85 books like Shadow Country

Water, water everywhere—but not in the American West. I first read Reisner’s book soon after its publication in 1986, when it presented a haunting, frightening future for the western United States that is being realized today. The book reveals the inadequacy of the management of water in the western states that began as soon as there was settlement, and it takes an especially hard look at the treaties surrounding the Colorado River, which has all but disappeared in the past few years, causing panic at the Hoover Dam and in Las Vegas, Arizona, and Mexico. Reisner amply demonstrates why major cities should not be built in semi-arid and arid climes—and still, the western states’ populations continue to explode. 

If Desert Solitaire is an American classic, The Monkey Wrench Gang is the blockbuster that everyone knows and loves for its humor, and sex, all wrapped up in an environmental action thriller.

While this book might not be quite as literary as Desert Solitaire, it changed environmentalism in America. This book blended anarchism and environmentalism. It also helped inspire the environmental organization, Earth First. And it created the term “to monkey wrench.”

Read the book because it changed American environmentalism. Love it for its action and thrills in the Desert Southwest. I know I did.

And while I always wanted to be like the brash main character, George Washington Hayduke, in all truth I was and am more like Seldom Seen.

This is perhaps the best book on two separate yet related topics: cultural anthropology and ethnobotany. Davis, well-known for The Serpent and the Rainbow, his book (and subsequent movie) about his quest for a Haitian zombie poison, here takes on twin adventure stories: his own research in Columbia and nearby countries in the 1970s, and that of his Harvard mentor and titan of ethnobotany, Richard Evans Schultes, some 30 years earlier. Both are compelling and compulsively readable simply as adventure stories, but Davis also uses them to demonstrate, in a way few other books ever have, the profound and essential connection between human beings and the living world around them.

National parks have long been the bedrock of nature conservation efforts. For most Westerners, their vision of Africa is built on images from iconic parks like Tanzania’s Serengeti or Kenya’s Masai Mara. Those parks, however, were imposed on the African landscape with lasting and often devastating consequences, among them the pernicious notion that Africans themselves are little more than part of the fauna and are an impediment to conservation efforts that can be swept aside. Roderick Neuman reveals that far from a simple means to protect nature, parks are a complicated intersection of ecological, economic, political, and cultural issues. His analysis of Arusha National Park in Tanzania, not far from Mount Kilimanjaro, melds careful scholarship with passionate and vivid writing and is an essential text for understanding the promise and limitations of long-established conservation practices. 

Edna Buchanan moved from New Jersey to Miami on a whim in 1965 and found her calling in the journalistic life.

Calvin Trillin would later write, “In Miami, a few figures are regularly discussed by first name among people they have never actually met. One of them is Fidel. Another is Edna.”

She had a nose for the bizarre and the macabre—as well as for a good lead: “A man wandering along a Miami Beach street in his undershorts and carrying a blood-stained knife Sunday morning led police to the scene of a murder.”

In this memoir she recalls zipping around South Florida from Hollywood to Homestead in her yellow Triumph Spitfire to produce her almost-daily cataloguing of gruesome crime. The “polite” killer who abducted couples on dates, raped the woman, and then allowed her to dress before shooting both.

The hand grenade thrown… show more.

This noir pastiche is one long joke, a satire on art, art criticism, and art collecting.

James Figueras, a cad bachelor freelance art critic in 1960s Palm Beach, is tasked with stealing a painting by the (fictional) French artist Jacques Deberiue.

Deberiue was the founder of the Nihilistic Surrealism movement who retired after the creation of one work, No. One: an empty frame mounted around a crack in a wall. The trail leads to the dusty outskirts of Miami and a bloody murder in the Everglades, but the real mystery surrounds the artist and his art.

And the fun is in the comedy: "The fact that he used the English No. One instead of Nombre une may or may not've influenced Samuel Beckett to write in French instead of English, as the literary critic Leon Mindlin has claimed."

When Willeford became a friend of my family, around 1979, he was known only by a small cult following.

He hadn't published a book in seven years, and his twelve previous books were out of print. He was teaching at Miami-Dade Community College and reviewing mystery books for The Miami Herald.

Miami Blues, which rescued its author from obscurity, presented a Miami in transition. South Beach is still decrepit and full of old people, but there is a new sense of danger on the streets—a scent of violent desperation among refugees from Latin America and opportunists from the rest of the U.S.

Like Willeford's pulp novels of earlier decades, Miami Blues and the later Hoke Moseley books defy their genre. For detective novels, they have precious little mystery or police procedure.

There is the smattering of Willefordian violence, and each book does have a criminal who gets… show more.

I re-read this early McGuane as I was researching my book, looking for details of South Florida life during the 1972 football season.

The protagonist, Thomas Skelton, comes home to Key West from Gainesville and sets out to become a fishing guide. It was written during, and takes place during, the fall of 1972, and Skelton’s dad even watches football in one scene.

But this Key West native isn’t interested in the perfect Dolphins—he’s a Packers fan! (This anomaly is explained, though not excused, by the fact that the author hailed from northern Michigan.)

I was enthralled, though, by some of McGuane’s best writing, and got this gem about the lure of South Florida: “…American bad actors who, when the chips are down, go to Florida with all the gothics and grotesqueries of chrome and poured-to-form concrete that that implies.” 

The Outlander is a gripping historical fiction novel set in the Canadian Rockies.

The story follows Mary Boulton, a young woman on the run from her dangerous husband. As Mary navigates the rugged wilderness, she encounters a cast of memorable characters and faces numerous trials.

I loved its evocative and atmospheric writing, transporting me to the untamed Rocky Mountains in the early 20th century. Adamson's portrayal of Mary as a strong and resourceful protagonist captivated me. The land is brutal and beautiful at one, as are the characters she encounters.

The Outlander is a compelling tale of survival, filled with suspense, surprising twists and turns, and a captivating exploration of the human spirit. I could not put this down.

The West used to begin in Ohio. Some of my ancestors moved there around 1816. Their experiences must have been very similar to those of the Lucketts family depicted in The Trees by the masterful writer, Conrad Richter.

The trees so closely grown and tall, one could not see through them or over them. They had to be toppled. Children got lost in the trees while playing; some never made it back to their homes. Lost forever.

The rich narrative, reminiscent of pioneers’ old diaries the novelist read prior to writing, fills the reader’s ear with character, honesty, pathos, and heart. Richter won the Pulitzer Prize for The Town, the third novel in his Heartland Trilogy. But the trilogy’s first book, The Trees, is my favorite.