I’m a travel writer, photographer, and lover of wilderness. I am the co-author of three travel guides about swimming: Places We Swim Australia, Places We Swim Sydney, and my new book, listed below. Together with my wife, we write about the connection between water, wilderness, and culture. I am fascinated with how people and nature interact and change one another. All of these books and authors on my list reveal how their experiences in nature have fuelled, anchored them, and inspired their craft.
I wrote
Places We Swim California: A Guide to the Best Rivers, Lakes, Waterfalls, Beaches, Gorges, and Hot Springs
I heard an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson on an Ezra Klein podcast while we were traveling in California, and I immediately bought this book.
I devoured it while we were exploring and writing about the Sierra Nevada. As the title suggests, Kim has had a lifelong love affair with the Sierras, and this book is filled with his deep knowledge of geology, geography, and personal adventures.
The joy, respect, and wonder are contagious. I love how he talks about the Sierras as a place that has anchored his life through many phases.
Kim Stanley Robinson first ventured into the Sierra Nevada mountains during the summer of 1973. He returned from that encounter a changed man, awed by a landscape that made him feel as if he were simultaneously strolling through an art museum and scrambling on a jungle gym like an energized child. He has returned to the mountains throughout his life-more than a hundred trips-and has gathered a vast store of knowledge about them. The High Sierra is his lavish celebration of this exceptional place and an exploration of what makes this span of mountains one of the most compelling places…
My wife and I felt a kinship with Bonnie when we discovered her writing, or maybe she was just the person we wanted to be.
She is a New York Times journalist, a surfer, and a swimmer. Although she lives in San Francisco, she has spent some time living in Australia (Sydney, where we live), and she has experienced some of our local swimming spots, as well as many in California (her locals).
In this book, Bonnie artfully expresses the intangible feelings many of us feel about swimming and water and how we engage with it as humans. The best writers can articulate feelings and experiences in a way that makes you feel seen. This is one of those books for me.
“A fascinating and beautifully written love letter to water. I was enchanted by this book." —Rebecca Skloot, bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
We swim in freezing Arctic waters and piranha-infested rivers to test our limits. We swim for pleasure, for exercise, for healing. But humans, unlike other animals that are drawn to water, are not naturalborn swimmers. We must be taught. Our evolutionary ancestors learned for survival; today, swimming is one of the most popular activities in the world. Why We Swim is propelled by stories of Olympic champions, a Baghdad swim club that meets in…
I fell in love with this beautiful meditation on life, nature, and the importance of feeling awe. The prose is so honest and raw. It’s one of the most dog-eared titles in our house, and I always go back to look up my favorite passages.
Australian journalist Julia Baird shares her journey of ocean swimming, cancer treatment, friendship, and even some stabs at the meaning of life. It sounds like it could be corny, but I assure you that it isn’t. It is sincere and inspiring in the best way possible.
'This book is beautiful ... Julia Baird has been to the tough edges and gives us light. She writes like a dream.' MATT HAIG
'Luminous and deeply comforting' KATHERINE MAY
'Utterly captivating and magical.' JULIA BRADBURY
Julia Baird's intimate study of phosphorescence is full of wisdom and joy; a roadmap for rediscovering our inner light after the darkest of times.
We now know just how much we should treasure the times when we feel happy, content and at peace. When we feel this way we seek out life's experiences with a sense of optimism and hope. But…
This book forever changed the way that I look at trees. It’s a work of fiction, but elements are inspired by the life and research of ecologist Peter Wohlleben and his amazing discoveries of how trees communicate and cooperate.
It is incredibly well crafted and beautifully woven with ecological research in a digestible way. I admire an author who can weave together so many distinct narratives and lives, including the lives of trees.
It did the rounds in my family. Everybody was reading it across the world at the same time, and we loved chatting about it and discussing how much our minds were blown.
The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of-and paean to-the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers's twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours-vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see…
This is the ultimate travel memoir. I read this on a surf trip to Indonesia with my wife and brother a few years ago. It’s got this Forest Gump-like quality of a person who managed to be in the right place at the right time through all these key progressions and periods of surfing.
To experience the world of surfing through his eyes, hearing about these world-famous waves before they were popular, is the ultimate surfer’s fantasy. His storytelling is so incredible that you do not have to be a surfer to enjoy this book. Like others on this list, William Finnigan’s passion for surfing has often been separated from his writing for most of his career.
In this book, he perfectly captures the obsessiveness, futility, enduring search, and inherent uselessness of pursuing something like surfing. It is probably my most recommended travel book to date.
**Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography**
Included in President Obama's 2016 Summer Reading List
"Without a doubt, the finest surf book I've ever read . . . " -The New York Times Magazine
Barbarian Days is William Finnegan's memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life.
Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South…
My book is a guidebook to California’s unique wilderness featuring the best rivers, lakes, waterfalls, beaches, gorges, and hot springs across the state.
The book contains 58 outdoor adventures for water-loving people and is divided into six key regions–Northern California, Sierra Nevada, The Bay Area, Gold Country, Central California, and Southern California. You’ll discover what makes each hike and swimming hole unique, learn the best time to go and gain useful local knowledge, like where to find the most delicious food nearby.
I have been to, and loved, North, Central, and especially East Africa for over fifty years. Only six times have I been to Africa on holiday; more often, perhaps twenty or more times, as a television producer. Working in Africa gains a perspective of reality that the glories of vacation do not. Each has its place, each its pitfalls like stalled plane rides with emergency landings in the bush or attacks by wildlife. But, in the end, the magic of the “otherness,” what an old friend called “primitava” captures one’s soul and changes your life.
Keen to rekindle their love of East African wildlife adventures after years of filming, extreme dangers, and rescues, producer Pero Baltazar, safari guide Mbuno Waliangulu, and Nancy Breiton, camerawoman, undertake a filming walking adventure north of Lake Rudolf, crossing from Kenya into Ethiopia along the Omo River, following a herd of elephant making their annual migration.
Stumbling onto an elephant poaching, the team become embroiled in true financing of terrorism for al Shabaab –ivory sales–and are determined to stop the slaughter at any cost. Ivory trade financing terrorism involves UN refugee camps with two hundred thousand displaced Somali persons, powerful…
A documentary team hiking through East Africa collides with a gang of deadly poachers, in this gripping adventure by the author of Kidnapped on Safari.
Years of filming, extreme dangers, and daring rescues have taken their toll on documentary producer Pero Baltazar and his team. To relax and reconnect with the East African wildlife they love, Pero organizes a walking safari for him, his camerawoman Nancy Breiton, and their elite guide Mbuno Waliangulu. Still, Pero has trouble truly disconnecting from work. When the team comes across a herd of elephants making their annual migration north of Lake Rudolf, Pero decides…
