19 books
Wilfred Thesiger
Thesiger crossed the Empty Quarter twice in the late forties, on camels, with a few Bedu who’d have gotten there a lot faster without him. His paper job was scouting locust grounds for the British. Everybody knew that was an…
Huw Lewis-Jones
Before cameras, if you wanted to bring back what you saw, you drew it. Lewis-Jones and Herbert — he’s a polar guide and historian, she’s the daughter of the explorer Wally Herbert — pulled together seventy sketchbooks kept in the…
Huw Lewis-Jones
Polar explorer, historian, professor, and writer Huw Lewis-Jones is so prolific you will be forgiven for thinking there are two of him. In 2010, he published this book, an admiring sweep of ocean pioneers, along with a similar, companion book…
David Roberts
Roberts came at Ruess for thirty years, and this book is him finally inside the story instead of writing about it. First half is the life: the letters, the woodblock prints, the burros, five years of a kid in his…
Tristan Gooley
Water carries signs and almost nobody reads them. Gooley works through puddles, ponds, rivers, and open sea: How ripple patterns reveal wind direction and depth, how eddies mark what’s under the surface, how the color of a wave says something…
Bruce Chatwin
Bruce Chatwin’s book about Patagonia is one of the great travel narratives — though what exactly it is remains debatable. Part travel, part history, part fiction, part hallucination. Chatwin walked through Patagonia collecting stories the way other people collect stamps.…
Kate Harris
Harris is one of the few authors whose writing stops me in my tracks (in a good way, of course). She grew up wanting to be an explorer, decided the planet was fully mapped, and went into science instead —…
David Roberts
Written after a cancer diagnosis at seventy-three, and it’s Roberts taking stock of a life of risk and asking what exploration was ever for. He goes through the history — polar travel, the Amazon, the great cave systems, first ascents…
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…
Carl Hoffman
In 1961 Michael Rockefeller, twenty-three, son of the governor of New York, disappeared off the coast of Asmat in Dutch New Guinea while collecting art. The family said drowning. Hoffman went and lived in Asmat villages for months, worked through…
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…
Carl Hoffman
Two men, thirty years apart. Bruno Manser, a Swiss shepherd who walked into the Sarawak rainforest in 1984, lived six years with the nomadic Penan, then led their blockades against the logging companies and became a wanted man before vanishing…
David Grann
In 1925 Percy Fawcett, the most experienced explorer in the Amazon, walked into the Mato Grosso with his son and his son’s friend looking for a city he called Z, and none of them came out. Something like a hundred…
Lionel Davidson
The time is the early 1950s. The place is Central Asia. The backdrop is geopolitics, with the great powers of Britain, China, and others wrestling in the shadows for influence over India, Tibet, and Nepal. Into this cauldron stumbles fictional…
Apsley Cherry-Garrard
Cherry-Garrard was twenty-four, half blind without his glasses, and paid to join Scott’s last expedition. The title journey isn’t the pole. It’s the winter trip he made with two others to Cape Crozier to collect emperor penguin eggs, five weeks…
Eowyn Ivey
In 1885, shortly after the Alaska Purchase from Russia and before the gold rush, the U.S. Army’s Lieutenant Henry T. Allen was ordered on a 1,200-mile expedition to map the Copper and Tanana rivers of Alaska’s interior. Little was known…
Ian Frazier
Frazier caught what he calls Russia-love and spent years going back, culminating in a nine-thousand-mile drive across Siberia in a used van with two Russian guides who argued the whole way. The book is that trip plus the whole history…
M.R. O’Connor
“I had forgotten that my phone knew nothing of whether humans can fly, or the seasonal flow of the Rio Grande, that it had no actual experience because it had never been born, only programmed by someone who might never…
