The Great Outdoors

Whether you’re an outdoors enthusiast or a dyed-in-the-wool metropolitan, this collection will connect you with the joys, mysteries, and marvels of the natural world. Lyall Watson’s Heaven’s Breath presents an encyclopedic, unclassifiable “natural history of the wind” that explores some of the most peculiar aspects of the air around us. In Jules Renard’s Nature Stories, whimsical, anthropomorphic vignettes about plant and animal life are accompanied by the charming ink-brush illustrations of Pierre Bonnard.

With an introduction by Wendell Berry, Masanobu Fukuoka’s The One-Straw Revolution is a memoir and sustainable agriculture manifesto that Michael Pollan calls “one of founding documents of the alternative food movement.” J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine describes the author’s preoccupation with a pair of peregrine falcons nesting near his home in the English countryside—a fixation that gradually breaks down his sense of human self. Says Werner Herzog: “It's a most incredible book. It has prose of the caliber that we have not seen since Joseph Conrad—an ecstasy of a delirious sort of love for what he observes.”

An elegiac memoir by an award-winning British environmental journalist, Michael McCarthy’s The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy “fights against indifference, shines with the deep magic and beauty of the nonhuman lives around us, and shows how their loss lessens us all,” according to Helen Macdonald. Isabella Tree’s Wilding: Returning Nature to Our Farm, meanwhile, is “a book about the fact that it’s still possible to heal what’s barren or polluted, and that maybe it would be richer, more joyful, and more possible than we imagine, if we could only just begin” (CNN).