Less a how-to than a survey of where the movement went. Urban Sketchers started as a Flickr group in 2007 and turned into a global thing with chapters in hundreds of cities, and Bower gathers work from sketchers across those…
Kevin Fedarko
The Grand Canyon runs two hundred seventy-seven river miles and has no trail from one end to the other, so walking it means about seven hundred fifty miles of route-finding along ledges between the rim and the river, in country…
Joseph Wood Krutch
Krutch was a New York drama critic and Thoreau scholar who moved to Tucson in his fifties and became one of the great desert writers. This is his naturalist’s year: The spadefoot toad that waits underground for the one right…
Andrew Sean Greer
The writing in this book is anguished from the first page: It’s precious, far too self-aware, awkward, and twee. It set me on edge. I pushed through another or ten or so pages and gave up. I might return for…
Lauren Groff
A servant girl runs out of the Jamestown fort in the winter of the starving time, with a hatchet, a stolen pewter cup, and two pairs of stockings, into a continent she knows nothing about. That’s the whole book —…
Frank B. Salisbury
Salisbury was a plant physiologist at Utah State — a serious scientist with NASA contracts — who spent years in the late sixties and early seventies documenting sightings in the Uintah Basin, mostly from the Ute reservation and the ranching…
Felix Scheinberger
Scheinberger’s watercolor book, and it’s aimed at people who’ve been told watercolor is difficult and precious. He isn’t. It’s color theory taught quickly, a small palette, the mechanics of wet-on-wet and glazing, how to keep whites, how to fix a…
Isabel Carmona Andreu
Confession: I have an absurdly large collection of urban sketching books and spend more time admiring their artwork than actually drawing. That’s okay. This is a beginner’s book, and right up my alley. Andreu sketches around Newbury in England and…
Shari Blaukopf
Blaukopf teaches in Montreal and sketches a lot of wet streets and bare trees, and this is the color volume of the handbook series. It’s pocket-sized and built around one idea: A tiny palette, mixed well, beats a big box…
Katie Woodward
Light is what makes a sketch read, and this is the volume about it. Woodward works through value structure first — squinting to reduce a scene to three or four tones — then the direction and quality of light, cast…
Virginia Hein and Gail L. Wong
The volume about sketching the parts of a scene that won’t hold still and don’t have straight lines. Hein and Wong work through trees as masses rather than leaves, foliage in different seasons, water and reflections, rock and cliff, skies…
Veronica Lawlor
Lawlor drew the aftermath of September 11 on the streets of Manhattan, and this is the volume about drawing as journalism — going to the event and reporting it in line. Courtrooms, protests, disaster zones, political conventions, ordinary meetings. She…
Róisín Curé
People are the thing that stops most sketchers cold. They move, and everybody already knows what a person is supposed to look like, so the errors show. Curé’s fix is to start with proportion and then get you drawing fast…
Mike Yoshiaki Daikubara
Everybody draws the lines and then fills them in. Daikubara does it backwards — watercolor down first, loose and fast, shapes and values with no outline, then ink on top once it’s dry, and only where it’s needed. The advantage…
Gabriel Campanario
This is the buildings volume and the one that fixes the most common glitch. It’s all about perspective, finding eye level, one and two vanishing points, how to draw a street that runs uphill, how to fake a crowd of…
Stephanie Bower
Bower trained as an architect and taught architectural drawing, and this is the tips volume — a hundred and one short entries you can flip to quickly. How to find eye level and why everything depends on it, how to…
Earl Swift
Virginian Earl Swift loves the Appalachian Trail. As a young man, he kept moving closer and closer to it, as if inching toward a girl he wanted to know, eventually leasing “a goddamn eyesore” apartment because it was located at…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
