16 books
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…
J. Smeaton Chase
J. Smeaton Chase was an Englishman who landed in Southern California in 1890, wandered it on horseback for thirty years, and wrote it down. This one came out in 1919, after he’d settled in Palm Springs when it was still…
Edwin Corle
Erskine Caldwell got the idea for a series of books about American regions after coming home from covering the German invasion of Russia, and this was the first one out, in 1941. Edwin Corle got the desert — Nevada, Arizona,…
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…
Graham Greene
In 1935, Greene, thirty and with no relevant experience whatsoever, walked across the interior of Liberia with his twenty-three-year-old cousin Barbara, a cook, and a line of carriers, on a route where the map said nothing but “Cannibals.” They spent…
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 —…
Oliver Sacks
Sacks was a lifelong fern obsessive and in 2000 he went to Oaxaca with the American Fern Society — a busload of amateur botanists, a few professionals, and him with a notebook. So the book is about ferns, but it’s…
Jack Hitt
Hitt walked the Camino de Santiago in the early nineties, five hundred miles across northern Spain, back when the trail was still mostly empty and the pilgrim infrastructure was a few nuns with a stamp. He is not a believer…
Ian Frazier
Frazier spent years going out to Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota with his friend Le War Lance, an Oglala Lakota man he met in New York, and the book is what that friendship showed him. Some of it…
Tom Zoellner
Zoellner walked eight hundred miles across Arizona, roughly the diagonal, and used the walk to grapple with the state he grew up in. Chapters alternate between the trail — heat, water, private land, dogs, the people who pick up a…
Sanmao
Sanmao was a Taiwanese writer who read one article about the Sahara and moved there, marrying a Spanish diver named José and settling in El Aaiún in the Spanish Sahara in the 1970s. These are her dispatches: Building furniture out…
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 —…
W.G. Sebald
A man walks the coast of Suffolk, England, and the walk keeps opening into other things. A skull, a herring fishery, Thomas Browne’s missing remains, the silk trade, Joseph Conrad in the Congo, the Taiping rebellion, a collapsing country house,…
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…
Ian Frazier
Frazier caught what he calls Russia-love and spent years going back, culminating in a nine-thousand-mile drive across Siberia in a used van with two Russian guides who argued the whole way. The book is that trip plus the whole history…
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…
