Recommended Reading

“In a world of bum deals, a bicycle offers an excellent return on investment,” writes cycling enthusiast Jody Rosen. “Bikes are cheap and durable and portable and take up little space.” They are also incredible personal mobility machines, enabling someone to move four times faster than walking while using five times less energy. Rosen is wonderfully lyrical when spinning odes to such benefits, but Two Wheels Good is more history than mystery: It’s a tour of the complicated and often tense relationship between riders and establishment forces that see bikes as a threat to power and profits. In 1989, Chinese protestors in Tiananmen Square arrived mostly by bikes, which were crushed under tanks and left as a warning for all to see; Beijing then began a decades-long anti-bike campaign that has been equally effective at squashing ownership and usage. Rosen argues convincingly that riding a bike isn’t just fun and good for your health: It’s also an act of rebellion against those who would oppress people and the planet for their own greedy ends.

An Immense World delivers miracles on every page. A fly’s vision updates six times faster than a human’s, perhaps rending its perception of our movements in slow motion. Cows’ gazes appear unfocused because they see in a horizontal band and register activity in front, next to, and behind them at the same time. A mallard has panoramic vision and so sees “the world simultaneously moving toward it and away from it.” Ed Yong’s exploration of the strange, awesome universe of animal senses will completely reshape your view of the planet and fellow inhabitants, beginning with the concept of umwelt, which in German means environment or surroundings, but refers to how senses shape an organism’s experiences and interpretation of the world. It is an astonishing, lively, and entertaining book, and an important one, too: Yong shows that the limits of our perception affect, well, everything, and that imagining the umwelten of others encourages us to be more sensitive and less damaging earthly citizens.

With Tree Thieves, British Columbia writer Lyndsie Bourgon set out to answer two questions: How can a tree be stolen? and Why would someone steal one? She plants her narrative in the coastal forests of Northern California and the dying town of Orick, just outside Redwood National Park. Locals opposed the park and federal policies they deemed heavy-handed, and they decried the region’s declining economy. Fortunately, Bourgon goes way past the binary framework of good/bad, outsiders/insiders, and brings to life the complexities of local culture and the people who’ve turned to illegal cutting to survive. “I have begun to see the act of timber poaching as not simply a dramatic environmental crime, but something deeper—an act to reclaim one’s place in a rapidly changing world, a deed of necessity.” Well, yes. But she is perhaps too sympathetic. Worldwide, illegal logging generates up to $157 billion annually and comprises thirty percent of the world market for wood—and unlike people, trees can’t up and move when their fortunes go south.

In 1967, at age fifty-one, Dick Proenneke retired from a peripatetic life as a diesel mechanic, salmon fisherman, and repairman and settled in southwest Alaska, where he spent the next thirty years living intimately with the land. A master craftsman, Proenneke singlehandedly built his cabin, furniture, tools, and most everything else he needed. He also meticulously recorded his life in journals and on film, and a PBS documentary and subsequent books won him legions of fans. Proenneke appreciated that acclaim, especially for his wilderness ethos (do no harm), but he would have been most pleased with the posthumous Handcrafted Life, assembled and edited by his dear friend and fellow craftsman Monroe Robinson. Over four hundred pages and drawn almost exclusively from his journals, the book tells the story of Proenneke’s remarkable life through his tools, workmanship, and own words. “Did you ever pick very large blueberries after a summer rain, walk through a grove of cottonwoods, open like a park, and see the blue sky beyond the shimmering gold of the leaves?…The world is full of such things.”