Books for Lovers of Thoreau's Walden

Deep in the Mohave Desert, Austin examines a land that echoes her deepest sense of self as a woman. Recommended for readers of Willa Cather and Tillie Olsen.

Battling shell-shock and depression after World War I, Beston retreats to a fishing shack on the remote and lonely Great Beach of Cape Cod to find peace, even healing. (Later he marries Elizabeth Coatsworth, the famed children's author.)

Begun as an assignment for a slick magazine, the book morphed into a sprawling, intensely poetic anthem to life in rural Alabama. With the stunning b/w photographs by Walker Evans that made "documentary" into an art form.

Into the Himalayas with a writer and a biologist, both seeking the rarest of big cats, for different reasons. In that high-altitude Nirvana, Matthiessen learns he must also find peace within his home and family, back in America.

A memoir of seventeen years spent coffee-farming the cool, wet slopes above Nairobi. Written from her home in Denmark, Dinesen broods without apology on the beautiful, doomed dream of a colonial Africa.

A Norwegian reporter embeds herself in the home of an Afghan liberal — she thinks. Instead, she finds that he dominates his women with a Taliban-like oppression. Controversial for that, and for her use of fictive devices.

As a young medical student, Guevara travels the length of South America, discovering a glorious Indian civilization now mired in European injustice. More art than propaganda, the book traces Guevara's revolutionary roots.

A humorous, self-deprecating story of two urban mid-lifers hiking the Appalachian Trail. Along the way, they shape up, lose their snark, and begin to appreciate the difficulty of preserving wilderness in postmodern times.

This miscellany of pieces from her years as a California reporter has all the chaos and calm of its namesake, the last collaborative work by The Beatles. Brooding, self-absorbed, full of lighting-strike insights; Didion scores in nearly every sentence.

The most Thoreau-like of moderns in his angry rejection of asphalt, Abbey works alone as a seasonal park ranger, in love with "rock and tree and cloud," the natural arches and canyons of southeast Utah.