13 books
John McPhee
McPhee spent twenty years riding shotgun with geologists up and down Interstate 80, pulling over at roadcuts, and this is all four books plus a fifth chunk stacked into one. It won the Pulitzer in 1999. He starts in Jersey…
John McPhee
McPhee’s California book, and the fourth of the Annals volumes. He drove I-80 across the state with Eldridge Moores, a Davis geologist who read ancient seafloor for a living, and the story they told is that California isn’t one place.…
John McPhee
McPhee’s first geology book, 1981, and the one that started the whole run. He rides I-80 across Nevada with Ken Deffeyes, a Princeton geologist with a beard and a scheme to make money pulling silver out of hundred-year-old mine tailings.…
Jack Kerouac
Kerouac wrote On the Road, and it made him famous, and the fame ate him alive. By 1960, he was 38, drinking himself apart, with strangers showing up at his mother’s house wanting the King of the Beats. Ferlinghetti offered…
John McPhee
McPhee went north in the mid-seventies, right as the Land Claims Act carved the state up and everybody was fighting over what would be park, what would be Native, what would stay open. The book comes in three parts. First,…
John McPhee
McPhee’s trick here is simple and mean. He takes David Brower, the head of the Sierra Club and the most effective conservationist alive, and drops him in the field with three men who want to use the land, one at…
Amitav Ghosh
Calcutta, 1969. A three-year-old girl in a strict vegetarian household announces she wants fish for lunch. She’s never had it, never seen it in the house. She says she remembers another life, a mud house by a river, a different…
Ian Frazier
Frazier spent years going out to Pine Ridge with his friend Le War Lance, an Oglala Lakota man he met in New York, and the book is what that friendship showed him. Some of it is history — Crazy Horse,…
John McPhee
I think this might have been my first McPhee book. It’s three long pieces about people trying to stop geology. The Army Corps of Engineers at the Old River Control Structure in Louisiana, holding the Mississippi in its channel against…
David Graeber
The standard story goes: Small egalitarian bands, then farming, then cities, then inevitable hierarchy and the state. Graeber, an anthropologist, and Wengrow, an archaeologist, spent ten years arguing that basically none of that holds. The evidence shows enormous cities with…
John McPhee
A million acres of sand and pitch pine in the middle of the most crowded state in the country, sitting on an aquifer holding trillions of gallons of clean water, with almost nobody living in it. McPhee spent months out…
John McPhee
Henri Vaillancourt was in his twenties in Greenville, New Hampshire, building birchbark canoes by hand — no plans, no power tools, bark peeled off standing trees, split spruce root for lashing, pitch for the seams — because almost nobody was…
Ian Frazier
Frazier caught what he calls Russia-love and spent years going back, culminating in a nine-thousand-mile drive across Siberia in a used van with two Russian guides who argued the whole way. The book is that trip plus the whole history…
