76 books like Annals of the Former World

McPhee refers to the “gin-clear” water of Alaskan rivers, and his prose is equally lucid. It is also dense with facts, each sentence packed like a canoe or loaded raft. Serialized in the New Yorker in the 1970s, the “The Encircled River” section describes his canoe journey down a 60-mile segment of Salmon River, the most northern river above the Arctic Circle.

With four others who worked for the U.S. government, they studied the river as a national wild river Congress would be voting on to become part of the Kobuk Valley National Monument. The legislation passed under Jimmy Carter on December 2, 1980. Pair with his Survival of a Birch Bark Canoe.

I read this book on a 2-week river trip down the Colorado, which made the read all the more gripping. The Grand Canyon is awe-inspiring even if you’re only gazing into its beguiling depths from a vista point—moreso if you’re accompanying seasoned river runner Kenton Grua in his attempt to smash a speed record riding a storm-swollen, raging Colorado in a wooden dory.

The drama of Grua’s determination and daring kept me turning pages, but I also loved learning about the history of the Canyon, its great river, and its dedicated and colorful tribe of river runners. My copy is tattered from being stuffed in my dry bag, but the book’s imagery and energy don’t fade.

I find great pleasure in learning a little bit about a lot of things, and this book scratches that itch in a great way. Touring through big scientific concepts, Bryson delivers the potentially overwhelming (and boring) information in a fun way that made me understand space-time way more than any middle school physics class did.

It’s not a book that needs to be read in order or even be read in its entirety to enjoy, so it’s fun to have around to pick up a chapter here and there or read it straight through. The other day I went back and referred to it while having a conversation about space time and found an explanation that we both understood—and enjoyed. 

Geology can be a tough sell for the popular science audience. It can seem boringly commonplace yet remote in relevance to our day-to-day lives. But it is probably the most important science for understanding how and where we live.

In this beautifully written compilation, McPhee drives across North America, generally in the company of a local geologist, exploring the deep past and our modern relationship with it through roadcuts, quarries, eroded exposures, volcanoes, and mountains pushing up through the sediments.

McPhee is a New Yorker writer, with all that implies–his work is meticulously written, detailed, and literary. This book is simply a visceral pleasure to read–I recommend you find a hammock and a few days.

This graphic history is a short, beautiful book that features the spectacular wildlife in the Sea of Cortez off the shore of Mexico.

I loved how artist Ava Salzman shows conservation workers piecing together clues of what’s causing endangered sea creatures there to disappear. The book shifts nimbly to the viewpoint of an investigative team going undercover to solve the mystery and find and convict wildlife traffickers. I found the story and images so dramatic—the inky drawings of the night stakeouts, the painstaking analysis.

It’s a story I could not find in film or photographs due to sensitive legal issues. I’m gobsmacked by how well Salzman worked with the team to tell this important story in such a cinematic way.

I love graphic memoirs and the scope they give for visualizing life and entire movements. 

I was surprised and thrilled to pick up Craig Thompson’s book Ginseng Roots. Craig grew up in the ginseng farming area of Wisconsin. His family and others—including some I interviewed myself two decades before—give a rich picture of the ups and downs. He tells a story of connections with that tradition from boyhood, and the dreams and mishaps that inspired.

His drawings are rich, imaginative, and precise at the same time. I found this to be a gripping account of life, death, nature, and connection.

I picked up this book for its firsthand account of a young anthropologist in California who decides to go through the rigorous training to become a wildfire fighter.

But I kept on reading because the author’s vivid storytelling showed what it felt like to test yourself to your physical limits, interspersed with the history of fire traditions and fire suppresion. The author nearly died in a wildfire while working through one of the most devastating wildfire seasons in California’s history.

For days until I finished, I really couldn’t put this book down.

Winchester’s book is a biography of William Smith, the orphaned son of a village blacksmith. It is the story of one man’s passion, triumph, and tragedy. In his youth Smith was engaged in digging canals in England. Through careful observation of the fossils, he was the first to document the sequential layers of earth’s history. His geologic map, completed in 1815, heralded the beginning of a new science, the science of geology. 

I am deeply engaged in the lifelong work of neuroscientist Nina Kraus in the area of sound and music. My background as a sound designer and neuroscientist resonates with Dr. Kraus’ curiosity to unravel the mysteries of how we hear and make sense of the sonic world.

I really was blown away when she demonstrated how a famous rock melody created an electric signal in the brain of the listener, which was then transformed back into an audio signal that sounded exactly like the original melody. This book is full of hardcore explanations about the wondrous experience of the human brain’s interpretation of our world of sound, which I use for self-exploration and professional application in sound design.

Almost everyone knows the name of Charles Darwin, but how many of us know about Thomas Huxley? The reality is that Darwin’s brilliant leap of insight was only one step in bringing the theory of evolution into common knowledge. People don’t readily embrace a new idea that turns their entire worldview on its head, and Darwin alone could not have overcome the inertia and outright hostility that greeted his new theory. Darwin’s Armada is a delightful account of a larger cast of characters whose scientific efforts, exploratory voyages, and intriguing personalities were part of the story of this revolution in human thought.