Pablo Ortiz Monasterio
When Kahlo died in 1954, Rivera turned the Blue House into a museum but had the rest of her things — clothes, letters, documents, and more than 6,000 photographs — locked in the bathrooms and sealed. They stayed shut for…
Jenny Odell
Not a digital detox book, which Odell says up front. She’s an artist who spends a lot of time watching birds in an Oakland rose garden, and her argument is that the attention economy is an economy, and that refusing…
Julian Brave NoiseCat
NoiseCat’s father, a Secwépemc and St’at’imc carver, left when he was young, and NoiseCat grew up with his non-Native mother in the urban Native community in Oakland, spending time on the Canim Lake reserve in British Columbia. The book is…
Anaïs Nin
Paris, 1931 to 1934. Nin is in her late twenties, married to a banker, in analysis, and just beginning to write, and the diary is her real work. This is the volume where she meets Henry Miller and June Miller…
Michael Newton
The first of Newton’s books, from 1994, and the one that started the whole life-between-lives field. Twenty-nine cases, transcribed, of subjects under deep hypnosis describing what happens after death: A passage, a reception by guides, a return to a soul…
Michael Newton
Michael Newton was a counseling psychologist and hypnotherapist in Los Angeles, an atheist when he started, who says he stumbled into this by accident when a client under hypnosis went past a past life and started describing what happened between…
James Nestor
Nestor got himself into a Stanford lab and had a rhinologist plug both his nostrils shut with silicone for ten days, which left him breathing through his mouth and nothing else. His blood pressure spiked, he started snoring 4,000 percent…
Lawrence R. Walker and Frederick H. Landau
The scientific baseline for the Mojave in one accessible volume. Geology and how the basins and ranges got there, climate and why so little rain arrives, soils and desert pavement and cryptobiotic crust, the plants from creosote clones thousands of…
Roderick Nash
The book that founded environmental history as a field. Nash traces what Americans have meant by wilderness — first a wasteland to be conquered, a place of moral danger, then, once it started running out, a national treasure and a…
Gary Nabhan
Terroir is the wine world’s word for the way a place ends up in the glass — soil, sun, wind, water. Nabhan takes it out of Burgundy and drops it on the Arizona-Sonora border, where he’s spent his life. Mexican…
Kate Murphy
I can’t claim to be a good listener, but I’m a better one after reading this book, which I revisit annually for a refresh. Murphy is a reporter, so listening is her job, and she went looking for people who…
Oliver Morton
Morton is a science writer and this is the moon from every angle at once. How it formed and why that mattered for life here. What Apollo actually was as a political project and what it felt like. The geology…
Robert Moor
Moor thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail and spent the next several years asking what a trail actually is. So the book goes from fossil traces of the first creatures to move on a seafloor, to ants laying pheromone lines and correcting…
Annie Montgomery Labatt
Annie Labatt taught art history at Texas, did a Rome Prize and a stint at the Met, and between 2013 and 2015 she gave twenty Friday-night lectures at the San Antonio Museum of Art. This book is those talks. One…
Keith McCloskey
In February 1959 nine experienced ski hikers died on a slope in the northern Urals. They cut their way out of the tent from the inside and ran into a blizzard at night in bare feet and underwear. Some froze;…
Jared D. Margulies
There’s a global black market in rare cacti and succulents, and Margulies spent years inside it — with collectors, growers, smugglers, customs officers, and conservation scientists across Europe, Asia, Mexico, and South Africa. Plants poached out of the ground in…
Ekkehart Malotki
Almost everybody looking at rock art goes hunting for the pictures — the sheep, the hunters, the spirals with a story attached. Malotki and Dissanayake point out that the oldest marks aren’t pictures at all. They’re dots, lines, grids, circles,…
Janet Malcolm
Malcolm spent a career taking other people apart in print and refused to write about herself, then in her eighties wrote this — twenty-odd short pieces, each triggered by a photograph from her own boxes. A Czech Jewish family that…
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…
Robert Macfarlane
Everything under our feet, in three parts: What we shelter, what we yield, what we dispose of. The dark matter lab under a Yorkshire hill. The wood wide web and the fungal networks trading sugar between trees. Catacombs beneath Paris…
Janna Levin
Levin is a cosmologist at Barnard, and this is a short one, about 150 pages with drawings by Lia Halloran, meant to be read in a sitting. Her opening move is the one that gets you: A black hole isn’t…
Natalie Leon
The old Japanese calendar splits the year into twenty-four sekki and then into seventy-two ko — microseasons of about five days each, with names like east wind melts the ice and rotten grass becomes fireflies. Leon studied tea and spent…
Stephen Lekson
Lekson noticed that Chaco Canyon, Aztec Ruins, and Paquimé in Chihuahua sit within a few minutes of longitude of one another, hundreds of miles apart, over four centuries. His argument is that this was deliberate — that the political center…
John Muir Laws and Emilie Lygren
The companion to Laws’s Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling, and it’s built for anybody leading a group — teachers, naturalists, parents, camp staff. Forty-plus field activities with the actual instructions, timing, and prompts, all organized around three questions…
