100 books like The Winter Fortress

Our kids need nature as part of a healthy childhood. In this groundbreaking book, Louv describes the consequences of the indoor child, how spending time within the confines of four walls can be a kind of prison, removing children from active outdoor play and nature connection.

He coined the phrase “Nature Deficit Disorder” to illustrate the human costs of being disconnected from nature, a rise in anxiety, more obesity, less resiliency, and, in the end, less healthy children for a progressively less healthy world.

A book about a hobbit, thirteen dwarves, and a wizard may seem an odd choice to reflect on the fragility of human culture—but I think this is the most human of journeys I’ve read, as Bilbo interrupts his gentle life in the Shire for an uncomfortable adventure.

Now I’m reading it to my nine-month-old son and noticing how much this is a story about social vulnerability—Bilbo’s displacement, the dwarves adrift from their ancestral home, the ruined town of Dale, and the damage caused by the dragon Smaug in the name of amassing a fortune (which he simply sits on like some big corporation with its profits). In the middle of all that devastation, it reminds me that friendship is one of the most important aspects of humanity.

This book is a collection of true short stories about the misadventures of 22 different climbers on New Hampshire’s iconic Presidential Range, particularly Mount Washington, between 1849 and 1994.

One of my other guidebooks cherry-picks the best routes in New Hampshire, one of my favorite places to stand atop a peak, which is why I first picked up this book. (I went to college in New Hampshire and then lived there for another 20+ years.)

The stories drive home how these exposed summits can surprise even experienced hikers in tragic ways. Nick Howe is a good writer, who has done his research. If you have an interest in climbing mountains or New England history, this is a must-read.

Mount Everest is arguably the location of the most epic adventures ever.

This is my favorite book about Everest, perhaps because the author, David Breashears, is a friend who shared many Thanksgiving dinners with me during the thick of his climbing and high-altitude film career. He is most well-known for producing the popular IMAX film, Everest.

This is Breashear’s autobiography. It includes his perspective on the 1996 Everest tragedy, which he not only miraculously survived but also saved the lives of other climbers. I also enjoyed the book, Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, which is about that same Everest episode and had much broader commercial success. Krakauer wrote the forward to this book.

However, I found this book one to be more personal, more revealing. After reading it, you’ll admire Breashears as much as Krakauer and I do.

As it turns out, the Germans never got close to building an atomic bomb—largely because of some major mistakes at the outset (one of them made by their top nuclear chemist because of a crisis in his love life). Powers, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, created some controversy because of his portrayal of the man who didn’t build the German bomb. That controversy continues. 

I once had to physically separate the author from his critics and threaten to remove disruptive protesters from the audience when I moderated a session on the history of the German bomb at the Smithsonian.  

A secret intelligence program with Nazi scientists is described in such colorful detail that this nonfiction book riveted my attention.

What was most compelling for me was the story of how these scientists and technological experts were utilized by American ingenuity. A fascinating and well-researched history book always holds my interest.  

Walter Isaacson’s biography is not just a mere recounting of the life of a Renaissance genius; it is an exploration into the mind of a man whose curiosity knew no bounds.

Isaacson details how that curiosity, combined with his ability to observe and question the world around him, led to groundbreaking insights and inventions.

This resonates deeply with my own pursuit of understanding human potential and performance.

An open mind and creative imagination are needed to explore reality. In making sense of the most significant science fiction writer of the 20th century, Philip K. Dick, we might refer to the dying words of his Berkeley buddy, Jack Spicer: “My vocabulary did this to me.” Like a Zen stone mason in a hall of mirrors, Dick often seems to depart from the most inscrutable of semantic pebbles. Exegesis offers us a lexical labyrinth infused with the most profound heuristic paranoia, to yield a vast shifting matrix of uncountable speculative origins. Anyone who reads this book and does not write at least one of their own, even as a prophylactic, is indeed “duller than the fattest weed on the wharf of Lethe.” (Paraphrased from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5)

But can you fight the future? Isn’t it inevitable? This is often how tech companies try to make us think, and that anyone who opposes “progress” is a Luddite. But, as Patrick Sale makes clear in this excellent and heartbreaking historical study, the original Luddites—a protest movement that swept the industrial heartland of 19th Century England—were not anti-technology; they merely thought technology should serve people, not profit. Faced with the destruction of their livelihoods and their traditional way of life, they destroyed machines and burnt factories because that was the only outlet they had for their rage and desperation. And when the “inevitable march of progress” comes to trample you too, you may see that they had a point.

I love how this book has been part of a resurgence of interest in the Luddites and has helped recontextualize the history. It really has punctured the hype around the idea that the Luddites were anti-tech – the book so brilliantly lays out the very fact that this important piece of hype-busting has been needed for some time for us to really come to terms with technology in today’s society.

It’s also just brilliant historical story-telling, and it’s written with fervour, which I always like in a book.