7 books
Tony Judt
Europe from the rubble of 1945 to 2005, east and west given equal weight, in one nine-hundred-page volume by a historian who could actually write. The material everybody knows — Marshall Plan, Wall, 1968, 1989 — is here, but the…
Frida Kahlo
The last ten years of her life in her own hand — a facsimile of the journal she kept from about 1944, reproduced in full color, so you get the actual pages: Watercolor and ink drawings, blots she turned into…
Stieg Larsson
Mikael Blomkvist, a financial journalist just convicted of libel, gets hired by an aging industrialist to solve a forty-year-old disappearance on the family’s private island north of Stockholm. Working with him, eventually, is Lisbeth Salander — a researcher and hacker,…
Matt Warshaw
Warshaw spent years assembling this — fifteen hundred entries covering surfers, breaks, board designers, films, magazines, contests, terminology, and the odd corners nobody else bothered with. It’s alphabetical and it’s browsable to a dangerous degree: You look up one thing…
Ellen Meloy
Meloy lived on the San Juan River in Southeast Utah and spent four seasons watching a band of about eighty desert bighorn on the cliffs near her house — sheep she called the Blue Door Band. They’d been written off…
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…
Yvon Chouinard
Chouinard taught himself blacksmithing to make better pitons, sold them out of the trunk of his car in Yosemite, and then discovered his pitons were wrecking the cracks, so he stopped making the thing his company was built on and…
