Recommended Reading

Few wildlife biologists can tell stories like Douglas Chadwick, a National Geographic contributor who’s spent his life in the field with elusive and misunderstood animals—snow leopards, wolverines, and grizzly bears. In this strange-but-true account, he takes us into a mountainous corner of Mongolian desert, one of the world’s most difficult, remote landscapes, where rain rarely falls, most of the ground is stone, and temperatures range from 122° to minus 40°. How can anything live here? First confirmed by scientists in the 1940s, the Gobi bear is the rarest of bears—a relative of grizzlies, shaggy-haired and shy yet playful, a tenacious champion of adaptation. With chapters like “Indiana Jones and the Gobi Death Worm” plus more than 150 images by photographer Joe Riis, it’s an exploration of survival and a reminder our world still holds mystery.

Is it a cookbook? A field journal memoir? A photo album with cool archives, like a scan of a 1912 polar menu featuring “Plum Pouding Union Jack” and penguin? Yes, yes, and yes. But, cooking and cleaning…in Antarctica? Two young women, one an activist, the other a backcountry cook, organized a remote island cleanup to pick up manmade litter. They cajoled 54 volunteers and constructed one makeshift kitchen for a summer. The experience is told by scrapbook: journal entries, maps, 40 recipes, menus, and to-do lists. Photos show the characters drawn to the austral extremes over the last century, from Shackleton to today’s scientists and adventurers. Maybe it’s the honey oatmeal bread, musings of Russian and Chilean researchers, or dreamlike images of icebergs and whale flukes, but together, in what would seem to be the least compelling read, it’s a surprisingly hearty chronicle of the bottom of the world.

This Pulitzer Prize finalist feels like winter—wet snowflakes on eyelashes, smell of a woodstove, fear of long, dark nights. Inspired by a Russian folk tale, it’s a fictional story about a novice homesteading couple in 1920s Alaska who are unprepared for the frontier. On a whim they build a childlike snowman; overnight the snowman vanishes, and a mysterious little girl appears from the woods. She is skittish around people yet surefooted as a mountain goat in the snow, trapping animals for food with a red fox as her hunting companion. Named after alpenglow, she is fearlessly at home in the very wilderness that threatens the homesteaders. Where is she from, and why does she disappear at night? Is she a fairy tale come to life? The Snow Child shifts between the fantastical and the real, an immersive, haunting fable about finding hope in wildness that stays wild.