Along the Nahanni River, he faced all of the hardships characterized by a wild, northern river. I am very excited to read this book next! Braving It: A Father, a Daughter, and an Unforgettable Journey into the Alaskan Wild By James Campbell NOLS Expedition Planning will also help outdoor enthusiasts plan food and fuel requirements, how to prepare mentally and physically for the hardships faced in the great wilderness. There’s a lot of landscape in The New Wilderness, and Cook’s prose is at its finest when she trains her eye on the natural world. The harsh, dazzling setting seems to be one of the few things to which the characters react with much awe or emotion – but for me, their ambivalence toward so many other aspects of life comes at a cost. Cook’s desired intention, I believe, must be to highlight the mutedness with which her characters have come to experience events that would horrify most 21st-century readers: a fatal mauling, a fall down an abyss, even the tragic stillbirth of a child whose personhood is heartbreakingly discounted by a Ranger in one of the novel’s most poignant scenes. But to numb the narrative consciousness to these events, the text must numb the reader, too. Perhaps I am judging a book by its cover (well, specifically, its synopsis) but I don’t have a lot of desire to read a “meaning of life” book written by someone just 5 years my senior.

Wilderness (2023 TV series) - Wikipedia Wilderness (2023 TV series) - Wikipedia

You’ll be fascinated by her descriptions of attending dog sledding school, panic when she gets trapped in snow, fear for her as she navigates empty tundra at night. And yet, while the story is exciting in nature, there is so much more to the book than sled dogs and chilly environments. After eating only what they’re able to forage and hunt with bows and arrows, the Community has grown bony, ravaged by the sun and hardened by experience. Agnes, though, is thriving and at one with a fierce, savagely beautiful environment that has already proven fatal to half their original group of 20.One of the most promising threads to emerge from the recent glut of nature writing is the idea of ‘rewilding’. The two most important books in this respect are George Monbiot’s Feral and, for different reasons, Isabella Tree’s Wilding. It was a close call, but I chose this one over Feral because, as important as Feral was in terms of popularising the idea of Europeans having a Serengeti on their own doorstep, Wilding is about the author and her husband’s attempts to create just that. Books such as Feral are only useful in so far as they lead to places like Knepp, the scene of Wilding. Wilderness Ethics: Preserving the Spirit of Wildness, Special Edition, with an Appreciation of Guy Waterman Without management, wildness cannot survive, but with too much management or the wrong kind of management, we can destroy the spiritual component of wildness in our passion to preserve its physical side.

The best books on Wilderness - Five Books The best books on Wilderness - Five Books

This is a carefully plotted and well-paced novel that has a strong central character. Will the husband and some of the other characters are not as fully formed but they’re there really more as a foil to Liv. She’s the one through whose eyes we witness every situation and development.

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Cook, a former producer of the cult radio programme This American Life, is the author of the acclaimed short story collection, Man v. Nature. Here, too, it’s what we do to nature and what nature does to us that absorbs her. She doesn’t once use that hoary phrase “Mother Nature”, but it hovers all the same over a novel in which motherhood and the mother-daughter relationship – its sacrifices, its limitations, its elemental, consuming love – are pivotal. The push-pull ambivalence of Bea and Agnes’s bond forms its beating heart. Shattered by the discovery of her husband's affair, Liv knows they need to leave the chaos of New York to try to save their marriage. Maybe the roadtrip that they'd always planned, exploring America's national parks, just the two of them, would help heal the wounds. Joe and his climbing partner are mountain climbing in South America, attempting a first ascent. On the descent, there is a terrible storm, Joe is injured and from there on it’s just disaster-miracle-disaster-miracle. According to The Solo Travel Handbook by Lonely Planet, solo travel is the ultimate indulgence, allowing you to come and go as you please, with no compromises needed.

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There’s tension when his climbing partner must decide whether to stay or abandon his partner. You’ll hold your breath as Joe dangles over a crevasse, about to drop. If you have high blood pressure, maybe don’t read this book. But if you love to be kept up at night on the edge of your seat, you’ll love this book.As a sustainable travel enthusiast from Luxembourg, I am the happiest while doing outdoorsy stuff like hiking, cycling, or sailing. But it’s because he moves forward with the trip, despite the emerging problems, that we get to read such an entertaining and thrilling account of a nearly disastrous trip. So I definitely recommend this book! I want to emphasize just how much upriver paddling he does, because anyone who has paddled a whitewater river knows it takes skill to paddle down the river; paddling up seems impossible. Yet Adam manages to paddle up the Coppermine River. Olivia and her husband Will, head to the States for a break, for a chance to heal their marriage after Will’s affair. But Olivia can’t stop thinking that she can never trust him again and she can’t forgive him for what he has done. As dark thoughts crowd in, a plan starts to hatch inside her head, but she doesn’t realise the disastrous consequences it’ll have for them both. I was so excited to read this book. I liked Adam’s first book (Alone Against the North, featured below) and I also love the arctic. So, no surprise I loved this book (much more than his first, actually).

Braving the Wilderness: The quest for true belonging and the

We spoke to Isabella Tree after this book came out, and she said she “consciously didn’t call my book ‘ Rewilding’ because that pesky little ‘re-’ prefix suggests to many rewilding detractors an attempt to recapture the past.” I thought that was interesting. It’s about letting go of our preconceived ideas of what it means to be ‘wild.’ Author and environmentalist Mark Boyle lived for three years without money; now he lives entirely off-grid and eschews all forms of modern technology, in search of a wilder way of living—and of being more in tune with the natural world. Here he discusses his literary inspirations: the best books on wilderness. While I was reading this book, I was always trying to convince people it was more interesting than it appeared. “ Mikaela, you’re reading a book about salmon?!?” On the surface, it’s a story about paddling the Yukon River (Adam is in a canoe, after all) but the story goes so much deeper than that.

I should be clear that this book, in its totality, is not one of my favourite books. In fact, I found myself starting to glaze over parts in the second half. The reason I’ve gone for it is solely down to its first two chapters, the second of which is the most astounding piece of writing I’ve read on communication between species, in particular between apex predators and their prey. It changes everything we ever thought we knew about their relationship to each other, and to death. In doing so, it offers fascinating insights into the depths of understanding which civilised peoples have lost and what, if we were wise, we might attempt to regain. As the title suggests, this book is not just about wolves, but the lessons their ways can teach us button-pressing bipeds.