Two things are true in the desert: There isn’t enough water, and there is way too much of it. Childs spends the book hunting the first and getting caught by the second. He maps water holes in the Arizona desert,…
Zack Klein
Zach Klein co-founded Vimeo, then in 2010 bought fifty-five acres of woods in upstate New York with his wife and some friends and started building. They needed ideas, so they made a Tumblr to collect pictures of handmade cabins, and…
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…
Eowyn Ivey
This Pulitzer Prize finalist feels like winter—wet snowflakes on eyelashes, the smell of a woodstove, fear of long, dark nights. Inspired by an old Russian folk tale, it’s a fictional story about a novice homesteading couple in 1920s Alaska who…
Craig Childs
The standard story is that the Ancestral Puebloans vanished. Childs walks the actual ground to show they moved. He starts at Chaco and follows the trail out — the great houses at Aztec and Mesa Verde, the roads, the pottery…
Craig Childs
Craigs Childs walks canyons and leaves what he finds where it lies. That’s his position going in, and this book is him spending four years having it argued out of him. He sits with private collectors who have Mimbres bowls…
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…
Ian Frazier
Frazier spent years going out to Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota with his friend Le War Lance, an Oglala Lakota man he met in New York, and the book is what that friendship showed him. Some of it…
Peter Heller
One of my favorite books, full stop. It’s nine years after a pandemic, the location a small airport at the base of the Colorado Rockies. Hig (Big Hig to his friends) lives in a compound with his beloved dog, Jasper,…
David Roberts
Roberts came at Ruess for thirty years, and this book is him inside the story instead of outside it. The first half is the life: the letters, the woodblock prints, the burros, five years of a kid in his teens…
Robert Macfarlane
Macfarlane found that a children’s dictionary had cut words like acorn, bluebell, and kingfisher to make room for broadband and cut-and-paste, and this book is his answer. Nine chapters, each on a landscape and a writer who saw it clearly…
Huw Lewis-Jones
Maps of places that don’t exist and essays by the writers who made them. Treasure Island, Middle-earth, Narnia, Earthsea, Winnie-the-Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood, Discworld, and plenty more, reproduced large. Philip Pullman, Robert Macfarlane, Frances Hardinge, Cressida Cowell, David Mitchell, Joanne…
Antoine de Sainte-Exupery
His first book, and the roughest. Jacques Bernis flies the Toulouse–Dakar mail run down the coast of Africa, over the Spanish Sahara where a forced landing means capture, and the narrator is a friend at one of the desert waystations…
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…
Antoine de Sainte-Exupery
Saint-Exupéry flew reconnaissance during the collapse of France in May 1940, and this is one flight — low over Arras, through flak, to photograph German positions in a sector already lost. Everybody in the squadron knows the mission is pointless.…
Antoine de Sainte-Exupery
Frenchman Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wasn’t just the writer of The Little Prince, he was a pilot who helped pioneer postal aviation in the 1920s, when planes barely had instruments (he lamented that pilots of later, more-advanced planes were little more…
Antoine de Sainte-Exupery
A pilot crashes in the Sahara with eight days of water and a broken engine, and a small boy appears out of nowhere asking him to draw a sheep. The boy is from an asteroid the size of a house,…
Robert Macfarlane
Macfarlane writes that an old path is a record of everyone who wore it, that walking one puts you in their company whether you want it or not, and that this does something to the inside of your head —…
Yvon Chouinard
Chouinard taught himself blacksmithing to make better pitons, sold them out of the trunk of his car in Yosemite, and then discovered his pitons were wrecking the cracks, so he stopped making the thing his company was built on and…
