Set in an America where a second civil war broke out in 1954 and the wrong side won. By 2030, a white-run government called the Order classifies Black people as Descendants of Slavery and an algorithm hands out your job,…
Michael R. Canfield
Anyone who’s contemplated keeping a nature journal knows the paralysis of structuring a blank book. Here, a dozen field scientists open their notebooks and give you a peek. There are George Schaller’s pages from the Serengeti lions and the pandas…
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…
Gabriel Campanario
Campanario is the Seattle Times artist who started the Urban Sketchers blog in 2007 and turned it into a worldwide network, and this 2012 book is the movement’s first big showcase. More than a hundred sketchers from thirty-odd countries, work…
David Werner
Okay, I do a little prepping and this book is part of it. It’s a village health care manual, first published in 1970 out of work in the Sierra Madre of Mexico, and still the most widely used health book…
Amy Tan
Amy Tan started drawing birds in 2016 and kept a nature journal for six years, and this is a facsimile of it — her ink and watercolor drawings with her handwritten notes running around them. The Northern flicker, the scrub…
Patrick Syme
Before color charts, naturalists had no shared vocabulary, so a German mineralogist named Abraham Werner built one and the Scottish painter Patrick Syme expanded it in 1814 — 110 colors, each with a hand-painted swatch and three references: A mineral,…
R.E. Burrillo
Burrillo took the long way to Cedar Mesa — upstate New York, then New Orleans tending bar for five years trying to be a writer, then seasonal work in Glacier and two summers on the North Rim, which is where…
Oliver Burkeman
Do the math and a normal lifespan comes out to about four thousand weeks. That’s it. That’s the whole allotment. Burkeman spent years writing a productivity column, running every system going, and finally decided the entire project is a trap.…
Bill Broyles
El Camino del Diablo runs across the driest corner of the Sonoran Desert, and for centuries the only reliable water on it was Tinajas Altas — a stack of natural rock basins in a granite ravine, filled by the rare…
Patrick Bringley
Bringley was working a desk job at The New Yorker when his older brother Tom died of cancer in his twenties. After that, he had no taste for a career; he only wanted to stand still. So he took a…
Katy Bowman
Bowman is a biomechanist, and her argument is that exercise isn’t movement. An hour at the gym followed by nine hours in a chair leaves most of your body loaded exactly the same way all day, and cells respond to…
Stephanie Bower
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…
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…
Keith H. Basso
Keith Basso spent decades at Cibecue, Arizona, and the idea for the book sparked when an elder asked him to make a map with the real names on it. Apache place names turn out to be whole sentences — water…
Peter Reyner Banham
Banham was the British architecture critic who took Los Angeles seriously when nobody else would, and this is what happened when he pointed the same eye at the Mojave. He drives it, camps it, and picks at his own reaction…
Mary Austin
Austin published this in 1903, out of years living in the Owens Valley between the Sierra and Death Valley, and it’s the book that taught American writers how to look at the desert. Short chapters: A buzzard, a scavenger’s territory,…
Peter Attia
This book was written and blew up before Attia was connected to Jeffrey Epstein. His argument — and I wholeheartedly agree — is that medicine is good at trauma and infection and bad at the four things that actually kill…
Marilyn Stokstad and Michael W. Cothren
This is the survey doorstop, the one that gets assigned. Marilyn Stokstad wrote the first edition in the nineties at Kansas, and she did something the old standbys hadn’t: She quit treating art history as a straight line from Greece…
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…
Diana M. Raab
I’m a confessed notebook, sketchbook, and journal nerd, so I consume books like this like a bottomless barrel of gummi bears. It’s twenty-six writers on what they actually do with a notebook. Sue Grafton, Dorianne Laux, Kim Stafford, John Dufresne,…
Carrot Quinn
This book stopped me in my, ahem, tracks, and I was obsessed with the idea of excerpting it in Adventure Journal (we did—thanks, Carrot!). Quinn grew up in Anchorage with a mother deep in untreated schizophrenia — no heat, no…
Michel Pastoureau
Green was hard to make and harder to keep. The dye wouldn’t hold — it faded, it shifted, it wouldn’t sit still on cloth — and medieval guilds kept the blue dyers and the yellow dyers separate by law, so…
Franny Moyle
J.M.W. Turner was the son of a Covent Garden barber, sold his first drawings out of the shop window, got into the Royal Academy at fourteen, and became the most radical painter in England — and stayed a rough, secretive,…
Dennis Mersereau
A field guide to what’s over your head, written by a weather journalist for people who don’t want the math. Cloud types and what each one is telling you about the next few hours. How a thunderstorm actually organizes itself…
