A first-person memoir of growing up and working in colonial East Africa, told through episodic accounts of life on farms, training racehorses, and learning to fly.

Set in an early 20th-century Brooklyn neighborhood, the novel follows a young girl growing up amid economic hardship and complex family dynamics. It traces the pressures of poverty, education, and personal ambition as the child negotiates loyalty to family and the desire for a different future.

An expansive non-fiction survey of the ocean that traces its origins, physical processes, and living systems while explaining scientific findings in accessible, often lyrical language.

A critique of prevailing mid-20th-century urban planning that argues neighborhoods thrive when everyday street life, local commerce, and diverse uses are preserved.

A scientific investigation and public argument about the ecological and human harms of widespread synthetic pesticide use, with sustained attention to DDT.

Two linked essays presented as letters that question the place of race and religion in American life.

A Moveable Feast is Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of his years as a young expatriate writer in Paris during the 1920s. The book collects episodic recollections—personal scenes, interactions, and snapshots of everyday life—anchored around his marriage at the time and his early literary friendships and work habits.

A long-form nonfiction account of the 1959 murders of a farming family in rural Kansas and the investigation that followed. The work follows the discovery of the crime, the police inquiry, interviews with townspeople and suspects, and the eventual identification, trial, and punishment of the perpetrators.

A compact nonfiction work that analyzes how images are seen and understood, arguing that social context and ideology shape visual meaning. It presents short, illustrated meditations and concrete image readings to show how advertising, reproduction, and historical habits influence perception and value judgments in art.

A book-length series of linked essays that record extended, close observations of the natural world around a creek and turn those observations into philosophical and lyrical reflections on life, perception, and the human place in nature.

A character-driven reconstruction of the three days around the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, told through the perspectives of historical military figures from both the Union and the Confederacy.

A first-person account of growing up between Chinese folktales and American life, where family history and mythic stories intertwine with recollections of childhood.

An extended piece of narrative journalism that follows postwar U.S. test pilots and the first astronauts selected for Project Mercury, probing why these men accepted extreme danger and how American aviation and space culture valorized risk.

Three extended nonfiction essays look closely at distinct episodes where people tried to redirect, constrain, or rebuild around powerful natural forces: efforts on a major river system, responses to a volcanic eruption, and work against mountain debris flows.

A scientist's wide-angle account of how species have originated, diversified, and occupied Earth’s ecosystems, paired with a diagnosis of contemporary biodiversity decline.

A long-form investigation into how island size, isolation, and landscape change shape species distributions and drive extinctions.

A biographical memoir by Paula Fox that collects memories and impressions from her early life and career as an American novelist. The book orients around formative childhood experiences and episodes from a writer’s life, using anecdote and recollection to sketch how personal history shaped a literary trajectory.

A collection of reflective natural-history essays focused on mosses and their place in forest ecosystems. The book links careful field observation of bryophytes to explanations of their biology and roles in plant ecology, while connecting those details to cultural and life-history perspectives about plants.

A memoir of a childhood spent in unstable, often impoverished circumstances, told from the author's adult vantage. The account focuses on a family marked by vivid highs and dangerous lows: parental idealism and promises alongside episodes of neglect and homelessness.

A first-person account of the year after Joan Didion's husband died, recording the small, persistent thoughts and rituals that accompany sudden bereavement. The narrative tracks how memory, habit, and formal thinking shape a surviving spouse’s attempt to understand loss and the quotidian aftermath of grief.

A first-person account by a clinician-scholar describing living with schizophrenia while pursuing an academic career. The book presents personal episodes of illness and recovery alongside reflections on diagnosis, treatment, and maintaining work in higher education.

This book looks closely at how people behave in major disasters, arguing against the idea that chaos and panic are the default. Using historical episodes and reporting, it shows recurring patterns of spontaneous cooperation, improvisation, and mutual aid that form temporary communities in the wake of catastrophe.

A sweeping, literary account of cancer treated as a historical subject: how clinicians, researchers, and institutions have identified, named, studied, and attempted to treat cancer over decades and centuries.

An investigative nonfiction account tracing the life of Henrietta Lacks and the origin of the HeLa cell line, focusing on how her cells were taken, used in scientific research, and the ethical, racial, and personal consequences for her family.

Michelle Alexander argues that mass incarceration in the United States operates as a contemporary racial caste system—what she terms the "New Jim Crow."

An author convalescing with a chronic illness observes and cares for a wild snail that becomes a daily companion. The book records close, patient attention to the snail’s behavior and anatomy while using that relationship to reflect on bodily experience, time, and recovery.

A narrative history of the Great Migration, tracing the movement of Black Americans out of the U.S. South into northern, midwestern, and western cities across much of the twentieth century.

A narrative investigation into how animal infections jump into humans and create new epidemics, built from scientific case studies, interviews with researchers, and on-the-ground reportage.

An interdisciplinary nonfiction collection that interweaves Indigenous wisdom, ecological science, and personal memoir to reconsider how humans relate to plants and land.

A linked memoir of personal and communal loss: the author recounts the deaths of five Black men connected to her across roughly four years and situates those deaths within family history, local conditions, and systemic forces.

Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming is a verse memoir that records her early childhood and adolescent memories growing up African American in the 1960s.

Journalistic nonfiction that documents a contemporary, human-caused mass extinction by surveying past mass die-offs, profiling particular species losses, and reporting from scientific sites and researchers.

A first-person, essayistic account that traces an author's experiences around pregnancy, partnership, and family while weaving in philosophical and theoretical reflections. The work observes intimate domestic moments alongside questions about gender, identity, and what it means to make a family in contemporary life.

A detailed biography of Alexander von Humboldt that follows his formative years, major expeditions—especially in Latin America—and his intellectual effort to present nature as an interconnected system.

An ethnographic study of matsutake mushrooms and the people and places shaped by their global trade. The author follows harvesters, middlemen, buyers, and landscapes to show how a single wild commodity links local ecological disturbance, precarious livelihoods, and transnational markets.

A firsthand account of encounters with octopuses that uses field observation and scientific context to investigate octopus behavior and signs of consciousness. The book links specific animal interactions to accessible explanations from marine biology to consider how octopuses think, sense, and relate to humans.

This nonfiction work surveys evidence for complex learning, problem-solving, and memory in birds by following field observations and laboratory studies across species.

A neurosurgeon and writer confronts a diagnosis of advanced lung cancer and records the transition from clinician to patient. The book links scenes from medical training and surgical practice to reflections on meaning, identity, and what makes life worth living when time is suddenly limited.

A first-person memoir that follows a woman raised in a survivalist, home‑schooled household who leaves that insular world to attend college and later pursue advanced academic study.

A first-person memoir about a First Nation woman's passage through a troubled childhood, early and fraught motherhood, and ongoing struggles with mental health and identity. The narrative pieces together memory, family history, and personal reflection to show how past trauma informs present life and relationships.

A chronological popular-science history of dinosaurs from their early evolution through their dominance and the end of non-avian dinosaurs at the Chicxulub impact.

A first-person memoir of Saeed Jones' adolescence and young adulthood, focused on his efforts to find safety, desire, and selfhood as a young Black gay man in 1990s Texas.

A first-person memoir that looks closely at a relationship Machado calls the Dream House and how that relationship involved psychological abuse.

A first-person memoir by Chanel Miller recounting her sexual assault at Stanford in 2015 and the consequences that followed, including the legal case People v. Turner. The book traces the personal aftermath, public attention, and interactions with the justice system as the author reclaims voice and identity.

A linked collection of personal essays in which the author describes living with schizophrenia and related diagnoses, linking firsthand memoir to discussion of clinical diagnosis, treatment, and the social realities of mental illness.

Two professionals connected to dating technology navigate attraction and past grievances while juggling careers and public reputations. The setup focuses on their personal chemistry and the complications that arise when business, dating apps, and prior history collide.

A data-driven account of how rising global temperatures could reshape life on Earth, surveying a range of warming scenarios and their likely consequences across environments, health, food systems, and geopolitics.

A sequence of exploratory trips beneath landscapes — caves, catacombs, glacial moulins and other underground sites — that probe how subterranean spaces hold memory, burial, and signs of human activity across deep time.

A series of personal essays by George M. Johnson that trace growing up as a Black queer youth in the U.S., linking autobiographical scenes to direct address to younger Black queer readers.