28 books
Patti Smith
Patti Smith wrote this in her forties, a short book about being a child in southern New Jersey — the fields behind the house, the woolgatherers she imagined moving through them at dusk, a slaughterhouse, a cloud museum, her brother…
Katie Woodward
Light is what makes a sketch read, and this is the volume about it. Woodward works through value structure first — squinting to reduce a scene to three or four tones — then the direction and quality of light, cast…
David Roberts
His last book on the country he spent thirty years in. Half is the archaeology and his own walking — the Cedar Mesa sites, Grand Gulch, the panels, the places he keeps returning to. The other half is the history…
Joshua M. Powell
Not a guidebook. Powell hiked the PCT and made a visual compendium of it — hand-drawn maps, charts, and diagrams covering the whole 2,650 miles from Campo to Manning Park. Elevation profiles, snowpack, water sources, the mileage between resupply towns,…
Kate Murphy
I can’t claim to be a good listener, but I’m a better one after reading this book, which I revisit annually for a refresh. Murphy is a reporter, so listening is her job, and she went looking for people who…
James Lacatski, Colm Kelleher, and George Knapp
Lacatski was the Defense Intelligence Agency scientist who got the AAWSAP program funded — the predecessor to the better-known Pentagon UFO office — and this is the insider account of it. The program studied Skinwalker Ranch in Utah, and the…
David Graeber
The standard story goes: Small egalitarian bands, then farming, then cities, then inevitable hierarchy and the state. Graeber, an anthropologist, and Wengrow, an archaeologist, spent ten years arguing that basically none of that holds. The evidence shows enormous cities with…
Rebecca Giggs
She helped push a beached humpback back into the water off a Perth beach. It came back, and she stood with the crowd while it died. What stayed with her was the question underneath: What happens to a whale that…
Michael Easter
Easter went thirty-three days into the Arctic on a caribou hunt with no resupply, and uses that trip as the spine for the rest. His case is that we engineered away every discomfort humans evolved with — hunger, cold, heat,…
Geoff Dyer
Dyer looking hard at photographs, mostly one at a time, mostly for a few pages each. Eugène Atget’s empty Paris streets, Dorothea Lange, Roy DeCarava, Vivian Maier, Alex Webb, Gary Winogrand, plus a long stretch on his own preoccupations —…
