11 books
Diane Ackerman
Ackerman is a poet who reports like a naturalist, and she built this as five long sections, one per sense, with a short final piece on synesthesia. She starts with smell because it is the oldest sense and the one…
James Nestor
Nestor got himself into a Stanford lab and had a rhinologist plug both his nostrils shut with silicone for ten days, which left him breathing through his mouth and nothing else. His blood pressure spiked, he started snoring 4,000 percent…
Philip Ball
The gene-as-blueprint story is wrong and Ball’s argument is that biological science has known it for a while without saying so out loud. The human genome came in at around twenty thousand genes, fewer than a water flea, and it…
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…
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…
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…
Terry Tempest Williams
Two things happen at once. The Great Salt Lake rises to record levels through the mid-eighties and drowns the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, where Williams has watched birds her whole life. And her mother is dying of ovarian cancer,…
Michael Easter
Easter went thirty-three days into the Arctic on a caribou hunt with no resupply, and he uses that trip as the backbone for the rest. His case? That we engineered away every discomfort humans evolved with — hunger, cold, heat,…
Nan Shepherd
British author Robert Macfarlane, who wrote the introduction to the 2011 edition of this classic, is no slouch for words, but he struggled to label The Living Mountain, calling it a “formidably difficult book to describe.” He comes close when…
Murray Dickson
Okay, I do a little prepping and this book is part of it. Published by the Hesperian Foundation, the outfit behind Where There Is No Doctor, and written for health workers and villagers with no dentist within a day’s travel.…
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…
