6 books
Aldo Leopold
You know it from “land ethic,” but you’ll remember it for his incredible observations of nature. Aldo Leopold was a forester who spent his early career killing predators for the government, then changed his mind, and this book is the…
Cormac McCarthy
John Grady Cole is sixteen when his grandfather dies and the ranch he expected to inherit gets sold out from under him. It’s 1949, and the cowboy life he wants has already ended in Texas, so he and a friend…
Ian Frazier
Frazier spent years going out to Pine Ridge with his friend Le War Lance, an Oglala Lakota man he met in New York, and the book is what that friendship showed him. Some of it is history — Crazy Horse,…
Cormac McCarthy
The second McCarthy border novel — a young man crosses into Mexico to return a wolf to the wild. The wolf doesn’t survive. Neither does the old world McCarthy is eulogizing. If McCarthy’s your jam, the prose is as good…
Christopher Ketcham
Ketcham spent years reporting on the 450 million acres the federal government holds in the West and came back angry. The core of it is livestock grazing on public land — how few operators there are, how little they pay,…
Li Juan
“Later, when I found myself hoisting thirty pounds of snow, tottering across the desert huffing and puffing like an ox, I couldn’t help but sigh: bad idea.” So notes eighty-eight-pound Li Juan in her surprisingly humorous memoir about a winter…
