Alex Patterson flew P-51s in the war, spent a career at IBM, retired, then went back to school and made himself an anthropologist. This came out of that second life, in 1992, and it’s still the standard — seventeen printings,…
Gestalten
The one that started the small-cabin publishing run. Huts, shelters, and retreats from the last couple of decades, plus a handful of older icons, arranged for browsing — forest cabins on stilts, mountain refuges, a sauna at the end of…
Gestalten
The follow-up to Rock the Shack, and the pitch is in the title: Buildings you inhabit to not to be found. They’re cabins, huts, treehouses, bothies, and small retreats from around the world, shot well and presented with plans and…
Indoek
Indoek photographed surfers at home — not in the water, in their houses, vans, trailers, and cabins — and the result is a portrait of a subculture through its interiors. Shapers’ garages, boards stacked in hallways, plants, records, wetsuits drying…
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…
Matt Warshaw
Warshaw spent years assembling this — fifteen hundred entries covering surfers, breaks, board designers, films, magazines, contests, terminology, and the odd corners nobody else bothered with. It’s alphabetical and it’s browsable to a dangerous degree: You look up one thing…
Sebastian Copeland
If anyone can transport us into the soul of the White Continent, it’s photographer Sebastian Copeland. A professional polar explorer, Copeland has made several human-powered expeditions in frozen extremes, including the first transcontinental crossing of Antarctica from east to west…
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…
Roger Deakin
You’ll never regret plunging into the “wild swimming” world of British environmentalist Roger Deakin, who lived in a moated farmhouse. Yes, a moat. You’re already charmed, right? Inspired by a short story, Deakin decided to swim throughout Britain in as…
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…
Peter Heller
Peter Heller’s novel The River,moved as swiftly and eventfully as class V whitewater, but not all readers were pleased with its denouement (one AJ editor and Heller fan threw his copy against the wall in protest). The Guide, though, will…
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…
Katie Ives
In 1962, a climbing magazine ran a photo of an impossible range of granite spires called the Riesenstein, said to be in British Columbia, and climbers went looking for it. It was a hoax — the picture showed the Kichatna…
Li Juan
“Later, when I found myself hoisting thirty pounds of snow, tottering across the desert huffing and puffing like an ox, I couldn’t help but sigh: bad idea.” So notes eighty-eight-pound Li Juan in her surprisingly humorous memoir about a winter…
Andrew Krivak
Off in the future, society has collapsed, leaving behind only a girl and her father as the last people on the planet. They live in an idyllic setting, the stuff of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dreams: a mountainside cabin near a…
Robert Macfarlane
He set out to find what wildness is left in Britain and Ireland, expecting remoteness — islands, summits, moors — and slept out in fifteen of them over a year. Then Roger Deakin, his friend, kept pointing him back toward…
Kim McCoy
What The Joy of Cooking is to home cooks, Waves and Beaches has been to sea lovers for nearly sixty years. The comprehensive tome is part fundamental instructional and part voluminous love letter to the alchemy of where land meets…
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Short essays, one animal or plant each, illustrated by Fumi Nakamura. The axolotl’s permanent smile. The corpse flower. The peacock she loved as a girl and the classmates who made that a problem. Firefly squid, whale sharks, cactus wrens, monsoon…
M.R. O’Connor
“I had forgotten that my phone knew nothing of whether humans can fly, or the seasonal flow of the Rio Grande, that it had no actual experience because it had never been born, only programmed by someone who might never…
Hampton Sides
Kit Carson was a small, illiterate, soft-spoken trapper who couldn’t read the dime novels that made him a legend while he was still alive. Sides uses him as the thread through the whole conquest of the Southwest — the Mexican…
Wendy Trusler, Carol Devine
Is it a cookbook? A field journal memoir? A photo album with cool archives, like a scan of a 1912 polar menu featuring “Plum Pouding Union Jack” and penguin? Yes, yes, and yes. But, cooking and cleaning...in Antarctica? Two young…
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…
Imbolo Mbue
How Beautiful We Were is more acutely felt than most of the real-life environmental tragedies that populate today’s headlines. A fictional eco-disaster set in the also fictional African village of Kosawa, Mbue’s second novel eviscerates the hypocrisies and externalized hungers…
Nathaniel Ian Miller
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…
Rebecca Wragg Sykes
Smug Homo sapiens have long looked down on Neanderthals, like city folk sneering at country cousins. Snort. You couldn’t even not go extinct. But these hominins have always gotten a bad rap, and Rebecca Wragg Sykes’s affectionate synthesis of a…
