Farrar, Straus and Giroux

John McPhee spent twenty years writing about the geology of North America by crossing the continent at Interstate 80 and stopping to read the rocks. The result is one of the great works of American nonfiction — four books assembled into a single 700-page masterpiece that makes deep time feel personal.

McPhee on the plate tectonics that built California — a state assembled from island arcs, ocean floor, and continental fragments smashed together over hundreds of millions of years. Earthquakes are not anomalies; they're the sound of the assembly still in progress.

The first volume of McPhee's geology series, in which he drives across Nevada with a geologist and learns to see time in roadcuts. The book that taught a generation of readers to look at landscapes and see the forces that made them.

McPhee's book about Alaska is really three books: urban Alaska, rural Alaska, and the bush. The third section — about people who chose to live far from everything — is the most powerful. Nobody writes about place and the people who inhabit it like McPhee.

What happens when legendary environmentalist and Sierra Club founder David Brower is forced to spend time with a miner, a real estate developer, and a dam builder? Exactly what you’d expect: fiery arguments, ideological head-butting, and alpha-male posturing, all in the name the protection (or destruction) of our wild places. A tantalizing storyline when told by anyone, but when written by master wordsmith John McPhee, the book becomes a classic piece of environmental literature.

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.

McPhee on the geology of the Appalachians — the oldest mountains in North America, worn down to nubs by time. The companion piece to Basin and Range, looking east instead of west.

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.

Stay and Fight is land-loving, community-rooted fiction in the tradition of Wendell Berry, though with a little more guerrilla resistance and a lot more sex. Following her boyfriend’s notions of self-reliance, Seattle-raised Helen Conley buys twenty steep, densely wooded acres in Appalachia, but the boyfriend soon abandons her. To everyone’s surprise, Helen stays, inviting a local family, Karen and Lily and their baby boy, to move in and join forces. The resourceful local women butt heads with college-educated Helen and her Foxfire-like “Best Practices Binder”—“look for morels in the creek bed, oyster mushrooms smell like anise”—but together they build a ramshackle off-grid refuge. Years of hard labor, roadkill dinners, and isolation go by, but the outside world eventually comes knocking, then suddenly snarling. How far would you go to protect all that you hold dear? This is one fine rabble-rouser of a tale, as determined as the bite of a snapping turtle.

McPhee on humanity's attempts to control natural forces: the Mississippi River, Icelandic lava flows, Los Angeles debris flows. Each essay is a case study in hubris and engineering, told with McPhee's trademark compression and structural elegance.

Frazier on fishing — which means Frazier on rivers, weather, patience, and the particular pleasure of standing in water trying to outsmart something with a brain the size of a pea.

McPhee on shad — the fish that fed the Continental Army, filled the rivers of the eastern seaboard, and is now mostly forgotten. Only McPhee could make a fish biography this compelling.

McPhee's portrait of the million-acre wilderness in the middle of New Jersey — a landscape most people don't know exists, populated by people who've been there since before the Revolution. Classic McPhee: the hidden world revealed.

McPhee travels through the Maine woods in a birch bark canoe built by Henri Vaillancourt — a young craftsman obsessed with replicating the ancient Algonquin design. The canoe is beautiful. The canoe builder is difficult. McPhee documents both.

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.