1997

The Day After Roswell

Philip J. Corso

Corso was a retired Army colonel who had run a Pentagon foreign technology desk, and in 1997 he published this: A claim that he was handed a filing cabinet of debris recovered at Roswell in 1947 and quietly fed the…

The Spell of the Sensuous

David Abram

Abram’s first book and the argument the rest of his work rests on. He apprenticed himself to traditional healers in Indonesia and Nepal, expecting to talk about magic, and found their real work was keeping relations square with the land.…

The Sparrow

Mary Doria Russell

A radio telescope picks up singing from Alpha Centauri, and the Jesuits — who have been doing astronomy and first contact for four centuries — quietly fund and crew the first mission. Eight people go. One comes back, mutilated and…

Into Thin Air

Jon Krakauer

Krakauer was sent to Everest by a magazine to write about the commercialization of the mountain and summited on May 10, 1996, the day a storm caught multiple teams high on the peak. Eight people died that day, including both…