South America

All that stuff you were taught in school about North America being an empty, idyllic wilderness? Not true. In fact, there were millions of people living in the Americas before European contact. The hemisphere prior to 1492 was more populous, more urban, and more ecologically managed than anyone imagined. Mann's book redraws the map of human civilization and, we'd argue, is a must-read.

The 1968 journey to Patagonia by Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins is the stuff of legend, and from it epic tales and giant companies were sparked. Four decades later, Jeff Johnson retraced their travels for Chris Malloy's 2010 film, 180° South, and this companion book documents his journey to the edge of the world. It's part surf trip, part climbing expedition, and part environmental reckoning.

Piers Paul Read's account of the Andes plane crash and the survivors' 72-day ordeal is one of the most harrowing survival stories ever told. The survivors' decision to eat the dead to stay alive is presented without judgment, in prose that earns the right to be that restrained.

Gregory Crouch's memoir of climbing in Patagonia's granite towers — Cerro Torre, Fitz Roy, and the rest of the Chaltén massif. Wind, ice, and vertical rock described with the intensity of someone who spent years getting beaten down by all three.

Bruce Chatwin's book about Patagonia is one of the great travel narratives — though what exactly it is remains debatable. Part travel, part history, part fiction, part hallucination. Chatwin walked through Patagonia collecting stories the way other people collect stamps. Nothing quite like it exists.

Intense, unyielding, unapologetic, and at times straight-up angry, world-renowned alpinist Mark Twight holds nothing back in this collection of essays about life in the cold, deadly mountains. Whether recounting his first-ascent exploits in the Alaska Range or sharing his thoughts on nonconformity, Kiss or Kill gives readers the opportunity to spend a few hours inside Twight’s head—and emerge either tougher and more committed to their craft….or perhaps intimidated and looking for a comfy romance novel to cleanse their mental palette.

Yossi Ghinsberg's account of being stranded alone in the Bolivian Amazon for three weeks after a backpacking trip went wrong. Starvation, parasites, hallucinations, and a rescue that came just in time. Raw survival narrative.

Anthropologist, ethnobotanist, and award-winning author of twenty books, including One River, The Wayfinders, and Into the Silence, Wade Davis has a soul of many passions. One of his strongest is for Colombia, the land and people that stole his heart as a teenager in 1968, before cocaine and civil war transformed one of the earth’s most ecologically and geographically diverse regions into a nightmare of bloody terror. After decades of strife, the country now is healing, creating national parks, restoring Indigenous rights, and opening to travel. Charting the wonders of this renewal, Davis turned to Colombia’s lifeline, the thousand-mile long Magdalena River. With four maps and vivid photography, his new book journeys to snowcapped peaks, the Amazon rainforest, impossibly green wetlands, and coastal sands—where “magical realism is simply journalism.” Best shelved between Gabriel García Márquez and Norman Maclean, Magdalena is a magnetic chronicle of the sacredness of water as the source of all things.

Nando Parrado's own account of the 1972 Andes crash — the companion to Piers Paul Read's Alive, told by one of the survivors who walked out. More introspective than Read's version, and haunted by what it took to survive.

Saint-Exupéry's novel about early airmail pilots flying over South America at night — when navigation meant reading the stars and the mountains were invisible until they killed you. Spare, tense, and luminous.

Wade Davis's masterwork — the story of his mentor Richard Evans Schultes's botanical explorations in the Amazon, interleaved with Davis's own journeys through the same rivers and forests decades later. A double narrative about plants, indigenous knowledge, and the vanishing of both.

As a NOLS instructor in Chile's Aysén Region in 1993, Nancy Pfeiffer watched a man on a horse gracefully navigate a swollen river. Standing with her college students, hungry and wet and not at all at ease, she vowed to return on horseback—to try to experience the land like a local. At the age of 38, she saddled up for lessons at home in Palmer, Alaska, where she worked as a mountain guide, and few years later she was back in Coyhaique, looking to buy a horse and head south. Riding Into the Heart of Patagonia is a memoir of growth—of a self-reliant adventurer learning patience and ceding the urge to control—and also of a changing countryside, with dams proposed and roads being paved. Pfeiffer's observations beckon: flowering calafate, gnarled branches in the lenga forest, the deeply rooted, welcoming people. It all smells of horsehair and rivers and mud and maté, and I didn’t want any of it to end.

Despite his well-document track record of pushing beyond his physical limits and emerging from life-threatening situations mostly unscathed, Theodore Roosevelt’s journey through uncharted regions of the Amazon almost broke him. What started as a comically arrogant march through the jungle ended with TR contracting malaria, gravely injuring himself, and begging his son to leave him for dead. The book offers a revealing peek into the life and psyche of one the most spirited U.S. Presidents.

The true story of Percy Fawcett, the British explorer who vanished in the Amazon in 1925 searching for a lost civilization — and the modern journalist who went looking for him. Grann's investigation into Fawcett's disappearance becomes its own kind of jungle fever.

The complete history of Cerro Torre — the most disputed summit claim in mountaineering. Did Maestri reach the top in 1959? Cordes investigates the evidence, the personalities, and the obsession that has consumed climbers for sixty years.

Joe Simpson fell into a crevasse in the Peruvian Andes with a shattered leg, was cut loose by his climbing partner, and crawled back to camp over three days. Simon Yates, the partner who cut the rope, tells his side too. The result is the most gripping survival story in mountaineering — and an unflinching exploration of a decision that haunted both men for decades.

Brooklyn to the tip of South America by motorcycle — the Pan-American Highway and everything off it. Photography-driven, with the road itself as the organizing principle.