Asia

Wilfred Thesiger traveling through the mountains of Central and South Asia — Kurdistan, the Hindu Kush, the Karakoram. The landscapes are harsh, the companions are local, and Thesiger's preference for difficulty over comfort is absolute.

Andrew Pham bicycled across Vietnam twenty years after his family fled the country. The journey is external — heat, roads, food — and internal — identity, memory, belonging. A Vietnamese American returning to a place that's both home and foreign.

Peter Hessler drove across China in a rented car, following the Great Wall, watching a village industrialize, and navigating a country reinventing itself at highway speed. The third book in his China trilogy, and the one most about landscape and what happens to it when money arrives.

Gretel Ehrlich traveled to Japan in the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami and wrote about what she found — destroyed coastlines, displaced communities, and a culture's relationship with impermanence. Ehrlich brings a poet's attention to a journalist's subject.

Born in 1939 in rural Japan, Junko Tabei became the first woman to climb Mt. Everest in 1975 and complete the Seven Summits, and she continued to climb big, scary peaks until she passed away in 2016. Who was this 4’9” mountaineer behind the Tokyo Ladies Climbing Club (slogan: “Let’s go on an overseas expedition by ourselves.”), who balanced a home with a beloved climber husband and two kids and was renowned for her superhuman strength and gentle giggle? Honouring High Places is Tabei’s first book in English, a translated collection of memoirs and photographs filled with the details of post-WWII culture, groundbreaking expeditions, and a life fully enraptured by mountains. In addition to her long list of remarkable firsts, it’s arguable that in the history of world climbing Tabei should also win for “best smile,” and Honouring nearly reads like a series of meditative love letters—to the alpine, to lost climbing partners, to family, to life itself.

Kate Harris bicycled the Silk Road from Turkey to Tibet, chasing the ghost of Marco Polo and her own childhood dream of exploration. The question at the book's center: is there still anywhere left to explore?

Martijn Doolaard bicycled from Amsterdam to Singapore and photographed the journey. The images are gorgeous — the book is a visual diary of landscapes and encounters across two continents.

Peter Hessler's second China book — built around the discovery of ancient oracle bones inscribed with the earliest Chinese writing, but really about modern China's relationship with its own past. Hessler weaves together archaeology, journalism, and the lives of ordinary people navigating extraordinary change.

Greg Child's account of four American climbers kidnapped by militants in Kyrgyzstan in 2000. The escape involved pushing a guard off a cliff. A climbing trip that became a war story.

Two years teaching English in a small city on the Yangtze during China's transformation. The river rises, the city changes, and the outsider watches with the precision of someone who knows he's seeing something that won't last.

The investigation into what really happened to Michael Rockefeller when he disappeared off the coast of New Guinea in 1961. The answer involves headhunting, revenge, and a colonial legacy darker than the official story allowed.

Dial's son went missing in the jungles of Borneo. This is the story of the search — a father using every skill from a lifetime of wilderness travel to find his child in the most difficult terrain on earth. The ending is not what you want.

Two obsessives in Borneo — one collecting tribal art, the other defending the rainforest. Their stories converge in a place that is being destroyed as fast as it can be documented.

Seven prisoners escaped a Soviet labor camp in Siberia and walked 4,000 miles to India. Through the Gobi Desert, over the Himalaya, on foot. The authenticity has been questioned. The story is extraordinary regardless.

Walking across Afghanistan in the winter of 2002, alone, just after the fall of the Taliban. Stewart carried a walking stick and a letter from a warlord. The villages, the hospitality, the danger — all rendered with the clarity of someone who understood he might not make it.

A man-eating Amur tiger stalks a remote village in the Russian Far East, and a tracker is sent to kill it. Vaillant's narrative is both a thriller and a natural history of the world's largest cat. The tiger is the antagonist. The deforestation that drove it to hunt humans is the real villain.

The forgotten story of the Littledales, a Victorian couple who explored Central Asia more extensively than any Europeans of their era — across the Gobi, the Pamirs, and Tibet. Adventure as marriage.

Few wildlife biologists can tell stories like Douglas Chadwick, a National Geographic contributor since 1977 who’s spent his life in the field with elusive and misunderstood animals—snow leopards in the Himalaya, wolverines and grizzly bears in North America. In this strange-but-true account he takes us into a mountainous corner of Mongolian desert, one of the world’s most difficult, remote landscapes, where only four to six inches of rain fall a year, most of the ground is stone, and temperatures range from 122 Fahrenheit to minus 40. How can anything live here? First confirmed by scientists as recently as the 1940s, the Gobi bear is the rarest of bears—a relative of grizzlies, shaggy-haired and shy yet playful, a tenacious champion of adaptation. With chapters like “Indiana Jones and the Gobi Death Worm” plus more than 150 images by photographer Joe Riis, it’s an exploration of survival and a reminder our world still holds mystery.

Frazier drove across Siberia — the entire width of it — and wrote about what he found: emptiness, history, mosquitoes, and the ghost of the gulag. Thousands of miles of road that barely qualifies as road, rendered with Frazier's signature deadpan.

A granddaughter returns to Taiwan to trace her family's story through the island's mountains, forests, and coastline. Geology, botany, and memory braided together. Quiet and precise.

Crossing the Gobi Desert on foot at age 63 — 1,600 miles of sand, wind, and extreme temperature. Thayer is the kind of person who makes you reconsider what's possible.

Solo bicycle travel through Asia — dirt roads, language barriers, and the hospitality of strangers. The pavement ends early and the real journey begins.

“Later, when I found myself hoisting thirty pounds of snow, tottering across the desert huffing and puffing like an ox, I couldn’t help but sigh: bad idea.” So notes eighty-eight pound Li Juan in her surprisingly humorous memoir about a winter living with nomadic Kazakh herders. Who knew wrangling camels could be laugh out loud funny? Li, from northwestern China’s Altai Mountains, struggles to find anyone willing to take her on their journey to the remote and windy tundra. But her mother remembers a family that owes them money, and they quickly agree; Li will be free labor and an easy way to cancel the debt. With several hundred camels, sheep, horses, and cows, together they venture by foot and horseback into the frozen steppes, where the night temps dip beyond twenty below and shelter is a tiny underground burrow. Li is a darling guide, and she writes candidly, evoking the beauty and harshness that comes with this close-to-the-earth way of life. A bestseller in China recently translated into English, Winter Pasture is the most delightful book I’ve read all year.