Great Plains

Aldo Leopold's collection of essays from the 1940s is the foundational text of the American conservation movement. Written from his weekend shack in rural Wisconsin, it builds from close observation of cranes and wildflowers to the land ethic — the idea that humans are not conquerors of the land but citizens of it.

Rick Bass writes about hunting, family, and the Texas Hill Country with the same lyrical intensity he brings to everything. Four generations of deer hunters, one landscape, and the question of what it means to take a life from a place you love.

The first volume of McCarthy's Border Trilogy follows two young Texans who ride into Mexico in 1949 looking for a way of life that's already vanishing. The horsemanship is real. The landscape is merciless. The prose is some of the finest in the English language.

Steven Rinella hunts a single buffalo in Alaska and uses that hunt to unspool the entire natural and cultural history of the species — from ice age migration to near-extinction to the strange politics of modern conservation. Part memoir, part natural history, part elegy for a continent that used to shake.

Robin Wall Kimmerer weaves together indigenous wisdom and botanical science to argue that plants and people are meant to be in relationship. Each essay is an act of attention — to moss, to strawberries, to the grammar of animacy in the Potawatomi language. The book that made a generation rethink what it means to be a naturalist.

Ian Frazier drove back and forth across the Great Plains for years, collecting stories, histories, and observations about the most overlooked landscape in America. Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, missile silos, and abandoned towns — Frazier finds everything. A masterpiece of American nonfiction.

Ian Frazier spent years on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, befriending an Oglala Sioux man named Le War Lance. The result is a book about poverty, history, humor, and the resilience of a people who've survived everything America has done to them.

We first meet Nelson as a 13-year-old Boy Scout in the summer of 1962, his shirt and shorts squeaky clean, sash heavy with merit badges, bowlines impeccable. He strives to be loyal, brave, and kind—terms of the Scout Law. At Camp Chippewa in Wisconsin’s Northwoods, Nelson’s the ideal citizen. But his overachieving doesn’t earn any friends until Jonathan, a popular scout, takes an unexpected interest in him. This panoramic coming-of-age novel strides across three American generations, from the echoes of World War I to today in Afghanistan, and from shattering tragedies to sweet first loves. There are times you want to look away from this book, and times you want to hold it close. Through it all, Camp Chippewa remains central, with its tidy tents and fields of lightning bugs. Can the moral compass of summer camp keep us oriented throughout our lives?

Paulsen's young adult novel about a boy alone on an island in a northern lake. Stripped down and elemental — survival as a form of attention.

Seventy days paddling the Rio Grande from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico — through the border country, the canyons, and the politics that make this river the most contested waterway in America.

The Lewis and Clark expedition, told with narrative momentum and deep research. Ambrose follows the Corps of Discovery from St. Louis to the Pacific, through a continent that was anything but empty.