W.W. Norton & Company

To fully understand the modern American West, readers must dig deep into the lives, writings, and philosophies of Edward Abbey and Wallace Stegner. On the surface, the men couldn’t be more different: Abbey, an irreverent, hard-living wildman, and Stegner, a measured, buttoned-up professor. In this double biography, Gessner compares and contrasts the two icons, revealing unexpected commonalities and hypocrisies, giving the reader a new perspective on these two complex characters and their lasting impacts on the West.

David Roberts tells the story of Douglas Mawson's 1912 Antarctic expedition, in which Mawson lost both his companions, most of his supplies, and the soles of his feet — then walked 100 miles back to base camp alone. It may actually be the greatest survival story in the history of exploration.

Alex Honnold's account of his free solo of El Capitan and other death-defying climbs, co-written with David Roberts. Honnold is the most famous rock climber alive and also one of the most unusual minds — his calm in the face of certain death is either inspiring or terrifying, depending on your relationship with gravity.

In summer 2019, Oklahoma-born Joy Harjo became the first Native American appointed as the United States Poet Laureate. Outdoor readers are most familiar with Harjo for her memoir, Crazy Brave, but the Muscogee (Creek) Nation member is also an award-winning playwright, musician, and activist. An American Sunrise, her new collection of poems, traverses the kind of committing and uncomfortable terrain Harjo has been exploring her whole life: “Through the immense and terrible echo of injustice a meadow bird sang and sang.” Some argue outdoor recreation should be the one place we can go to get away from politics. Harjo, whose family was violently forced west on the Trail of Tears, reminds that the sacred exists in step with the profane. “That’s how blues emerged, by the way—Our spirits needed a way to dance through the heavy mess.” Stormy, radiant, singing in rhythms ancient and new, Sunrise is a call to a future restored and whole.

Michael Smith's biography of the Irish seaman who served on three Antarctic expeditions — with Scott twice and Shackleton once — and performed some of the most extraordinary feats of endurance in polar history. Crean walked 35 miles alone across the Ross Ice Shelf to save his companions. Almost nobody knows his name.

Amanda Padoan and Peter Zuckerman tell the story of the 2008 K2 disaster from the perspective of the high-altitude workers — the Sherpas, Baltis, and HAPs who make Himalayan climbing possible and die in disproportionate numbers. A necessary corrective to the Western-climber-as-hero narrative.

A teenager who strolled away from a deadly plane crash in the jungle. A sailor who was rescued after spending two months adrift on the Atlantic. An alpinist who dragged his injured body to safety across an unforgiving landscape. Sure, luck played a factor for all of them, but Gonzales mashes up hard science with adrenaline-splashed anecdotes to suggest that some people are just hard-wired for survival—while explaining how the rest of us can still tip the odds in our favor.

Not Lansing's book but Frank Worsley's — the navigator of the Endurance tells his own version of the story. The 800-mile open-boat journey across the Southern Ocean, narrated by the man who navigated it with a sextant and dead reckoning. The seamanship alone is worth reading.

David Roberts retraces the 1776 Domínguez-Escalante expedition through the American Southwest — the first Europeans to cross the Colorado Plateau. Roberts walks the same ground 240 years later and finds both the landscape and the history more complicated than the maps suggest.

Sebastian Junger's short book about wildfire in the American West, Hopi fire ceremonies, and the culture of hotshot crews. Compact and intense, with the same narrative velocity that powered The Perfect Storm.

Conrad's novella about a journey up the Congo River is the most influential short work of fiction in the English language. Marlow's search for Kurtz is a journey into the center of colonial violence, human capacity for evil, and a darkness that has nothing to do with Africa.

David Roberts's meditation on exploration, risk, and the approaching end of his own life — written after a terminal cancer diagnosis. Forty years of adventure distilled into a farewell. Roberts at his most reflective and personal.

The navigator's account of the 800-mile open-boat crossing from Elephant Island to South Georgia — the most dangerous small-boat voyage in history. Where Lansing gives you the panorama, this gives you the tiller.

How diseases jump from animals to humans — Ebola, SARS, HIV, and the next pandemic. Quammen spent years tracking viruses through jungles and labs, and the book reads like a thriller because the threat is real. Published in 2012. Everything in it proved correct.

Thesiger's autobiography — the full sweep, from Ethiopia to the Empty Quarter to the marshes of Iraq. The definitive account of a life spent choosing difficulty over comfort, wilderness over civilization.

Roberts exploring Ancestral Puebloan ruins across the canyonlands — cliff dwellings, granaries, rock art. Each site is a detective story about a people who left and didn't leave a forwarding address.

“The mountains are calling, and I must go.” If you’re reading AJ, you probably live by this John Muir quote, and you definitely don’t need a brain scan or stress hormone report to convince you nature is a good, good thing. But author Florence Williams, a skeptical New Yorker at heart, asks a reasonable question: why? She takes us around the world in The Nature Fix, a wide-ranging nonfiction tour of the science behind nature’s effect on humans. Meet Japanese researchers analyzing the mental health benefits of “forest bathing,” neuroscientists in Utah mapping connections between adventure and problem-solving skills, and Korean immunologists studying how short bursts of nature enhance cancer-killing cells. From gritty urban park trails to the Idaho wilderness, it’s a heady, thought-provoking investigation that even minimalist Muir would have packed into the backcountry, snug between his bread and tea.

Amy Liptrot's memoir of returning to Orkney to recover from alcoholism. The islands — their weather, their seals, their silence — become the instrument of her recovery. Sparse, windswept prose that reads like the landscape it describes.

I was skeptical about this book, with its nine human characters, sprawling timeline from 19th century New York to Occupy Wall Street, and magical realism meets science fiction meets eco-terrorism fable. What? But Richard Powers, who’s won a National Book Award and a MacArthur Fellowship, knows how to build a fire. The Overstory has earned the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, thousands of impassioned reader reviews (both good and bad but mostly good), and, more important, the wholehearted love of the Lorax. In this novel (and in real life, too), the trees are as alive as the people—mulberries bleed, chestnuts groan, walnuts choke—and they create communities, transform the landscape, and talk nonstop: “We’d drown you in meaning” if only humans knew how to listen. Though massive as a redwood, Overstory’s tiniest moments whirl cinematically, like maple seeds spinning, searching for a spot to take root.

The 1991 nor'easter that sank the Andrea Gail and killed six fishermen off the Grand Banks. Junger reconstructs the storm, the boat, and the lives of the men aboard with the narrative intensity of a novelist.

Bass's short stories — Montana, Texas, the landscapes where wildness and domestication collide. The fiction is leaner than the nonfiction, and the sentences are some of his best.

Macfarlane goes underground — into caves, catacombs, ice cores, nuclear waste sites, and the fungal networks beneath forests. The world beneath our feet, rendered with the same literary attention he brings to the surface.