Simon & Schuster

John Gierach is the best fishing writer alive. This collection of essays about fly fishing in Colorado and beyond is vintage Gierach: dry, wry, and populated with the kind of characters who drive hours for a rumor of trout. Nobody captures the obsession better.

Abbey's strangest novel — a love story set at a fire lookout in the Arizona high country. Darker and more personal than The Monkey Wrench Gang, it's the book where Abbey's tenderness and his nihilism collide. Not his most famous, but possibly his most revealing.

The book that launched a thousand forays into the desert canyons of southern Utah and northern Arizona chronicles David Roberts’ unlikely evolution from bleeding edge alpinist to Native American archaeology geek. The young Alaskan climbing gun fell hard for the grit of red soil, the call of a canyon wren, and most of all the powerful, obsessive allure of the Ancestral Puebloans who wrote the canyon walls with paint and sculpted soaring cliff dwellings. His book beautifully conveys how curiosity becomes passion, how intrigue becomes compulsion, and for budding fans of the Southwest and the people once known as Anasazi there’s no better place to start.

Thor Heyerdahl's account of crossing the Pacific on a balsa-wood raft to prove that ancient South Americans could have settled Polynesia. The theory is debatable. The voyage is not — 101 days on the open ocean with five companions and a parrot, armed with a hypothesis and no backup plan.

David Roberts's memoir of his climbing years — from Harvard Mountaineering Club expeditions in Alaska to the death of his climbing partner and the long reckoning that followed. Roberts examines why young men risk their lives on mountains, and whether the answer changes as you age.

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.

Essays about the obsessive life of the fly fisher — the rivers, the hatches, the solitude, and the nagging suspicion that all this time on the water means something beyond catching fish. The title says everything about the tone.

The true story of an Irish national who traveled the world stealing rare raptor eggs — from Patagonian cliffs to Arctic tundras — and the detective who caught him. A crime story set in the world of falconry and obsessive egg collecting.

The Stowaway starts in 1928 with 18-year-old Billy Gawronski, a first-generation New Yorker from a Polish Catholic family, jumping into the Hudson River at night as he tries to sneak aboard Admiral Richard Byrd’s ship. The Eleanor Bolle is bound for Antarctica and the South Pole—the most sought-after final frontier at the time, and certainly a hell of a lot more exciting than the Gawronski family upholstery business. The backdrop is Jazz Age America—think Rockefellers, flappers, and early years of The Explorers Club—when the U.S. careened forward with heady optimism. Using original Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times expedition footage and historical photos, documentary filmmaker Shapiro weaves a downright plucky true tale of polar fever. Beneath the romance, though, is a thoughtful take on an age-old question: Just what is it that emboldens some to knock down barriers in order to chase a dream? Stowaway is a well-researched and entertaining coming-of-age story of a boy, a country, and an era of exploration.