Here are 82 books that Wild Life fans have personally recommended if you like
Wild Life.
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I love the quirky, restless Pacific Northwest, also known as Cascadia, my home bioregion. Nonfiction is my jam, but I enjoy stories both unreal and real (stealing and tweaking Oregon author Ursula Le Guin’s use of the terms). I’m also an avid hiker. I’ve often wondered how I could provide folks heading here to hike the 400-mile Oregon Coast Trail (another passion of mine) with my personal book list introducing them to this landscape and its history, human and natural. Here is a start.
Pyle is a leading butterfly expert and a brilliant natural history writer. And he happens to be bigfoot-curious. As am I. The past few years have seen Sasquatch—at least images of the mythical-or-not-mythical beast—cropping up widely in this region, usually to try to sell something. Pyle takes it more seriously, without being boring or sensationalist. In this telling, Pyle packs his rig with camping gear (and plenty of IPA) and—with his expansive knowledge of nature, his keen skills of observation (of all species, us included), and his humor—heads into southwest Washington’s Dark Divide to try to clear up what, exactly, he heard decades earlier on a camping trip in this remote corner of Cascadia. As to what he finds, you be the judge.
The inspiration for the film The Dark Divide starring David Cross and Debra Messing, one of America’s most esteemed natural history writers takes to the hills in search of Bigfoot―and finds the wildness within ourselves.
Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to investigate the legends of Sasquatch, Yale-trained ecologist Dr. Robert Pyle treks into the unprotected wilderness of the Dark Divide near Mount St. Helens, where he discovers both a giant fossil footprint and recent tracks. On the trail of what he thought was legend, he searches out Indians who tell him of an outcast tribe, the Seeahtiks, who had not fully…
Nancy Lord, one of Alaska’s best-known writers, has been writing fiction and nonfiction in Alaska for more than fifty years. Let Them Tell You gathers selected stories from her three previous short fiction books, each first published in a different decade, alongside newer work, some published in journals and some…
One way I bring lightness and wonder to my life is through the joy of observing something new around me in this world. The new thing might be the forty Heavenly Blue morning glories that bloomed one morning for my father and me, finding an ancient fossil shell in a skirt of fallen shale at the bottom of a cliff or hearing Balinese gamelan music for the first time. But each time one of these wonders lights up my day, I am reminded of how limited our ability to observe is. Each of these books gave me a view into a world I had not even dreamed about.
Reading this book was an act of both admiration and agony, admiration for the courage of the author to look where no one else was looking, to take huge physical risks, and to prevail, and agony because I longed every moment to have the ability to myself ascend the world’s tallest trees and meet the life that lives, separated forever from the ground, at their very tops.
Everything about this book is poetry of the best kind because it’s also true.
Hidden in unseen valleys of dense rainforest on the coast of California are the world's tallest and largest things - trees up to forty stories tall and as old as the Parthenon: the coastal redwoods. Mysterious and unexplored, few people know how to find them, and fewer still have climbed them to study their upper reaches and discover the wonders there. "The Wild Trees" is the astonishing story of the handful of wild tree climbers and amateur naturalists who are now working in the redwood canopy, exploring this enchanted and terrifically dangerous new world. The canopy is a mysterious place…
I love the quirky, restless Pacific Northwest, also known as Cascadia, my home bioregion. Nonfiction is my jam, but I enjoy stories both unreal and real (stealing and tweaking Oregon author Ursula Le Guin’s use of the terms). I’m also an avid hiker. I’ve often wondered how I could provide folks heading here to hike the 400-mile Oregon Coast Trail (another passion of mine) with my personal book list introducing them to this landscape and its history, human and natural. Here is a start.
This biography from a small academic publisher takes readers to a place in-between: the Oregon Coast at the turn of the 19th century, as native people and their culture were being displaced by white settlers. It tells the story of Annie Miner Peterson, a Miluk Coos Indian woman who became a minor celebrity among anthropologists and linguists. She was born in the days when “the passage of time was marked by fish and leaves;" upon her death in 1939, “the Miluk language became extinct.” It’s a sensitive and unflinching portrait of a memorable woman navigating her fraught era.
She's Tricky Like Coyote is the story of Annie Miner Peterson, who was born in an Indian village on a tidal slough along the southern Oregon Coast in 1860.
Annie lived a full and fascinating seventy-nine years. In the 1930s, she dictated her story, in Miluk Coos, to anthropologist Melville Jacobs, who translated the account into English. Although only a few pages long, the autobiography reveals a bright, outspoken, and independent woman who was raised as a traditional Indian and married five Indian men but whose adult life was spent in the white world. Supplementing the account with anthropologists' field…
Nancy Lord, one of Alaska’s best-known writers, has been writing fiction and nonfiction in Alaska for more than fifty years. Let Them Tell You gathers selected stories from her three previous short fiction books, each first published in a different decade, alongside newer work, some published in journals and some…
I love the quirky, restless Pacific Northwest, also known as Cascadia, my home bioregion. Nonfiction is my jam, but I enjoy stories both unreal and real (stealing and tweaking Oregon author Ursula Le Guin’s use of the terms). I’m also an avid hiker. I’ve often wondered how I could provide folks heading here to hike the 400-mile Oregon Coast Trail (another passion of mine) with my personal book list introducing them to this landscape and its history, human and natural. Here is a start.
Kirkpatrick is a prolific writer of historical novels, often romantic, often deemed “inspirational.” I’m not a big fan of the genre, but her story about Cassie Simpson, a compelling and compellingly flawed woman who ditched her husband and kid in 1899 in Washington to take up with her lover on the shores of Coos Bay, where he was helping to build a shipping and logging empire, gave me a whole new way of looking at that place today. And, by extension, other port towns on the Northwest coast. And, by extension, the difficulty, and price paid, of being a woman in the early years of the 20th century who chose an unconventional life and paid some heavy dues for it.
Based on historical characters and events, A Gathering of Finches tells the story of a turn-of-the-century Oregon coastal couple and the consequences of their choices, as seen through the eyes of the wife, her sister, and her Indian maid. Along the way, the reader will discover reasons to trust that money and possessions can't buy happiness or forgiveness, nor permit us to escape the consequences of our choices. The story emphasizes the message that real meaning is found in the relationships we nurture and in living our lives in obedience to God.
USA Today and #1 internationally bestselling author of The Marsh King's Daughter - “Subtle, brilliant and mature . . . as good as a thriller can be.” – The New York Times Book Review, and soon to be a major motion picture starring Daisy Ridley and Ben Mendelsohn, and The Wicked Sister, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2020. "Massively thrilling and altogether unputdownable. Dionne is proving to be one of the finest suspense writers working today.” – Karin Slaughter
I read this novel in one sitting, swept up and carried away to a world I never knew and a place I’ve never been: New Zealand’s West Coast, a rough and rugged land where after just five days in the country, the entire Chamberlain family disappears.
With the parents dead, what will become of the children? And what will they do to survive? Complicated moral choices elevate this richly drawn, intensely atmospheric, and absolutely stunning story of loss and endurance.
Lost in the wilderness: subjugation, survival, and the meaning of family
Up on the highway, the only evidence that the Chamberlains had ever been there was two smeared tire tracks in the mud leading into an almost undamaged screen of bushes and trees. No other cars passed that way until after dawn. By that time the tracks had been washed away by the heavy rain. After being in New Zealand for only five days, the English Chamberlain family had vanished into thin air. The date was 4 April 1978. In 2010 the remains of the eldest child are discovered in…
Fer over ten years I skippered a small book publishing company. During them years I inspected countless book proposals, most which got tossed overboard. I kin quickly gauge whether a manuscript be ripe fer publication. I bring that same skill ter reading YA and middle grade fiction. Ter be honest, it be a good deal easier ter judge the work of others than write great ficiton. But since “voice” be the reflection of the author’s soul, it helps ter know that those who be crafting the tales ‘ave thar moral compass aligned ter true north. These four authors be stand up in my book.
This book takes readers into the swamps of Florida where wild things eat people. I’m a huge fan of Carl Hiaasen, Dave Barry, and John D. McDonald, all of whom write (or wrote in the case of McDonald) about south Florida. So it’s great to find a YA book for boys set in the Everglades. Like with most of Tim’s books, the characters push the boundaries of what they know to be right, but do not cross the line. Boys take chances. Or at least the boys I grew up with did. We explore the outdoors, go it alone, test things, break things, and often get trapped in situations of our own making. Escape from the Everglades allows me to enjoy being a kid again without, you know, getting gobbled by a gator.
Escape from the Everglades is the first book in the High Water series and blends contemporary mystery and suspense, dramatic situations, and high adventure that both boys and girls will love.
A park ranger’s son hates the Everglades, and he thinks he’ll just die if he doesn't escape Southern Florida soon . . . and he’s right. After Parker Buckman is mauled and nearly killed by an alligator, he sees the glades as a place of death. All he wants to do is get out of the area, and he’s convinced he won’t truly be okay until he does. But…
I’ve been fascinated by wild and lonely places since early childhood. Growing up in a small village, there were plenty to choose from. Foraging and an interest in the medicinal properties of plants grew out of that fascination, and later brought me to survival guides and the concept of survival itself. Hostile places, historical skills, and wilderness experiences all have a hold over my imagination. The notion of being prepared for humanity’s decline is something I find endlessly intriguing. Can such a thing be prepared for? What form will our destruction take and how does this affect the methods we need to survive it? I’ll probably keep reading and writing about it until we have an answer.
A non-fiction account of one office worker’s yearlong attempt to survive in Alaska. As someone who finds non-fiction quite dry and hard to read, this book is the best of both worlds. It has the detail of a true account with the wit and humor of fictional story. This book gives me something that former SAS professionals and hardened explorers cannot; the experiences of an everyday man, trading his desk job for a log cabin in one of the most dangerous parts of the world.
Guy Grieve's life was going nowhere - trapped in a job he hated, commuting 2,000 miles a month and up to his neck in debt. But he dreamed of escaping it all to live alone in one of the wildest, most remote places on earth - Alaska.
And just when he'd given up hope, the dream came true. Suddenly Guy was thrown into one of the harshest environments in the world, miles from the nearest human being and armed with only the most basic equipment. And he soon found - whether building a log cabin from scratch, hunting, ice fishing…
My interest in healing and nature stems from a very particular source—my own search for answers in the wake of my wife’s premature death in 2007. I’d read somewhere that loss often either engulfs someone or propels them forward, and I didn’t want to end up in the former category, particularly as I had a young daughter to look after. So this list represents an urgent personal quest that started years ago and still continues to this day. The books have been a touchstone, a vital support, and a revelation—pieces in the jigsaw of a recovery still incomplete. I hope they help others as they’ve helped me.
I love the grittiness of this—an account of a walk along the South West Coast path, when terminal illness and poverty haunt the walkers and everything is in a state of flux.
It doesn’t glamorize the walk; it’s often uncomfortable with lots of biting wind and pouring rain. At times, there are even threats from others they come across who are sleeping rough. Overall, it’s a description of nature at its most raw and authentic.
Although we glimpse moments of inspiration and beauty, I like the fact, as well, that it doesn’t have a big, blowsy Hollywood ending—at the close, the future appears uncertain, although there is a definite sense that a new energy has been discovered.
It ends on a simple, perfect moment as the author describes her and her husband as “lightly salted blackberries hanging in the summer sun” and adds significantly that’s “all that is…
"Polished, poignant... an inspiring story of true love."-Entertainment Weekly
A BEST BOOK OF 2019, NPR's Book Concierge SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BOOK AWARD OVER 400,000 COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE
The true story of a couple who lost everything and embarked on a transformative journey walking the South West Coast Path in England
Just days after Raynor Winn learns that Moth, her husband of thirty-two years, is terminally ill, their house and farm are taken away, along with their livelihood. With nothing left and little time, they make the brave and impulsive decision to walk the 630 miles of the sea-swept South…
I am a survival expert and outdoor professional with over ten years of experience in outdoor recreation and survival. Recently, I became the winner of Season 9 of the survival TV series Alone after surviving for 78 days with just ten items in the unforgiving wilderness of Labrador. I have lived for six months in the boreal forest with my fiancée, foraging to complement our meager rations, and I have also spent one hundred days foraging in solitude during the Canadian winter. Currently I’m building an off-grid homestead that I hope one day will turn into an off-grid community.
This book is the bushcraft classic. Although it focuses on northern bushcraft, most of the information in it is very useful in other areas of the world.
Many important techniques and skills are covered in this book that are applicable to wilderness survival and wilderness living. The legendary author was one of the most well-respected survival instructors in the world.
I personally cherish this book due to the level of detail and depth of the subjects covered. Whenever I read it I can always feel that a great deal of experience and research stands behind what is written.
Longtime wilderness educator Mors Kochanski has dedicated his life to learning and teaching about the lore of the forest. With clear instructions, extensive use of diagrams and a color photo supplement, this comprehensive reference includes all the practical skills and knowledge essential for you to survive and enjoy the wilderness: * Lighting and maintaining a fire * Chopping wood and felling a tree * Creating a shelter and keeping warm * Safe use of the axe and bush knife * Plants and animals important for survival * Food, water and outdoor cooking * Wilderness first aid. * This bestseller should…
As a coach of elite weightlifters, a lifetime athlete, an outdoorsman, and a passionate advocate for self-reliance, I’m continually searching for quality sources of information that teach, inspire, and drive us to improve our abilities—physical, mental, and emotional—to not just enrich our own lives and bolster our capacity to achieve what’s meaningful to us, but to become better contributors to the world at large and help and inspire others in turn.
Survival books these days tend to be more flash and gimmicks than qualify information, just selling an author’s image rather than providing practical, valuable tools that can be immediately put to use by any inquisitive and motivated reader. Brown not only eschews such silliness, but he also provides the information in a tone and with an attitude sadly unusual in the genre and at large, inspiring curiosity, awe, and respect for the world around us rather than a clumsy attempt to dominate it.
A fully illustrated wilderness survival guide perfect for seasoned and novice outdoors enthusiasts alike.
Here, in one essential volume, are the basics of wilderness survival. The most ancient and important skills, preserved for generations, are presented in a simple, easy-to-use format with clear illustrations and instructions. A complete must-have companion to the great outdoors.
• How to build natural shelters in plains, woods, or deserts • How to get safe drinking water from plants, trees, the sun, or Earth Herself • How to make fire without matches and maintain it in any weather • How to find, stalk, kill, and…
