21 books
Colson Whitehead
Cora is a teenager on a Georgia cotton plantation, working a patch of dirt her grandmother claimed, abandoned by a mother who ran and never sent word. When Caesar asks her to go with him, she says no, then says…
James C. Scott
Everybody knows the story: People figure out farming, settle down, build cities, and civilization takes it from there. Scott, an anthropologist and political scientist at Yale who spent his life studying how regular people dodge governments, points out the timeline…
Joseph L. Sax
Sax was a law professor, and his argument is that parks aren’t a commodity to be delivered to consumers efficiently,and that the fight over what to allow in them — helicopters, tramways, snowmobiles, developed lodges — isn’t about elitism but…
Richard A. Rogers
Rogers is a communication scholar, and his subject isn’t what rock art meant but what we keep doing with it. Visitor centers, guidebooks, New Age tours, corporate logos, and the shaman theory all get examined as acts of appropriation, each…
Michael Pollan
A skeptical Michael Pollan came to psychedelics late, and in his sixties he took LSD, psilocybin, and 5-MeO-DMT under guides so he could report from inside. Around that he builds the history: The first wave of research in the fifties…
Lawrence R. Walker and Frederick H. Landau
This is the only modern natural history of the Mojave, which makes it the standard by default, but it’s also thorough, engaging, and well-written. There’s the geology and how the basins and ranges got there, climate and why so little…
Ekkehart Malotki
Almost everybody looking at rock art goes hunting for the pictures — the sheep, the hunters, the spirals with a story attached. (It’s the reason I drive past Mojave scratches to get to Colorado Plateau galleries.) Malotki and Dissanayake point…
Margareta Magnusson
Marie Kondo pushed me, and Magnusson made me jump—that and having to fill two Dumpsters with junk when my dad died. Döstädning is a real Swedish word and a real practice: Going through your things while you’re still able, so…
Leslie Kean
Kean is a journalist who applied the same method here she used on UFOs: Go to the best-documented cases, interview the researchers, report what holds up. That means young children with detailed verifiable memories of previous lives, work from the…
Antti Tuomainen
Jaakko Kaunismaa runs a small matsutake mushroom export business in a Finnish town, shipping to Japan, and a doctor tells him he’s been systematically poisoned and has weeks left to live. So he sets out to find out who’s killing…
