Here are 63 books that The Last American Man fans have personally recommended if you like
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As a teenager, I visited my uncle, who farmed rice in southern Haiti. I met a community that helped me understand that food is not just about dollars and cents—it’s about belonging, it’s about identity. This experience inspired me to become an aid worker. For the last 20+ years, I have worked to mend broken food systems all over the world. If we don’t get food right, hunger will threaten the social fabric.
I appreciated the author’s voice as a farmer speaking from experience and from the heart. Writing from his tiny farm, Fukuoka pushes back with flair against emerging agro-food paradigms.
I also found this book to be a window into mid-20th century Japan, a culture and period I simply did not know much about. Perhaps the best part of the book is the author's withering rants against industrial, modern agriculture.
Call it “Zen and the Art of Farming” or a “Little Green Book,” Masanobu Fukuoka’s manifesto about farming, eating, and the limits of human knowledge presents a radical challenge to the global systems we rely on for our food. At the same time, it is a spiritual memoir of a man whose innovative system of cultivating the earth reflects a deep faith in the wholeness and balance of the natural world. As Wendell Berry writes in his preface, the book “is valuable to us because it is at once practical and philosophical. It is an inspiring, necessary book about agriculture…
Blame it on the issues of National Geographicand books on ancient mythology I devoured as a child or my family’s obsession with Frontier House, but I’ve always been one of those people who felt misplaced in time—longing to live a life more immersed in the natural world. That yearning has only grown stronger as the world has rapidly technologized and globalized since my childhood. Luckily, I’ve been able to channel it into some fascinating work as a journalist and author writing about the environment, food systems (I’m also a lifelong foodie with a passion for traditional foods), and cultural history.
This isn’t just a book—it’s a feat of cultural anthropology, an ark of the world’s wondrous and unique food cultures on the brink of erasure due to the encroachment of industrial food and globalization. The photos are mesmerizing, and the accounts of the families are both fascinating and heartrending.
I keep this book on my desk and open it anytime I have a little downtime. I can disappear into the world of, say, subsistence farmers in Bhutan or marvel over the mouthwatering array of dishes a Turkish mom churns out for her family of six from a one-bedroom apartment in Istanbul. I never cease to be amazed—or hungry.
The age-old practice of sitting down to a family meal is undergoing unprecedented change as rising world affluence and trade, along with the spread of global food conglomerates, transform eating habits worldwide. HUNGRY PLANET profiles 30 families from around the world--including Bosnia, Chad, Egypt, Greenland, Japan, the United States, and France--and offers detailed descriptions of weekly food purchases; photographs of the families at home, at market, and in their communities; and a portrait of each family surrounded by a week's worth of groceries. Featuring photo-essays on international street food, meat markets, fast food, and cookery, this captivating chronicle offers a…
Blame it on the issues of National Geographicand books on ancient mythology I devoured as a child or my family’s obsession with Frontier House, but I’ve always been one of those people who felt misplaced in time—longing to live a life more immersed in the natural world. That yearning has only grown stronger as the world has rapidly technologized and globalized since my childhood. Luckily, I’ve been able to channel it into some fascinating work as a journalist and author writing about the environment, food systems (I’m also a lifelong foodie with a passion for traditional foods), and cultural history.
I read this in the early days of my fantasizing about off-grid living, and I found a true kindred spirit in Sundeen and the remarkable new-gen back-to-the-land pioneers he followed to write the three deep-dive stories that form this beautiful book.
Sundeen is a master of the immersive journalism genre in the vein of Jon Krakauer or Sebastian Junger and a true writer’s writer (i.e., never in love with the sound of his own voice, yet blows you away with the choiceness and poignancy of his storytelling). That this book isn’t yet more widely known is astonishing.
“An in-depth and compelling account of diverse Americans living off the grid.” —Los Angeles Times
The radical search for the simple life in today’s America.
On a frigid April night, a classically trained opera singer, five months pregnant, and her husband, a former marine biologist, disembark an Amtrak train in La Plata, Missouri, assemble two bikes, and pedal off into the night, bound for a homestead they've purchased, sight unseen. Meanwhile, a horticulturist, heir to the Great Migration that brought masses of African Americans to Detroit, and her husband, a product of the white flight from it, have turned to…
How do you create a happy life when you move away from home for the first time; or move to a new city or country for work or studies or love; or retire somewhere new? The Mobile Life guides you through the challenge of making new friends and inventing new…
Blame it on the issues of National Geographicand books on ancient mythology I devoured as a child or my family’s obsession with Frontier House, but I’ve always been one of those people who felt misplaced in time—longing to live a life more immersed in the natural world. That yearning has only grown stronger as the world has rapidly technologized and globalized since my childhood. Luckily, I’ve been able to channel it into some fascinating work as a journalist and author writing about the environment, food systems (I’m also a lifelong foodie with a passion for traditional foods), and cultural history.
My love of this book started out with its quirky cover photo. It’s slightly misleading because the bookisn’t about women’s place in the home; it’s about how we all have lost our sense of purpose, meaning, and self—and our human creativity—by living in a consumerist society that trades autonomy for endless want.
The first half is my favorite. Hayes delves into the shared-by-the-sexes history of homemaking in Medieval Europe and then unpacks the path to relentless productivity in the post-industrial age. I wish I had known about this book when my first daughter was born. I would have felt less alone in my frustration at the unfairness of modern motherhood, and empowered earlier to make more intentional life choices.
Mother Nature has shown her hand. Faced with climate change, dwindling resources, and species extinctions, most Americans understand the fundamental steps necessary to solve our global crises-drive less, consume less, increase self-reliance, buy locally, eat locally, rebuild our local communities.
In essence, the great work we face requires rekindling the home fires.Radical Homemakers is about men and women across the U.S. who focus on home and hearth as a political and ecological act, and who have centered their lives around family and community for personal fulfillment and cultural change. It explores what domesticity looks like in an era that has…
As a coach of elite weightlifters, a lifetime athlete, an outdoorsman, and a passionate advocate for self-reliance, I’m continually searching for quality sources of information that teach, inspire, and drive us to improve our abilities—physical, mental, and emotional—to not just enrich our own lives and bolster our capacity to achieve what’s meaningful to us, but to become better contributors to the world at large and help and inspire others in turn.
Survival books these days tend to be more flash and gimmicks than qualify information, just selling an author’s image rather than providing practical, valuable tools that can be immediately put to use by any inquisitive and motivated reader. Brown not only eschews such silliness, but he also provides the information in a tone and with an attitude sadly unusual in the genre and at large, inspiring curiosity, awe, and respect for the world around us rather than a clumsy attempt to dominate it.
A fully illustrated wilderness survival guide perfect for seasoned and novice outdoors enthusiasts alike.
Here, in one essential volume, are the basics of wilderness survival. The most ancient and important skills, preserved for generations, are presented in a simple, easy-to-use format with clear illustrations and instructions. A complete must-have companion to the great outdoors.
• How to build natural shelters in plains, woods, or deserts • How to get safe drinking water from plants, trees, the sun, or Earth Herself • How to make fire without matches and maintain it in any weather • How to find, stalk, kill, and…
I love the quirky, restless Pacific Northwest, also known as Cascadia, my home bioregion. Nonfiction is my jam, but I enjoy stories both unreal and real (stealing and tweaking Oregon author Ursula Le Guin’s use of the terms). I’m also an avid hiker. I’ve often wondered how I could provide folks heading here to hike the 400-mile Oregon Coast Trail (another passion of mine) with my personal book list introducing them to this landscape and its history, human and natural. Here is a start.
Charlotte Drummond is a sort of anti-Carrie Simpson: same era, but fictional and feminist, living on the lower Columbia River. She joins a search for a girl lost from a remote logging camp and discovers more than she bargained for. There’s so much to love in this quiet novel, mainly the vivid and unflashy rendering of landscape and unfolding of memorable characters.
In 1905, a cigar-smoking, feminist writer of popular adventure novels for women encounters Bigfoot in Molly Gloss’s best loved novel—“never has there been a more authentic, persuasive, or moving evocation of this elusive legend: a masterpiece” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
Set among lava sinkholes and logging camps at the fringe of the Northwest frontier in the early 1900s, Wild Life is the story—both real and imagined—of the free-thinking, cigar-smoking, trouser-wearing Charlotte Bridger Drummond, who pens dime-store women’s adventure stories. One day, when a little girl gets lost in the woods, Charlotte anxiously joins the search. When she becomes lost in…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I’m often asked if my Worst-Case Scenario books are serious or humorous. And my answer is always the same: “Yes!” While inspired by pop culture and the survival situations we see again and again in movies and on TV, the information in my books is real. I spend a lot of time seeking out experts to interview—the people who actually have done this stuff—and then distilling their survival wisdom into the form you see in the books. As humans, we want to be prepared for life’s twists and turns. Even if it’s, you know, when the aliens arrive. I’ve been a survival writer and humorist for 25 years and I ain’t stopping now!
Two decades ago, I was preparing for my first book promotion trip to Australia and New Zealand. I asked my (Aussie) publisher to recommend two books to learn more about Australia and its history.
The first was In A Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson, which I had heard of. The second was Cooper’s Creek, which I hadn’t. It’s a stunning, scary, edge-of-your-seat short history about an expedition in 1860 that set out from Melbourne into the vast, empty, broiling interior of the country, with the mission to find a route to the lush northern coast. Needless to say, things didn’t go as planned.
The book is taken from first-hand accounts by the explorers, and is novel-like in its dramatic twists and turns.
In 1860, an expedition set out from Melbourne, Australia, into the interior of the country, with the mission to find a route to the northern coast. Headed by Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills, the party of adventurers, scientists, and camels set out into the outback hoping to find enough water and to keep adequate food stores for their trek into the bush. Almost one year later, Burke, Wills, and two others from their party, Gray and King, reached the northern shore but on their journey back, they were stranded at Cooper’s Creek where all but King perished. Cooper’s…
I’ve been fascinated by wild and lonely places since early childhood. Growing up in a small village, there were plenty to choose from. Foraging and an interest in the medicinal properties of plants grew out of that fascination, and later brought me to survival guides and the concept of survival itself. Hostile places, historical skills, and wilderness experiences all have a hold over my imagination. The notion of being prepared for humanity’s decline is something I find endlessly intriguing. Can such a thing be prepared for? What form will our destruction take and how does this affect the methods we need to survive it? I’ll probably keep reading and writing about it until we have an answer.
A non-fiction account of one office worker’s yearlong attempt to survive in Alaska. As someone who finds non-fiction quite dry and hard to read, this book is the best of both worlds. It has the detail of a true account with the wit and humor of fictional story. This book gives me something that former SAS professionals and hardened explorers cannot; the experiences of an everyday man, trading his desk job for a log cabin in one of the most dangerous parts of the world.
Guy Grieve's life was going nowhere - trapped in a job he hated, commuting 2,000 miles a month and up to his neck in debt. But he dreamed of escaping it all to live alone in one of the wildest, most remote places on earth - Alaska.
And just when he'd given up hope, the dream came true. Suddenly Guy was thrown into one of the harshest environments in the world, miles from the nearest human being and armed with only the most basic equipment. And he soon found - whether building a log cabin from scratch, hunting, ice fishing…
I am a survival expert and outdoor professional with over ten years of experience in outdoor recreation and survival. Recently, I became the winner of Season 9 of the survival TV series Alone after surviving for 78 days with just ten items in the unforgiving wilderness of Labrador. I have lived for six months in the boreal forest with my fiancée, foraging to complement our meager rations, and I have also spent one hundred days foraging in solitude during the Canadian winter. Currently I’m building an off-grid homestead that I hope one day will turn into an off-grid community.
This book is the bushcraft classic. Although it focuses on northern bushcraft, most of the information in it is very useful in other areas of the world.
Many important techniques and skills are covered in this book that are applicable to wilderness survival and wilderness living. The legendary author was one of the most well-respected survival instructors in the world.
I personally cherish this book due to the level of detail and depth of the subjects covered. Whenever I read it I can always feel that a great deal of experience and research stands behind what is written.
Longtime wilderness educator Mors Kochanski has dedicated his life to learning and teaching about the lore of the forest. With clear instructions, extensive use of diagrams and a color photo supplement, this comprehensive reference includes all the practical skills and knowledge essential for you to survive and enjoy the wilderness: * Lighting and maintaining a fire * Chopping wood and felling a tree * Creating a shelter and keeping warm * Safe use of the axe and bush knife * Plants and animals important for survival * Food, water and outdoor cooking * Wilderness first aid. * This bestseller should…
As one of 67 million Americans who serve as caretakers to their elderly parents, Susan Hartzler cared for her dad for three years, gaining profound insight into Parkinson's disease and the multifaceted challenges of caregiving. Throughout this period, Hartzler's rescue dog, Baldwin, a precious gift from her late mom, provided…
I’ve always enjoyed time spent outdoors, and over the years I’ve done plenty of hiking and camping and some whitewater rafting and canoeing. As a result, I’m intrigued by books that excel in their portrayals of outdoor settings. A serious whitewater accident prompted me to include lots of kayaking scenes in my most recent book (Over the Falls), and so I thought it would be fun to pull together a list of other river-related books that offer suspense and/or mystery. I hope these suggestions help you add a few new stories to your reading list.
I’m always up for a page-turning thriller that’s set in the outdoors, and The River at Night kept me awake late and eager for more. This story follows four women who decide to jazz up their annual girls’ trip by whitewater rafting in the Maine wilderness. What could go wrong? Just about everything. When a freak accident leaves them stranded, they’re eager for help. But are their rescuers the saviors they first believe? Grab this book for an energizing read you won’t soon forget.
A “raw, relentless, and heart-poundingly real” (Ruth Ware, New York Times bestselling author) thriller set against the harsh beauty of the Maine wilderness, The River at Night charts the journey of four friends as they fight to survive the aftermath of a white water rafting accident.
Winifred Allen needs a vacation.
Stifled by a soul-crushing job, devastated by the death of her beloved brother, and lonely after the end of a fifteen-year marriage, Wini is feeling vulnerable. So when her three best friends insist on a high-octane getaway for their annual girls’ trip, she signs on, despite her misgivings.
