Books like The Lost City of Z

01

Into the Wild

Jon Krakauer · Biography

Into the Wild is Jon Krakauer's account of Christopher McCandless, a twenty-four-year-old who graduated from Emory University in 1990, gave his savings to charity, abandoned his car and possessions, and spent two years drifting through the American West before hitchhiking into the Alaskan wilderness in April 1992.

A kindred memoir read.

02

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

Alfred Lansing · History

In 1914, Ernest Shackleton led twenty-seven men into the Weddell Sea on a ship called the Endurance with the goal of crossing Antarctica on foot.

Both dig into exploration.

03

Into Thin Air

Jon Krakauer · Memoir

Into Thin Air is Jon Krakauer's firsthand account of the May 1996 Everest expedition that killed eight climbers in a single afternoon.

A kindred memoir read.

04

Barbarian Days

William Finnegan · Memoir

Barbarian Days is William Finnegan's memoir of a life spent surfing — from his childhood in Los Angeles and Hawaii through decades of obsessive searching for waves across the Pacific, Asia, Africa, and eventually the cold waters of New York.

Both dig into obsession.

05

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates · Memoir

Between the World and Me is a letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his teenage son, Samori, about what it means to live in a Black body in the United States.

Both dig into history.

06

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Isabel Wilkerson · Memoir

Isabel Wilkerson's second book proposes a reframing of American racial hierarchy: rather than thinking of racism primarily as prejudice, she argues that the United States has operated as a caste society, with Black Americans at the bottom of a rigidly maintained hierarchy similar in its structure — though different in its specific mechanisms — to the caste systems of India and Nazi Germany.

Both dig into history.

07

The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century

Kirk Wallace Johnson · Memoir

The Feather Thief tells two intertwined stories.

Both dig into obsession.

08

The Monster of Florence

Douglas Preston · Memoir

Between 1974 and 1985, a serial killer known as the Monster of Florence murdered sixteen people — couples parked in cars in the hills outside the city — and was never conclusively identified.

Both dig into obsession.

09

The Soul of a New Machine

Tracy Kidder · Memoir

Tracy Kidder's account of the engineers at Data General Corporation who designed a new minicomputer under enormous competitive pressure in the late 1970s won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1982 and effectively invented the genre of technology-company narrative journalism.

Both dig into obsession.

10

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Charles Mackay · History

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, published by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay in 1841, is one of the most quoted books in financial history despite being primarily a work of popular history and entertainment.

Both dig into history.

11

Fermat's Enigma

Simon Singh · Science

In 1637, Pierre de Fermat scrawled a note in the margin of a mathematics book claiming to have found a proof that no three positive integers can satisfy the equation a^n + b^n = c^n for any integer value of n greater than 2 — but that the margin was too narrow to contain it.

Both dig into obsession.

12

Forged in Crisis

Nancy Koehn · History

Nancy Koehn, a historian at Harvard Business School, profiles five historical leaders who were forged — not simply demonstrated — by crisis: Ernest Shackleton, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Rachel Carson.

Both dig into history.