4 books
William Finnegan
Finnegan covered wars for The New Yorker and spent his whole life not telling people he was a surfer, because it sounded ridiculous coming from a serious reporter. Then he wrote this and won the Pulitzer. It starts with a…
Miriam Horn
George Schaller invented the way modern field biology is done, which was mostly to go sit with the animals for years. Born in Berlin in 1933 to an American mother and a Nazi diplomat father, shuttled through occupied countries, he…
Yvon Chouinard
Chouinard taught himself blacksmithing to make better pitons, sold them out of the trunk of his car in Yosemite, and then discovered his pitons were wrecking the cracks, so he stopped making the thing his company was built on and…
Franny Moyle
J.M.W. Turner was the son of a Covent Garden barber, sold his first drawings out of the shop window, got into the Royal Academy at fourteen, and became the most radical painter in England — and stayed a rough, secretive,…
