Vintage

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.

Craig Childs visits the places where the planet's future is already visible — ice sheets, deserts, flooded coastlines — and reports back with the eye of a naturalist and the fatalism of a geologist. The earth has ended before. It will end again. Childs just wants to know what that looks like.

Barry Lopez's essay collection roams from the Arctic to the Sonoran Desert, from stone horse intaglios to the relationship between landscape and imagination. Each essay is a small, precise act of attention. Lopez at his most accessible.

A solo sailing journey from Seattle to Juneau through the Inside Passage, reading the water and the history simultaneously. The sea as text — tides, currents, and the layers of meaning left by the people who navigated these waters before engines existed.

Meloy's essays about color, landscape, and the sensory experience of being alive in the desert. The turquoise is literal — the stone, the water, the sky — and metaphorical. Nobody wrote about the desert's palette like Meloy.

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.