28 books
Ross Coulthart
Coulthart is an Australian investigative reporter with a serious record — organized crime, war crimes, corporate fraud — and he came to this subject skeptical. The book works through the documented material rather than the folklore: The Navy videos and…
Carrot Quinn
This book stopped me in my, ahem, tracks, and I was obsessed with the idea of excerpting it in Adventure Journal (we did—thanks, Carrot!). Quinn grew up in Anchorage with a mother deep in untreated schizophrenia — no heat, no…
Kenneth Arnold
On June 24, 1947, a private pilot flying near Mount Rainier saw nine objects moving in formation and later described their motion as like a saucer skipping across water. A reporter turned that into flying saucer and the phrase went…
Kim Stanley Robinson
It opens with a heat wave in Uttar Pradesh that kills twenty million people in a week, and the rest of the book is the world reacting. A UN agency is set up in Zurich to represent people who aren’t…
Benjamín Labatut
Five linked pieces that start as history and slide into fiction without telling you where the line is. Fritz Haber pulls nitrogen out of the air, feeds the world, and invents chemical weapons. Schwarzschild solves Einstein’s equations in the trenches…
Michael Christie
I liked this book. The New York Times also liked it a lot. The Washington Post was a bit more cynical, but also on point. “Michael Christie’s second novel, Greenwood, makes it clear that we really want 500-page novels about…
Max Barry
Humans hit something in deep space called the salamanders, which killed the crew that found them, and humanity built a war fleet in response. Providence Five carries four people and an AI that does all the fighting, plotting, and deciding…
Matthew B. Crawford
Matthew Crawford devotes Why We Drive to an anonymous couple he sees running down a wooded trail, pretending they’re riding motorcycles, making vrooming noises and playfully leaping over roots. It’s this eye for the small but uniquely human details that…
Monroe Robinson
In 1967, at age fifty-one, Dick Proenneke retired from a peripatetic life as a diesel mechanic, salmon fisherman, and repairman and settled in southwest Alaska, where he spent the next thirty years living intimately with the land. A master craftsman,…
Rebecca Wragg Sykes
Smug Homo sapiens have long looked down on Neanderthals, like city folk sneering at country cousins. Snort. You couldn’t even not go extinct. But these hominins have always gotten a bad rap, and Rebecca Wragg Sykes’s affectionate synthesis of a…
