100 books like Bartram's Living Legacy

This book is an absolute classic when it comes to plants, and I often turn back to it. Pollan mixes history, science, and cultural reflection to tell fuller stories about plants we have long histories with, like apples, all the while illuminating what makes those plants important to us—and how they’ve also transformed our ways of living.

It’s a book rich with anecdotes that are completely unforgettable.

Oliver Rackham is to historical landscape ecology what W.G. Hoskins is to landscape history.

More than anyone else, Rackham had the vision to understand that the pattern of woods, fields, hedges, moors, and marshes that defines the English countryside, although seemingly natural, was in fact created by a delicate and constantly shifting balance between human intervention and geological, climatological and ecological influences. 

The Chiltern beechwoods I’ve enjoyed walking in since childhood, for example, exist partly because the timber was valuable for the chair-making industry that once flourished there, while the species-rich hay meadows of Swaledale that entranced me on a recent cycle tour were part and parcel of the local dairy-farming tradition, and have been put at risk by its decline.

When I became interested in the relationship between Plateau tribal peoples and their cultural plants, everyone I spoke with directed me to a series of remarkable papers by British Columbia ethnobotanist Nancy Turner. One look at the photographs of elders who grace the introduction to each volume reinforces their individual knowledge and respect for the place where they have lived for untold generations. Turner’s work in southeastern B.C. eastern Washington, north Idaho, and western Montana have been distilled here into a handy field guide filled with both beautiful photographs and timeless information. 

I love comics of all kinds, so found it impossible to resist Andrea Wulf’s idea of adapting her popular biography of ecological pioneer Von Humboldt to the graphic form. Illustrator Lillian Melcher combines her comic chops and inventive design sense with Von Humboldt’s own drawings, maps, and specimen papers to create a book that truly enhances Wulf’s scholarly investigations. Plus it’s so much fun. 

In this classic account, the botanist William Bartram records his exploration of the southern wilderness just before the American Revolution. He portrays the wilderness and the flora and fauna and Indigenous people before white settlement. While researching and writing Boone I referred again and again to his poetic descriptions. Bartram is an inspiration.

As part of my “fifty sites project” for another book, I visited the best-known Native American earthwork sites in the American Midwest including: precisely crafted conical burial mounds; enormous, flat-topped “platform mounds;” embanked enclosures; and remarkable effigies in the shapes of birds, bears, and snakes. I was awed by their beauty and sophistication, but, sadly, settlers did not always view them as the work of Native People. Prolific author Jason Colavito conducts a deep dive into the racist roots of the myth of a “lost race” of ancient inhabitants of America who were claimed by some to have built those earthworks. Colavito brilliantly deconstructs the myth of a lost race of mound builders and gives due credit to the true authors of those earthworks, America’s Native People.

When I give talks about Jackson, audience members often bring up his “adoption” of Lyncoya, a Creek Indian boy, as an argument against his racist and violent treatment of Native Americans. Peterson delves into that episode, and similar events in the lives of Jackson and men like him, to explain what elite white “adoption” of Native children actually meant and how it reflected larger national themes of acquisition and subjugation. 

The greatest living travel writer? In my opinion, yes, and his books get better and better. After enjoying his adventures all over the world it was fascinating to see him turn to his own country. He originally intended to drive to the Deep South once in each season of the year, but the conditions and people he encountered kept him going back for much longer. It’s a raw portrait of a part of America that is poorer than many third-world countries but is also rich in history, in compassion, in music, in food, and in characters. Theroux’s gift, as with all the best travel writing, is that he listens to them. I’ve traveled a lot in the Deep South myself, but not to the places that Theroux uncovers.

C. Vann Woodward easily ranks as the greatest historian of the American South to date, and his pre-eminence in the field was already established when this volume of his essays first appeared in 1960. Woodward's masterful sense of irony permeates this collection, in which he offers original alternative perspectives on the South's experience both within and apart from the nation's experience. The essays themselves were also marked by a literary grace rarely found in historical writing of any era. Though Flannery O'Connor was hardly given to praising southern writers not named Faulkner, after devouring the collection, she reported to a friend that she had "taken up reading C. Vann Woodward" because "this man knows how to write English."

As a fiction author who investigates the Southern Jewish Experience as it transects with the African American one, I’ve found the work of Eli Evans indispensible. This collection of essays highlights Evans’ Civil Rights Era bona fides, his work in the LBJ administration as speech writer, his trip with Henry Kissinger to the Middle East. But it is also a book at its most personal and insightful when it celebrates small-town Southern life and the Southern Jew’s place in it. In the title essay Christian neighbors, both Black and white, are at church or enjoying Sunday supper after church, which leaves the often isolated Jewish children with little to do. An experimental fishing trip with his father on one such Sunday warms the heart and brings a smile. It’s worth the price of the book entire.