4 books
George Saunders
It’s six stories, and the title one has a man and a woman playing cave people in a theme park exhibit, required to grunt at visitors, receiving a daily goat, and filing performance reports on each other. That’s the register…
Rebecca Solnit
This is walking as a subject with a history. Solnit runs from bipedalism through the peripatetic philosophers, the invention of the country walk as recreation, Wordsworth and the Romantics, pilgrimage, the labyrinth, mountaineering, the flâneur, protest marches and the Suffragettes,…
Cormac McCarthy
A runaway kid out of Tennessee, fourteen years old, drifts down into Texas in 1849 and falls in with the Glanton gang — real men, scalp hunters the Mexican states paid by the head to kill Apaches, who figured out…
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,…
