The Discoverers
1983 · 745 pages
The obstacle to discovery was never ignorance but the illusion of knowledge, Boorstin argues, then walks through the clock, the compass and the microscope as victories over what everyone was certain of.
★ 6.6
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Voss
1957 · 464 pages
In 1845 a German explorer attempts to cross Australia, bound across the desert to a woman in Sydney he barely knows. It took the inaugural Miles Franklin Award, Australia's foremost literary prize.
★ 6.6
Coming into the Country
1977 · 438 pages
Three Alaskas: a river trip above the Arctic Circle, the hunt for a new capital site, and the trappers of Eagle on the Yukon. Reporters have been studying McPhee's patience ever since.
★ 6.5
The Journals
1768 · 646 pages
Cook charts New Zealand and eastern Australia in his own hand, and sails until no southern continent is left to find. The log calls the Aborigines happier than Europeans, then claims their coast.
★ 5.8
The Four Voyages
1493 · 320 pages
Columbus wrote it all down, and the wonder and the greed are inseparable from the start: islands more beautiful than anything he has seen, and people he judges would make good servants.
★ 5.8
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
2005 · 209 pages
How do you go about finding a thing whose nature is unknown to you? Solnit carries that question from Plato into deserts, ruins, and the blue of distance, making lostness a discipline.
★ 5.6
Arctic Dreams
1986 · 474 pages
Five years in the high Arctic, among narwhals and muskoxen and light that behaves like nothing further south. Lopez asks what Westerners have wanted from that country, and what the wanting cost.
★ 5.6
Marvelous Possessions
The Wonder of the New World
1991 · 202 pages
Wonder was never innocent, Greenblatt argues. Reading Columbus's landfall and the travel writers around him, he catches the moment when amazement at a new world hardens into a claim to own it.
★ 5.6
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
1958 · 260 pages
Quitting the London fashion trade with almost no climbing behind him, Newby set out for an unclimbed Afghan peak. The funniest travel book in English comes out of that mismatch.
★ 5.0
Magellan
Conqueror of the Seas
1938 · 352 pages
Five ships left Seville in 1519 and one came home three years later with eighteen men aboard. Zweig tells the circumnavigation as the story of an obstinate will set against an unmapped ocean.
★ 4.9