REQUIRED READING
Red Summer
By Bill Carter
(SCRIBNER, $25)
Bill Carter spent four summers slipping on salmon guts as a commercial fisherman in Egegik, Alaska, and the book he came away with is an honest, refreshingly understated look at a profession that's known for, well, exaggeration. Carter, an Arizona-based journalist, simply gets everything right, from the damaged, broke, drunk fishermen with their carpal-tunnel-racked arms to the sound of a thousand fish hitting a net at once.
| You're So Undead |
| "I know enough about high-altitude physiology to appreciate that the cold should have killed me, cerebral edema should have killed me, hypoxia should have killed me... [But] if I was dead on the evening of May 25 but alive on the morning of May 26, what happened?" —Aussie climber Lincoln Hall, on a night alone at 28,000 feet, in Dead Lucky: Life After Death on Mount Everest (Tarcher/Penguin, $25) |
A Voyage Long and Strange
By Tony Horwitz
(HENRY HOLT, $28)
"An awful lot happened between Columbus and the Pilgrims," writes Horwitz, but you didn't necessarily learn about it in fifth-grade social studies. Horwitz (Blue Latitudes) fills in the gaps by retracing the North American routes of European explorers like Cabeza de Vaca and Hernando de Soto, checking out tourist traps and meeting colorful locals along the way. As always, Horwitz is a smart, hilarious, and informative guide.
Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It
By Elizabeth Royte
(BLOOMSBURY, $25)
Fryeburg, Maine—where citizens are battling a multinational corporation that's pumping and selling H2O from their aquifer—is ground zero for this thirst-quenching look at the social and environmental consequences of bottled water. Our addiction to the stuff, especially when tap water is so cheap and safe, might be the "biggest scam in marketing history," writes Royte (Garbage Land).
NATURE BOYS
David Guterson's The Other features an unclaimed $440 million inheritance and a mummified corpse found in Washington's Olympic Mountains, but it's no murder mystery. Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars) uses these circumstances as the backdrop to an otherwise quiet tale of two Seattle friends, "of the generation that was slightly late for the zeal of the sixties and slightly early for disco." When they meet, in 1972, John William Barry is an aristocratic prep-schooler and Neil Countryman is a wannabe novelist from a blue-collar family. But the two forge an unlikely friendship through a love of dope, literature, and nature. While Countryman eventually marries and finds a job, Barry—"the contrarian who hears his conscience calling in the same way schizophrenics hear voices, so that, for him, there's no not listening"—only retreats deeper into the woods. When he hatches a plan to disappear for good, Countryman feels compelled to help him. With prose that's as careful and quiet as a mountain lion, The Other asks, and helps answer, two of life's most perplexing questions: How do we live in an imperfect world, and what are our obligations to those we love?
—Steven Rinella
