25 books
Merritt R. Turetsky
Takes the most sneered-at ground on earth and contends it’s one of the planet’s great underrated systems. It leans hard on “liminal” and the closing pep talk is earnest to a fault, but it’s a great read anyway.
Ann Zwinger
Zwinger went down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon over and over, in every season and just about every kind of boat, usually tagging along with scientists doing river studies. She calls herself an observer at the river’s brim, and…
Claire Vaye Watkins
The Southwest has dried out and been evacuated, and a dune sea called the Amargosa is moving east across California, burying towns. Luz, a former poster child for the drought-relief effort, and Ray, an ex-soldier, are squatting in an abandoned…
Tristan Gooley
Water carries signs and almost nobody reads them. Gooley works through puddles, ponds, rivers, and open sea: How ripple patterns reveal wind direction and depth, how eddies mark what’s under the surface, how the color of a wave says something…
Robert Macfarlane
The question posed by the title of celebrated British nature writer Robert Macfarlane’s keenly felt study of rivers is answered in the first few pages by his nine-year-old son: “Duh.” Yet, self-evident values are not always treated self evidentally. In…
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…
Audrey Sutherland
Audrey Sutherland paddled a nine-foot inflatable kayak up the Inside Passage from Ketchikan, alone, in her sixties, in summer after summer until she’d done the whole eight hundred and fifty miles. No support, no motor, food she’d dehydrated herself, camping…
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…
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,…
Candice Millard
Despite his well-document track record of pushing beyond his physical limits and emerging from life-threatening situations mostly unscathed, Theodore Roosevelt’s journey through uncharted regions of the Amazon almost broke him. What started as a comically arrogant march through the jungle…
Ann Zwinger
Ann Zwinger ran the Green River from its source in the Wind River Range down to its confluence with the Colorado — by kayak, raft, and on foot — and wrote the whole river as a naturalist. She covers the…
Christina Thompson
How did humans reach every habitable island across ten million square miles of Pacific, upwind, centuries before Europeans could cross an ocean at all? Thompson takes the whole history of that question: Cook and his crews puzzling over it, missionaries,…
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…
John McPhee
I think this might have been my first McPhee book. It’s three long pieces about people trying to stop geology. The Army Corps of Engineers at the Old River Control Structure in Louisiana, holding the Mississippi in its channel against…
Kevin Fedarko
In June 1983, the snowpack came off the Rockies faster than anyone predicted and Glen Canyon Dam started to come apart, spillways cavitating, plywood bolted onto the top to hold the reservoir back. With the Grand Canyon closed to boats…
Peter Heller
Award-winning writer Peter Heller has traveled the world as an expedition kayaker from the High Pamirs of Tajikistan to Central America to Peru. Which is to say, few can write about rivers — their shifting colors, sounds, and moods —…
Huw Lewis-Jones
Facsimile pages from the private logbooks and sketchbooks of people at sea across four centuries. Naval officers, whalers, a ship’s surgeon, naturalists, a young woman on an emigrant voyage, modern sailors and marine biologists. Watercolors of coastlines drawn as navigational…
Craig Childs
Two things are true in the desert: There isn’t enough water, and there is way too much of it. Childs spends the book hunting the first and getting caught by the second. He maps water holes in the Arizona desert,…
John McPhee
Henri Vaillancourt was in his twenties in Greenville, New Hampshire, building birchbark canoes by hand — no plans, no power tools, bark peeled off standing trees, split spruce root for lashing, pitch for the seams — because almost nobody was…
Paolo Bacigalupi
The Colorado River has been cut down to nothing and the states have gone to war over what’s left, legally and otherwise. Nevada has water knives — Angel Velasquez is one — men who show up with a court order…
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Simpson is Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg, a writer and musician, and this book thinks with water rather than about it. She starts from a Nishnaabeg story about a woman and a flood and works outward through ice, rain, tributaries, and the…
David
Longtime National Geographic photographer David Doubilet has spent more than twenty-seven thousand hours underwater, often in pursuit of the images that have become synonymous with his name: over/unders, above and belows, or, as he calls them, half-and-halfs. Enabled by domed…
Richard Henry Dana
Dana was a Harvard student whose eyes gave out, so in 1834 he shipped out of Boston as a common sailor rather than a passenger, rounded the Horn, and spent two years working the hide trade on the California coast…
Roger Deakin
You’ll never regret plunging into the “wild swimming” world of British environmentalist Roger Deakin, who lived in a moated farmhouse. Yes, a moat. You’re already charmed, right? Inspired by a short story, Deakin decided to swim throughout Britain in as…
Kim McCoy
What The Joy of Cooking is to home cooks, Waves and Beaches has been to sea lovers for nearly sixty years. The comprehensive tome is part fundamental instructional and part voluminous love letter to the alchemy of where land meets…
