9 books
Charles C. Mann
I think we know by now that what they taught us in school was…hmm…not always accurate. 1491 is the first book that opened my eyes to just how not accurate. Reporting from archaeology, anthropology, genetics, and ecology, Charles C. Mann…
David E. Stuart
Everybody wants Chaco to be a mystery. Stuart, an anthropologist at New Mexico who’s spent his career out there, knows it isn’t. It was a boom town. Great houses five stories high, dead-straight roads running for miles across nothing, macaws…
Hampton Sides
Kit Carson was a small, illiterate, soft-spoken trapper who couldn’t read the dime novels that made him a legend while he was still alive. Sides uses him as the thread through the whole conquest of the Southwest — the Mexican…
Wade Davis
Wade Davis’s monumental history of the British Everest expeditions of the 1920s — and the World War I trauma that drove them. The climbers who went to Everest were survivors of the trenches. The mountain was where they went to…
Candice Millard
Despite his well-document track record of pushing beyond his physical limits and emerging from life-threatening situations mostly unscathed, Theodore Roosevelt’s journey through uncharted regions of the Amazon almost broke him. What started as a comically arrogant march through the jungle…
Tim Queeney
The widespread adoption of nylon kernmantle ropes in the early 1960s revolutionized rock climbing—their ability to stretch nearly forty percent absorbed the energy of a fall, protecting climbers from rope injuries and opening the door to bold risk-taking. But as…
Huw Lewis-Jones
In 1957 and 1958 the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition drove tractors two thousand miles across the continent through the pole, the first surface crossing ever made, with Hillary’s team laying depots from the far side. George Lowe was the expedition photographer…
Matt Warshaw
If sports could wish, every sport wishes it could be treated with the depth, breadth, love, and wit that Matt Warshaw has given surfing. The former editor of Surfer magazine, Warshaw is the preeminent chronicler of surfing history, and no…
Cassidy Randall
Yes, gender is critical to the story of the 1970 Denali Damsels expedition on North America’s tallest summit. The six women just wanted to climb mountains, and in the late 1960s they had to fight male misogyny and suspicion to…
