J. Smeaton Chase
J. Smeaton Chase was an Englishman who landed in Southern California in 1890, wandered it on horseback for thirty years, and wrote it down. This one came out in 1919, after he’d settled in Palm Springs when it was still…
Suhita Shirodkar
Shirodkar sketches out of San Jose and this is the entry point to the handbook series — the one that arrived about ten volumes in, once somebody noticed there was no starting place. Value first, because getting light and dark…
Zoë Schlanger
Plants can hear a caterpillar chewing and respond with defensive chemistry. They warn their neighbors. Some appear to count, some to remember, and one Chilean vine imitates the leaves of whatever it climbs, including plastic ones, with no known mechanism…
Felix Scheinberger
Scheinberger’s watercolor book, and it’s aimed at people who’ve been told watercolor is difficult and precious. He isn’t. Color theory taught quickly, a small palette, the mechanics of wet-on-wet and glazing, how to keep whites, how to fix a mess,…
Felix Scheinberger
Felix Scheinberger has drawn more than fifty children’s books, and he wrote this to get people over the fear of the blank page. His whole stance is that a sketchbook belongs to you and nobody else, so there’s no wrong…
Joseph L. Sax
Sax was a law professor, and this is the clearest short statement of what national parks are for. His argument is that the parks aren’t a commodity to be delivered to consumers efficiently, and that the fight over what to…
David Sax
Sax noticed—in 2016, the year I launched AJ in print—that vinyl, paper notebooks, film, board games, and independent bookstores were all growing while the industries around them digitized, and went to find out why. It isn’t nostalgia — the buyers…
Fumio Sasaki
Sasaki was a magazine editor in Tokyo, thirty-five, living alone in a room stacked with books, CDs, DVDs, and gear for hobbies he’d quit, comparing himself to everybody and losing. So he spent a year getting rid of about 95…
Rick Rubin
People went bananas over this book, but I’m not one of them. Rubin has produced records for Johnny Cash, the Beastie Boys, Slayer, and Adele, and he does not play an instrument or work a board. What he does is…
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…
Kim Stanley Robinson
Robinson has been walking the Sierra Nevada since 1973 and has done something like a hundred trips, and this is everything he knows about it in one enormous, wandering book. Route descriptions and gear lists sit next to the geology…
David Roberts
His last book on the country he spent thirty years in. Half is the archaeology and his own walking — the Cedar Mesa sites, Grand Gulch, the panels, the places he keeps returning to. The other half is the history…
James Rebanks
Rebanks, the Lake District shepherd who wrote The Shepherd’s Life, went to a bare island off the coast of northern Norway for a season to work with a woman named Anna in her seventies — one of the last of…
Richard Preston
A handful of amateurs discovered in the 1980s that nobody had ever been to the top of a redwood, and that the canopy three hundred feet up is a whole ecosystem — soil, huckleberry bushes, ferns, salamanders that live their…
Joshua M. Powell
Not a guidebook. Powell hiked the PCT and made a visual compendium of it — hand-drawn maps, charts, and diagrams covering the whole 2,650 miles from Campo to Manning Park. Elevation profiles, snowpack, water sources, the mileage between resupply towns,…
Laura Poppick
Deep time told through the layers themselves. Poppick is a science journalist and she goes to the outcrops with the geologists reading them — banded iron formations recording the moment oxygen first flooded the ocean, the black shales of a…
Nick Pope
Two days after Christmas 1980, security police at the twin American air bases at Bentwaters and Woodbridge in Suffolk saw lights come down in the pines between them and went out to look. Jim Penniston says he walked up to…
Michael Pollan
Pollan came to psychedelics late, skeptical, and in his sixties 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 and sixties, Leary…
Michael Pollan
This book disabused me of my illusions about “organic.” Four meals, traced all the way back. A fast food dinner eaten in the car, which turns out to be corn wearing costumes — Pollan buys a steer and follows it…
Michael Pollan
Four plants, four human desires, and the argument runs backward: The apple, the tulip, cannabis, and the potato didn’t get domesticated by us so much as they figured out what we wanted and got us to plant them everywhere. Sweetness…
Lisa Phillips
In 1995, the Whitney Museum of American Art hung a show arguing that the Beats weren’t just a few novelists and a poem about Moloch — they were a whole visual and cultural movement, and this is the catalog. Lisa…
D.W. Pasulka
Pasulka’s follow-up to American Cosmic, and she opens the aperture wide. Nonhuman intelligence here doesn’t just mean whatever’s flying around — it covers angels, demons, animals, AI, the things people meet in dreams, and the possibility that some of it…
D.W. Pasulka
Pasulka teaches religious studies in North Carolina and wrote her first book on purgatory. Digging through old Catholic accounts, she kept hitting things that sounded oddly familiar: orbs of light, luminous beings, spinning suns, discs in the sky. So she…
Anu Partanen
Partanen moved from Finland to New York, married an American, and found herself suddenly anxious in ways she never had been — about health insurance, about childcare, about student debt, about what happens if a job ends. Her argument is…
