14 books
Fumio Sasaki
Sasaki was a magazine editor in Tokyo, thirty-five, living alone in a room stacked with books, CDs, DVDs, and gear for hobbies he’d quit, comparing himself to everybody and losing. So he spent a year getting rid of about ninety-five…
David Roberts
Written after a cancer diagnosis at seventy-three, and it’s Roberts taking stock of a life of risk and asking what exploration was ever for. He goes through the history — polar travel, the Amazon, the great cave systems, first ascents…
Richard Powers
Four lives converging on Makatea, a French Polynesian island strip-mined for phosphate decades ago and now down to eighty residents who are being asked to vote on whether a consortium can build the first floating city offshore. There’s a tech…
Laura Poppick
Deep time told through the layers themselves. Poppick is a science journalist and she goes to the outcrops with the geologists reading them — banded iron formations recording the moment oxygen first flooded the ocean, the black shales of a…
Robert Finch
Finch wrote Cape Cod for forty years, then started spending summers in a Newfoundland outport called Burnside — known locally as Squid Tickle — population under two hundred, on Bonavista Bay. The book is the accumulation of those seasons: Icebergs,…
David Roberts
For thirty years, David Roberts made annual pilgrimages from his home in Massachusetts to Four Corners canyon country, land he loved passionately. The last time we almost crossed paths in person, he was renting a house in Bluff and I…
Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris
Forty-nine British birds, every one of them in decline, from avocet to yellowhammer. Macfarlane writes each as a short essay rather than an identification entry — habits, flight, song, myth, and threat — and he varies the form wildly, including…
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…
John Vaillant
The tree of the title was a three-hundred-year-old Sitka spruce on Haida Gwaii with a genetic mutation that made its needles gold — a tree sacred to the Haida, protected in a small reserve, and a tourist attraction. In 1997,…
David Roberts
The sequel to In Search of the Old Ones, twenty years on. He revisits sites and finds some wrecked by visitation and others still untouched, and pushes into new country — Range Creek in Utah, kept private by one family…
Richard Powers
I was skeptical about this book, with its nine human characters, sprawling timeline from nineteenth century New York to Occupy Wall Street, and magical realism meets science fiction meets eco-terrorism fable. Wait, what? But Richard Powers, who’s won a National…
John Lanchester
Sea level rose, and Britain has ringed the entire island in concrete. Every citizen serves two years as a Defender on the wall, twelve-hour shifts staring at cold water, and the rule is simple: If Others get past you, you…
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…
Dan Flores
This is sixty-six million years of American animals in one book. Flores starts after the asteroid that killed the dinos and works forward — the strange menagerie that evolved, then the arrival of humans and the extinction of mammoths, horses,…
