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…
Eric Blehm
Randy Morgenson spent twenty-eight summers as a backcountry ranger in Sequoia and Kings Canyon, walking a district most people never see, and in July 1996 he didn’t answer the radio. What followed was one of the largest searches in Park…
Joe Simpson
Simpson and Simon Yates climbed the west face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes, the first ascent, and on the way down Simpson shattered his leg. Yates lowered him a thousand feet at a time until Simpson went over…
Edward Abbey
Four people meet on a river trip and decide to start wrecking things: a Vietnam surgeon with three ex-wives, a Mormon river guide with three current ones, a Bronx kid turned desert fanatic, and a woman from the Bronx who…
Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard was in her twenties, living beside a creek in Virginia’s Blue Ridge, when she spent a year writing what she saw there — muskrats, a mantis laying eggs, a frog that a giant water bug drains to a…
Carl Hoffman
In 1961, Michael Rockefeller, twenty-three, son of the governor of New York, disappeared off the coast of Asmat in Dutch New Guinea while collecting art. The family said he drowned. Hoffman went and lived in Asmat villages for months, worked…
Jaimal Yogis
Yogis follows Saltwater Buddha here, picking up in his early twenties with a broken heart and no direction. He goes to a monastery in Dharamsala and meets Sonam, a Tibetan refugee, and hatches a half-baked plan to get him to…
Carl Hoffman
Two men, thirty years apart. Bruno Manser, a Swiss shepherd who walked into the Sarawak rainforest in 1984, lived six years with the nomadic Penan, then led their blockades against the logging companies and became a wanted man before vanishing…
Kate Harris
Harris is one of the few authors whose writing stops me in my tracks (in a good way, of course). She grew up wanting to be an explorer, decided the planet was fully mapped, and went into science instead —…
Patrik Svensson
Who knew there could be an international bestseller all about eels? Turns out, as Patrik Svensson writes, quite a few knew. Centuries of leading thinkers — Pliny the Elder, Aristotle, Sigmund Freud, Rachel Carson — have been captivated by eels…
Jack Kerouac
Sal Paradise meets Dean Moriarty and spends the next few years crossing and recrossing the country — New York to Denver to San Francisco, down to Mexico City, back again, in borrowed cars and on buses, with no money, chasing…
Jack Kerouac
Kerouac wrote On the Road, and it made him famous, and the fame ate him alive. By 1960, he was thirty-eight, drinking himself apart, with strangers showing up at his mother’s house wanting the King of the Beats. Lawrence Ferlinghetti…
Wilfred Thesiger
Thesiger crossed the Empty Quarter twice in the late 1940s, on camels, with a few Bedu who’d have gotten there a lot faster without him. His nominal job was scouting locust breeding grounds for the British, locusts being the scourge…
Bruce Chatwin
Chatwin went to central Australia to find out how Aboriginal songlines work — the invisible tracks across the country laid down by ancestral beings, sung into being, where the melody carries the shape of the land so a man can…
Bruce Chatwin
Bruce Chatwin’s book about Patagonia is one of the great travel narratives — though what exactly it is up for debate. It’s part travelogue, part history, part fiction, part hallucination, part what the actual. Chatwin walked through Patagonia collecting stories…
Apsley Cherry-Garrard
Cherry-Garrard was twenty-four, half blind without his glasses, and paid to join Scott’s last expedition. The title journey isn’t the pole. It’s the winter trip he made with two others to Cape Crozier to collect emperor penguin eggs, five weeks…
Jack Kerouac
Kerouac wrote this right after On the Road, and it’s the calmer and better book. Ray Smith is Kerouac and Japhy Ryder is Gary Snyder, who was then a young poet in Berkeley translating Han Shan and heading for a…
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…
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 —…
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,…
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
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
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
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…
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…
