Peter Godfrey-Smith
Third in the run that started with Other Minds, and this one widens out from mind to the whole planet. His subject is action — how living things don’t just experience the world but reshape it, from bacteria oxygenating the…
Rebecca Giggs
She helped push a beached humpback back into the water off a Perth beach. It came back, and she stood with the crowd while it died. What stayed with her was the question underneath: What happens to a whale that…
James Galvin
A hundred years of one meadow on the Wyoming-Colorado line, at ten thousand feet, told out of order. Galvin owned part of it and knew the people who worked it, chiefly Lyle Van Waning, a man who built his own…
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…
Dan Flores
Sixty-six million years of American animals in one book. Flores starts after the asteroid and works forward — the strange menagerie that evolved here, then the arrival of humans and the extinction of mammoths, horses, camels, lions, and the giant…
Dan Flores
Wolves got wiped out of the Lower 48. Coyotes got the same treatment — bounties, poison, a federal agency that killed millions of them for the better part of a century — and instead of dying off they spread into…
Robert Finch
Finch wrote Cape Cod for forty years, then started spending summers in a Newfoundland outport called Burnside — known locally as Squid Tickle — population under two hundred, on Bonavista Bay. The book is the accumulation of those seasons: Icebergs,…
Alex Patterson
Alex Patterson flew P-51s in the war, spent a career at IBM, retired, then went back to school and made himself an anthropologist. This came out of that second life, in 1992, and it’s still the standard — 17 printings,…
Gary Ferguson
Ponderosa is the tree that makes the Southwest the Southwest— cinnamon bark, high open groves you can ride a horse through, vanilla smell in the sun. In the last decade, from Santa Fe to the Sierra, more than two hundred…
Thomas Elpel
No book is going to teach you botany in a day — you have to get down on your knees and go face to face with the flora. But this one gets you further in an afternoon than any field…
Luis Elizondo
Elizondo ran a Pentagon program on unidentified aerial phenomena, resigned in 2017, and was central to the infamous Navy UFO videos going public. This is his account. He promised more than he delivered—or, to be fair suggested more. But still.…
Jessica Easto
No espresso in it at all, which is the first thing worth knowing. Easto sticks to manual brewing and covers ten devices — French press, Chemex, V60, AeroPress, siphon, cold brew, the lot — and treats them as variations on…
Michael Easter
Easter went thirty-three days into the Arctic on a caribou hunt with no resupply, and uses that trip as the spine for the rest. His case is that we engineered away every discomfort humans evolved with — hunger, cold, heat,…
Geoff Dyer
Dyer looking hard at photographs, mostly one at a time, mostly for a few pages each. Eugène Atget’s empty Paris streets, Dorothea Lange, Roy DeCarava, Vivian Maier, Alex Webb, Gary Winogrand, plus a long stretch on his own preoccupations —…
Kathleen DuVal
A thousand years of Native North America told as the history of powerful nations rather than as a prelude to colonization. DuVal opens at Cahokia, the city on the Mississippi bigger than London at the time, and works forward through…
Frank Decourten
Clinton designated Grand Staircase-Escalante in 1996 and Utah went to war over it, and this was the first book to actually walk you through what got protected. It’s 1.9 million acres, bigger than Utah’s five national parks put together, bigger…
David Darlington
Darlington spent years driving and walking the Mojave in the years around the fight over the California Desert Protection Act, and the book is built out of the people who live there and can’t agree on anything. Miners who see…
David Darlington
Darlington went out to Rachel, Nevada, in the mid-nineties and hung around long enough to write the book about the people, not the saucers. The base is real and the history is straight: The CIA built it in the fifties…
Matthew B. Crawford
Crawford has a doctorate in political philosophy, took a think tank job, lasted five months, and quit to open a motorcycle repair shop. His argument is that we’ve built an economy that separates thinking from doing and calls that progress,…
Raymond B. Cowles
Raymond Cowles grew up in South Africa, ended up at UCLA, and more or less invented the study of how cold-blooded animals manage their own body heat — the reason we know a lizard is running a schedule all day,…
Ross Coulthart
Coulthart is an Australian investigative reporter with a serious record — organized crime, war crimes, corporate fraud — and he came to this subject skeptical. The book works through the documented material rather than the folklore: The Navy videos and…
Philip J. Corso
Corso was a retired Army colonel who had run a Pentagon foreign technology desk, and in 1997 he published this: A claim that he was handed a filing cabinet of debris recovered at Roswell in 1947 and quietly fed the…
Edwin Corle
Erskine Caldwell got the idea for a series of books about American regions after coming home from covering the German invasion of Russia, and this was the first one out, in 1941. Edwin Corle got the desert — Nevada, Arizona,…
