100 books like No Picnic on Mount Kenya

Theodore Roosevelt's equally courageous descent of an unknown tributary of the Amazon. What drew me to the book was the fact that the former President, no longer a young man, went through an incredibly hostile environment. Living in Louisiana, I have explored and indeed become lost in several large swamps, but none like this one. And none with no possibility of rescue. At points like this in a book, I am thinking, what would I do in the tight fix they were facing? Guessing ahead.

And then it was the boats. Unable to ram larger vessels through the jungle, they settled for dugout canoes that were inherently unstable, yet more so when carrying their gear. Yet they had to run very fast water at times, over unseen obstacles, and managed to survive the turnovers. The jungle itself became the enemy. It provided little food to eat, vegetables or animals, and… show more.

This book concerns a group of young firefighters known as smokejumpers and the catastrophic Mann Gulch Forest Fire in Montana in 1949. 

Maclean was from the community and worked in the US Forest Service before he became a professor and eventually an author who spent years researching the event. You learn about the physics of forest fires, the invention of the first "escape fire," how multiple and cascading errors can lead to a disastrous outcome, and about the lives and heroics of a group of firefighters.

Interestingly, it is all seen through the journey of a man trying to understand a captivating event from his past. This book falls pretty squarely in the non-fiction category, but has multiple stories interwoven with the facts. It helps that Maclean was not only an author of many nonfiction articles, but also the author of the highly successful novel (and movie) A River Runs… show more.

Davis in this book completes the literary equivalent of juggling bowling balls and razor blades. He crafts an incredible, readable adventure narrative on a generation of men seeking to make sense of the world after the slaughter of the Western Front concluded.

Using the vehicle of Mallory and Irvines’ 1924 attempt to summit Everest, Davis interweaves several intriguing narratives including the British coming to terms with the cause and effects of empire, climbers using mountains to overcome survivor’s guilt, and man’s indelible need to explore.

Sweeping in both detailed research and the human costs of mechanized warfare, Davis book is a prime example of the paradoxical notion of wounded men seeking solace on the top of the world’s tallest peaks.  

I love this book for at its heart this is a story of the average American sailor waging war in the Pacific during World War II.

As an author of naval history, I understand it is all too easy to get bogged down in the writing about motivations of top commanders and the newest advances in military weaponry. Tillman successfully walks the thin line in telling the individual stories of the sailors of the Enterprise and how this single vessel fits into the greater campaign of the U.S. Navy against the Empire of Japan.

This book demonstrates that detailed military scholarship can retain a human face. 

I found Kenyan biologist and environmental activist Wangari Maathai’s story inspiring, heartbreaking, and ultimately, triumphant.

Prévot’s text may require you to read this one closely with your kids – and be ready for conversations about authoritarianism and political rights. At the same time, Maathai’s successes and accomplishments are astonishing: the book’s title is an understatement – the Green Belt Movement which she founded has planted about 50 million trees now.

Fronty’s illustrations are beautiful, easy to get lost in, and make this book sing. This is a visually striking work with an important story to tell about science, perseverance, and the true value of a tree.

I recommend this book because it takes the reader to a totally different world of a child growing up in the 1940s and 50s in Kenya, East Africa, during the war between the British colonials and Mau Mau freedom fighters. The author was born into a typical African compound ruled by a patriarch with four wives. He had many adventures in his attempts to escape the restrictions of his native culture. In Chapter 3 of my memoir, titled “First Dreams of Africa,” I describe how I saw shapes which looked like African animals on a hill, the other side of the chemical factory and town dump. That’s when I started to dream about going to a more verdant faraway land. Ngugi wa Thiong'o became a novelist and playwright and I became an international film and media producer, and much later a creative nonfiction writer. 

Some odd 1950s social attitudes caught me by surprise when I re-read this much-loved book from my past (what are those bruises all about?). Don’t let this put you off this wonderful story of courage and hardship as Jean Paget, an ordinary woman is swept up in the Japanese invasion of Malaya, faces terrible hardships in her group of female prisoners. Starving and sick, they are helped by an Australian, Sgt Joe Harman, also a prisoner, but his kindness results in the most terrible retribution. To say more would ruin the shock of this fabulous story, but I guarantee that Joe Harman will have your heart by the end of the book.

Tommy Calnan was as brave as they come.  Flying an unarmed Spitfire of the Photographic Reconnaissance Unit, Calnan's plane was hit by flak and set afire.  He bailed out, but was badly burned in the process. Barely surviving his wounds, including third-degree burns to his face and hands, Calnan spent several months recovering in a German hospital. One might think that he had done enough for the Allied cause, but despite his face being badly scarred, Calnan became a serial escaper of great courage and determination.

Nick Freestone’s mother decides he should leave London during World War II and live more safely with his father, her ex-husband, on his family’s teak plantation (Hawk’s Nest) in Burma. But before Nick can learn more about the timber elephants and spend time with his father, the Japanese invade, and his father is imprisoned.

Packed into 315 pages are betrayals by trusted workers, Nick’s forced servitude (in his own home!) to the occupying colonel, a network of underground passages that should lead to safety, and a desperate trek to rescue his father. Through it all, he has the loyalty and cunning of the monk Hilltop and his great-granddaughter, Mya. But will it be enough to survive and keep other people and elephants alive?