The most recommended books about North America

The only thing better than reading about bees is getting outside and seeing some! This book combines good pictures with descriptions of behavior and habitats that will help identify what you find – if not to species, then at least to the major families and groups. Though focused on North America, many of the same general types of bees can be encountered anywhere: sweat bees, miners, diggers, leafcutters, cuckoo bees, and more. In addition to the identification tips, the book includes a generous introduction to bee biology and behavior, as well as a primer on how to improve the bee habitat in any yard through the addition of flowers, nesting sites, and more.

The Comanche Empire turns imperial history on its head. I like how Hämäläinen puts the spotlight on Comanche Indians instead of European colonizers. Indigenous people were powerful empire builders too.

I love how the book is also a story of horses, bison and how Indigenous people harnessed the resources of their environment. Horse riding and bison hunting, as much as Indigenous adaptability, were the foundation of the Comanche Empire.

What I love about the books in the Lerner’s Pull Ahead series is the natural language that’s used and the depth of information that’s provided. In an effort to be readable, many non-fiction books aimed at young elementary students are so concise as to wind up being superficial. But this series explores concepts in depth. In Building Beavers, 12 sentences are devoted to the construction of a beaver lodge. The books include 27 pages of text (two to three sentences per page.) At the end of the book, there is a map showing where in the world the animal is found and a diagram of the animal’s body parts as well as a glossary and an index. There are no headings or chapter titles, however. The detailed photographs provide an excellent complement to the text.

One November evening in 1831, Rebecca and John Burlend, three children in tow, stepped off a riverboat. Emigrants from England, they had reached Phillip’s Ferry, Illinois, the end of a dangerous journey. But instead of the village they expected, they found only forest. They burst into tears.  

The couple eventually buys land and clears it by “girdling”—stripping bark so trees die and drop their leaves, letting in enough sun for growing crops. Those include “Indian” corn whose stalks support beans. Indoors, a rag strip in a dish of lard burns with enough light to sew by. But farm life is perilous: While harvesting, a pregnant Rebecca rests by a sheaf, from which a startled rattlesnake crawls out. She kills it with her rake. 

I’ve read this book several times. It’s a saga worth relishing. 

I love the grand sweep of the history of humans in North America. It strethes all the way from the Pleistocene to the 21st century. Dan Flores provides a thought-provoking assessment of the complex relationship Americans have with wild animals and puts this into the larger framework of environmental history.

This book taught me how to hear birds. 

We all see birds to some degree. But most people completely miss their sounds. That’s where this book comes in, as a guide to the vocalization of all the western birds (there is an eastern version, too) with transliterations, spectrograms, and curated online recordings. 

Here’s what I recommend you do to instantly enrich your life: sit outside, wait until a bird sings or calls, then look it up in this book. Read the description, look at the spectrogram, and play the recording if needed. Now you know a bird by ear. Now, whenever it calls, you will know what bird is present, just by the subtle patterns or qualities of tone that most people ignore. 

Finally, expanding outward even further in space and time and going far beyond my Clash of Eagles series source material, Tim Flannery’s book covers the entire geological, ecological, and (yes) human history of the North American continent, from its formative years 65 million years ago through to its “discovery” by Europeans, and the effects those colonizing influences had on the peoples, flora, and fauna. I learned so much from this book that I still think about it almost daily, and especially so when I travel around today’s US in all its depth, breadth, and glory.

This is a beautifully written memoir by a prominent First Nations writer and theatre creator. I was left with so many stunning images of life on the land, of growing up in the North, of growing up in a healthy and loving family.

The book changes every preconception you have about First Nations communities and culture. It doesn’t have a narrative or chronological arc, rather it’s like a series of short stories – anecdotes that become almost Thuberesque in their idiosyncratic characters.

At a time when we are trying to come to grips with the legacy of residential schools, the book is honest, optimistic, realistic, and profoundly uplifting. 

This book will challenge your notion of what a poem is or can be. Let it. Subtitled “Diagram poems,” these works mix both word and illustration to get at their playful effects. The illustrations come from “found” or ephemeral sources, e.g., a manual on textiles, or a guide to common beetles of North America, or a grammar on computer languages, or the layouts of American playgrounds. The interplay in the poems creates a wonderful uncanniness. The friction, say, caused when you read “You are special” next to a few numbered puzzle pieces in Figure A. and “Everyone is special” next to a completed puzzle in Figure B, and yet when you try to superimpose the one on the other, you realize that some of the pieces have had to adjust themselves to fit the whole. The sudden epiphany is: How special is anyone? And yet answering that question… show more.

The Encyclopedia of Edible Plants is the only book to list all edible species (about 4,000 plants) that have been used as food by humans on the vast North American continent. The book contains a comprehensive account of each species, including etymology, geographical location, uses of each part, history of the uses, composition, medicinal uses, possible toxicity, endangered species, and much more.

Author Francis Couplan, Ph.D. blended scientific expertise with thirty-five years of personal experience consuming edible plants. By relating to the senses and to the pleasure of discovering amazing new tastes and flavors, the book encourages the reader to develop new relationships with nature. The book also includes traditional Native American cooking techniques and uses for plants which the author recorded while living with various tribes around the country.