11 books
John Jeremiah Sullivan
Here are fourteen pieces, almost all of them exemplary. Sullivan at a Christian rock festival in an RV with a group of West Virginia teenagers, at Disney World with the Real World cast, in the Ozarks with Axl Rose’s hometown.…
David Rains Wallace
Here’s the riddle: Nobody can say how old the California desert actually is, or where its plants and animals came from. Creosote, ocotillo, cactus, the chuckwalla itself — did they evolve out there over tens of millions of years, or…
Leslie Kean
The 2010 book that changed the conversation, subtitled “Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record,” and that’s literally the structure. Kean got firsthand accounts from people with names and ranks: A Belgian air force general, an Iranian fighter…
Philip L. Fradkin
In November 1934, a twenty-year-old kid from Los Angeles rode two burros into Davis Gulch on the Escalante and never came out. The burros were found penned in the canyon. He wasn’t. He’d been wandering the Southwest since he was…
Michael R. Canfield
Anyone who’s contemplated keeping a nature journal knows the paralysis of structuring a blank book. Here, a dozen field scientists open their notebooks and give you a peek. There are George Schaller’s pages from the Serengeti lions and the pandas…
Ueda Akinari
First published in 1776, the nine gothic tales in this collection are Japan’s finest and most celebrated examples of the literature of the occult. They subtly merge the world of reason with the realm of the uncanny and exemplify the…
David Abram
David Abram put himself through school doing card tricks, which is how he ended up hanging around traditional healers in Indonesia and Nepal. He figured they’d talk shop about magic. Instead he found their real work wasn’t with people at…
Haruki Murakami
You know Murakami’s going to be weird, you just don’t know if you’re going to like the flavor of weird he’s about to present. Well, I loved the acute oddness of 1Q84. What’s more romantic than one moon hanging in…
Stuart M. Kaminsky
Toby Peters is a broke Los Angeles private detective in the 1940s whose specialty is doing quiet jobs for movie stars. In this one the client is Cary Grant, being blackmailed with a photograph and tangled up in wartime counterintelligence…
Wade Davis
Wade Davis’s monumental history of the British Everest expeditions of the 1920s — and the World War I trauma that drove them. The climbers who went to Everest were survivors of the trenches. The mountain was where they went to…
