The 1968 journey to Patagonia by Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins is the stuff of legend, and from it epic tales and giant companies were sparked. Four decades later, Jeff Johnson retraced their travels for Chris Malloy’s 2010 film, 180°…
James Lacatski, Colm Kelleher, and George Knapp
Lacatski was the Defense Intelligence Agency scientist who got the AAWSAP program funded — the predecessor to the better-known Pentagon UFO office — and this is the insider account of it. The program studied Skinwalker Ranch in Utah and the…
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 H. Knoll
I can’t read much deep-time stuff before it puts me to sleep. I read this. Knoll is a Harvard paleontologist who built his career on the Precambrian, the three billion years of microbial life that came before anything you can…
Paul Kingsnorth
Kingsnorth used to be a green campaigner, walked away from all that, and now lives on a smallholding in western Ireland, where he went and got himself baptized Orthodox. This book is twenty years of him chewing on one bone.…
Robin Wall Kimmerer
A short book — essay length, illustrated — built on one plant. The serviceberry ripens in June and everything eats it: Birds, bears, people. Kimmerer uses it to lay out what she calls a gift economy, the way it works…
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…
Leslie Kean
Kean is a journalist who applied the same method here she used on UFOs: Go to the best-documented cases, interview the researchers, report what holds up. That means young children with detailed verifiable memories of previous lives, work from the…
Lucinda Kaukas Havenhand
A history of the American interior between roughly 1940 and 1970, and it’s about interiors rather than the famous chairs. Havenhand covers the designers who shaped how rooms looked and worked — Florence Knoll, Ray Eames, Alexander Girard, Van Day…
Frida Kahlo
This is last ten years of her life in her own hand — a facsimile of the journal she kept from about 1944, reproduced in full color, so you can see the actual pages. There are watercolor and ink drawings,…
Edmund C. Jaeger
In 1946, Edmund Jaeger was poking around a canyon in the Chuckwalla Mountains when he found a poorwill wedged in a rock crevice, cold and unresponsive, and it stayed that way for weeks. Nobody thought birds could hibernate. He went…
Edmund C. Jaeger
Jaeger’s 1933 guide, and for decades it was the only real one: geology, water, weather, plants, animals, and the routes across the Mojave and the Colorado, written by a man who walked it for sixty years and taught at Riverside.…
Ryan Huling
The premise is a line from American naturalist Henry Beston: Animals aren’t underlings, they’re other nations. Huling takes it literally and spends a year mapping their territories — Canada’s beaver belt, the tunnel complexes of sub-Saharan mole-rats, prairie dog cities…
Miriam Horn
George Schaller invented the way modern field biology is done, which was mostly to go sit with the animals for years. Born in Berlin in 1933 to an American mother and a Nazi diplomat father, shuttled through occupied countries, he…
Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney, eds.
A dictionary of American landscape words, written by forty-five writers instead of lexicographers. Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney handed out the terms and let each writer define them — so Barbara Kingsolver gets some, Antonya Nelson, William Kittredge, Luis Alberto…
James Hoffmann
Hoffmann won the World Barista Championship, and the first third here is the practical part — how coffee grows, what varietals are, the difference washed and natural processing makes in the cup, how roast level actually works, and brewing methods…
Donald D. Hoffman
Hoffman is a cognitive scientist who ran evolutionary simulations and got a result he didn’t like: Organisms that perceive reality accurately lose to organisms that perceive fitness payoffs instead. His conclusion is that space, time, and objects are a species-specific…
Hayden Herrera
Herrera published this in 1983, when Kahlo was still mostly filed as Diego Rivera’s wife, and it’s the book that ended that. She goes back to the blue house in Coyoacán where Frida was born, the polio at six, and…
Lafcadio Hearn
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…
Yuval Noah Harari
This is the whole span of the species in one volume, organized around three revolutions: Cognitive, agricultural, scientific. Harari’s central move is that what let us take over wasn’t intelligence exactly but the ability to believe in things that don’t…
David Graeber
The standard story of human civilization development argues we went from small egalitarian bands, to farming, to cities, and then inevitable hierarchy and the state. Graeber, an anthropologist, and Wengrow, an archaeologist, spent ten years arguing that’s baloney. Evidence shows…
James L. Gould; Carol Grant Gould
Animals navigate better than they should be able to and we still can’t fully explain it. The authors track through the evidence: Bees using polarized light and dancing directions to a hive, monarchs three generations removed finding one Mexican forest,…
Tristan Gooley
Every tree is a record of what happened to it. Gooley teaches you to read it: why branches on the south side grow at a different angle, how a tree leans away from prevailing wind and thickens on the windward…
Peter Godfrey-Smith
Our last common ancestor with an octopus was a flattened worm about six hundred million years back, which makes them the closest thing to meeting an intelligent alien on this planet. Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher and a scuba diver, and…
Peter Godfrey-Smith
If Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds was the octopus, this is everybody else. He works up the animal tree looking for where experience begins — sponges with no neurons at all, then corals, then a shrimp that stuns prey with a snap,…
