Here are 100 books that Into Great Silence fans have personally recommended if you like
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I grew up in a wilderness cabin in Alaska, surrounded by more wild animals than humans. For many years, I worked in the heavily male-dominated Alaskan fishing industry. I still work as a scientist in rural Alaska. I care passionately about the place, and the truthful stories written about it by people with deep roots and diverse backgrounds here.
As a kid growing up in Alaska, I daydreamed of venturing into the wilderness alone. I was hooked on the promise of adventure.
This book follows that dream as the author and her partner set off on an astonishing quest to traverse Alaska in homemade boats. Thoughtful, funny, and magical, it’s a tale of true love as well as near-death escapes.
During graduate school, as she conducted experiments on the peculiarly misshapen beaks of chickadees, ornithologist Caroline Van Hemert began to feel stifled in the isolated, sterile environment of the lab. Worried that she was losing her passion for the scientific research she once loved, she was compelled to experience wildness again, to be guided by the sounds of birds and to follow the trails of animals.
In March of 2012 she and her husband set off on a 4,000-mile wilderness journey from the Pacific rainforest to the Alaskan Arctic. Travelling by rowboat, ski, foot, raft and canoe, they explored northern…
I grew up in a wilderness cabin in Alaska, surrounded by more wild animals than humans. For many years, I worked in the heavily male-dominated Alaskan fishing industry. I still work as a scientist in rural Alaska. I care passionately about the place, and the truthful stories written about it by people with deep roots and diverse backgrounds here.
This book is the most gripping and true-to-life tale I’ve ever read about growing up in the wilderness. As a young boy in northern Alaska, the author learned as much from wolves as from his few friends.
Mesmerizingly beautiful, frightening, and touching, this book made me cry when I finished it.
Ordinary Wolves depicts a life different from what any of us has known: Inhuman cold, the taste of rancid salmon shared with shivering sled dogs, hunkering in a sod igloo while blizzards moan overhead. But this is the only world Cutuk Hawcley has ever known. Born and raised in the Arctic, he has learned to provide for himself by hunting, fishing, and trading. And yet, though he idolizes the indigenous hunters who have taught him how to survive, when he travels to the nearby Inupiaq village, he is jeered and pummeled by the native children for being white. When he…
I grew up in a wilderness cabin in Alaska, surrounded by more wild animals than humans. For many years, I worked in the heavily male-dominated Alaskan fishing industry. I still work as a scientist in rural Alaska. I care passionately about the place, and the truthful stories written about it by people with deep roots and diverse backgrounds here.
This book tells of Indigenous resistance to white colonizers in northern Alaska and the fierceness of a mother’s love as she fights to save her daughter from kidnapping.
Lily Tuzroyluk’s voice is fresh and utterly compelling. She writes of a place she knows. This book both broke my heart and thrilled me.
In the spring of 1893, arctic Alaska is devastated by smallpox. Kayaliruk knows it is time to light the funeral pyres and leave their home. With her surviving children, she packs their dog sled and they set off to find family. Kayaliruk wakes with a bleeding scalp and no memory of the last day. Her daughter was stolen by Yankee whalers, her sons say. They begin chasing the ship, through arctic storms, across immeasurable distances, slipping into the Yankee whalers' town on Herschel Island, and to the enemy shores of Siberia. Ibai, an African American whaler, grew up in New…
I grew up in a wilderness cabin in Alaska, surrounded by more wild animals than humans. For many years, I worked in the heavily male-dominated Alaskan fishing industry. I still work as a scientist in rural Alaska. I care passionately about the place, and the truthful stories written about it by people with deep roots and diverse backgrounds here.
I loved this book because it told the inner story of Southeast Alaska, a place where I grew up, a story I had never truly known. Tragic yet also easily relatable, the book tells of a family both deeply injured by and standing up against institutionalized racism. This is the Alaska that tourists do not see but that is powerfully, achingly real.
In the spring, the bear returns to the forest, the glacier returns to its source, and the salmon returns to the fresh water where it was spawned. Drawing on the special relationship that the Native people of southeastern Alaska have always had with nature, Blonde Indian is a story about returning.
Told in eloquent layers that blend Native stories and metaphor with social and spiritual journeys, this enchanting memoir traces the author’s life from her difficult childhood growing up in the Tlingit community, through her adulthood, during which she lived for some time in Seattle and San Francisco, and eventually…
I always wanted to be a writer but never thought I’d become a travel writer. And like many British teenagers, I also had a passion for the USA – its movies, its music, its writers – but never imagined I would end up living in Arizona. I’ve now traveled in the US widely and understand why its landscapes, its people, and its culture have produced so much good travel writing. It’s a country that’s inspiring and surprising in equal measure, ever-changing, vast, and even though I didn’t grow up there it certainly made me who I am.
Before I went to Alaska for the first time, I did some background reading and thankfully discovered this book and the writing of John McPhee. He and Alaska were made for each other. He’s the kind of writer who is interested in everything, and everyone, and conveys his curiosity and his discoveries with enthusiasm. Alaska is unique, as is McPhee’s style of writing, jumping from topic to topic as the mood – and his journey – takes him, and hauling the reader along with him. He’s the kind of traveling companion who’s forever saying: let’s see what’s down there, I wonder how that works, let’s go talk to that guy.
Coming into the Country is an unforgettable account of Alaska and Alaskans. It is a rich tapestry of vivid characters, observed landscapes, and descriptive narrative, in three principal segments that deal, respectively, with a total wilderness, with urban Alaska, and with life in the remoteness of the bush.
Readers of McPhee's earlier books will not be unprepared for his surprising shifts of scene and ordering of events, brilliantly combined into an organic whole. In the course of this volume we are made acquainted with the lore and techniques of placer mining, the habits and legends of the barren-ground grizzly, the…
I wanted to visit Alaska since high school. It took me a couple of decades to make good on the urge, but I have made numerous trips. Alaska has everything I have always loved about Colorado, but in superlatives. From a historical standpoint, Alaska means mountains, mining, and railroads, exactly what I have written about in the lower forty-eight. Outdoors, there has never been any place that makes me happier than climbing mountains or rafting rivers. Spend two weeks in the Brooks Range with just one buddy without seeing another human and one comes to understand the land—and appreciate stories from people who do, too!
There are many books recounting living the wilderness lifestyle in Alaska. At the top of the list is probably Dick Proenecke’s One Man’s Wilderness.ButThe Hard Way Homedeserves to be there, too. Steve Kahn has an engaging personal writing style that makes you think you are sitting by the fire in his cabin listening to his tales.
And there are some whoppers: from boating on Lake Clark in imprenatrable fog to tramping the hillsides in search of Dall sheep, to being forced to walk miles through an unexpected autumn snowfall to be flown out from a hunt. Remembering idyllic summers at Farewell Lake to the horrors of the Exxon Valdez oil spill and much in between, Kahn writes like a guy who knows the real Alaska.
A lifelong Alaskan, Steve Kahn moved at the age of nine from the "metropolis" of Anchorage to the foothills of the Chugach Mountains. A childhood of berry picking, fishing, and hunting led to a life as a big-game guide. When he wasn't guiding in the spring and fall, he worked as a commercial fisherman and earned his pilot's license, pursuits that took him to the far reaches of the Alaskan wilderness. He lived through some of the most important moments in the state's history: the 1964 earthquake (the most powerful in U.S. history), the Farewell Burn wildfire, the last king…
My second novel, Snakes of St. Augustine, describes an unconventional love story served up with a large side of Florida weirdness. My first novel, City in a Forest, received a Gold Royal Palm Literary Award from the Florida Writers Association in 2020. My short fiction and essays have appeared in Pangyrus, Eckerd Review, Northern Virginia Review, Atticus Review, and elsewhere. I earned my bachelor’s degree in English from Eckerd College and the M.F.A. in Fiction from Queens University of Charlotte. Currently, I’m a writer for a university in Daytona Beach, Florida. A resident of Ponce Inlet, I began volunteering with the Volusia-Flagler Sea Turtle Patrol in 2018.
Award-winning Florida author Connie May Fowler writes vividly and with intense emotion.
Best known for her six novels, including Before Women Had Wings, which became a film featuring Oprah Winfrey and Ellen Barkin, Fowler’s memoir, A Million Fragile Bones, describes the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Fowler was living a peaceful, luminous existence on Alligator Point, enjoying all the natural wonders that Florida has to offer, when a BP-operated oil rig exploded.
The disaster killed 11 men and spewed an estimated 210 million gallons of oil into the sea. Her detailed and deeply personal account of the resulting catastrophic environmental damage is riveting, heartbreaking, and informative.
Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Environmental Studies. On April 20th, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon, a BP operated oil rig, exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. Eleven men died in the explosion. Before the well was capped, it spewed an estimated 210 million gallons of oil into the gulf. The spill directly impacted 68,000 miles of ocean, and oil washed ashore along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.
Connie May Fowler began that day as she had begun most days for the previous sixteen years, immersed in the natural world that was her home on Alligator Point on Florida's gulf coast,…
I am the author of Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America. This book was sparked by a painting I own of a whaling scene. Gazing at that painting, I often wondered what it was like to go whaling. Having Moby-Dick in school, I already knew a fair amount about whaling. But the painting continued to stir my curiosity, and soon I discovered that there were libraries devoted to whaling, providing almost unlimited material for a historical narrative. This book, then, is my attempt to weave that material into a maritime tapestry that attempts to do justice to America’s rich whaling heritage.
This oversized book traces the long history of man’s tempestuous relationship with whales, and rather than focusing solely on American whaling, it covers whaling around the world. In addition to sections on Basque whaling going back more than a millennium, other parts of the book survey whaling in Australia, Japan, South Africa, Canada, Germany, Iceland, Norway, and the Caribbean, among many other locales. The book also discusses the anti-whaling movement in the twentieth century that ultimately led to the International Whaling Commission’s (not quite universal) moratorium on whaling, adopted in 1986. There are more than 300 images that beautifully complement the text and bring history to life.
Traces the complex history of humans and whales--from the aborigines to tenth-century Basques to eighteenth-century British and Dutch whalers to the Yankee sperm whale fishery and the whaling industry in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa
Born in England but living now in America’s mountain west, I am sucker for landscapes that dance with unusual plants and animals. I have been a commercial fisherman, a tool librarian, and a back-country park ranger. These days, I’m an award-winning public philosopher and author. I have written books and articles about powerful emerging technologies. However, I realized a few years ago that wild animals are an antidote to the technological and commercial forces that can flatten our world. From art painted on cave walls millennia ago to the toys we still give to our children, animals are an important part of human identity. I celebrate this in my work.
How can you not already love these underwater giants? But I didn’t know much about them before reading Gigg’s love letter to our undersea cousins. They live by breathing air and giving birth like we do, but most of their lives takes place in a hidden, watery world.
The horror our species inflicted on whales during commercial whaling became more repulsive as Giggs uncovered the layers of whales’ complexity and sociality. I learned that arthritis sufferers in the nineteenth century would bathe in holes cut into whale carcasses for their curative powers. I also tried to imagine an animal with blood vessels big enough for a child to crawl through and a heartbeat that can be heard through the water for over a mile.
WINNER OF THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION
WINNER OF THE NIB LITERARY AWARD
FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR NONFICTION
HIGHLY COMMENDED IN THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR WRITING ON GLOBAL CONSERVATION
A SUNDAY INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR
'There is a kind of hauntedness in wild animals today: a spectre related to environmental change ... Our fear is that the unseen spirits that move in them are ours. Once more, animals are a moral force.'
When Rebecca Giggs encountered a humpback whale stranded on her local beach in Australia, she began to wonder how the lives of…
Besides being an avid sketchbook keeper, author, and illustrator, I also collect weird and random facts. In my Everything Awesome book series, I love discovering cool facts to share with readers about some of my favorite topics, including sharks, space, and dinosaurs.
Yes, it’s another snail, but a different tale! (Or should it be tail?)
Easily already a children’s lit classic since it first came out in 2003, this book takes you on an oceanic journey with two very unlikely traveling companions to see the sights. There may be danger ahead, but friendship rules the day.
The Snail and the Whale is a delightful tale of adventure and friendship by the unparalleled picture book partnership of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, creators of The Gruffalo.
One little snail longs to see the world and hitches a lift on the tail of an enormous whale. Together they go on an amazing journey, past icebergs and volcanoes, sharks and penguins, and the little snail feels so small in the vastness of the world. But when disaster strikes and the whale is beached in a bay, it's the tiny snail's…
