Let’s Get Lost

The Southerner’s Handbook: A Guide to Living the Good Life

By the editors of Garden & Gun  |  HarperCollins Publishers  |  304 pages (Hardcover)

You don’t need to live below the Mason-Dixon line to enjoy this guide to living the good life. Curated by the editors of the award-winning Garden & Gun magazine, one of our favorite fellow pubs, this collection of more than 100 instructional and narrative essays offers a comprehensive tutorial for modern-day life in the South. From food and drink to sporting and style, home and garden to arts and culture, you’ll discover essential skills and unique insights from some of the South’s finest writers, chefs and craftspeople—including the secret to making perfect biscuits, tips for betting on the Kentucky Derby and how to whip up a proper Sazerac.

Travels With Charley: in Search of America

By John Steinbeck  |  Penguin Publishing Group  |  288 pages (Paperback)

An intimate journey across America, as told by one of California’s most beloved writers. With Charley, his French poodle, Steinbeck drives the interstates and the country roads, dines with truckers, encounters bears at Yellowstone and old friends in San Francisco. Along the way he reflects on the American character, racial hostility, the particular form of American loneliness he finds almost everywhere and the unexpected kindness of strangers.

Midnight in Siberia

By David Greene  |  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.  |  336 pages (Hardcover)

Far away from the trendy cafés, designer boutiques and political protests and crackdowns in Moscow, the real Russia exists. NPR host David Greene journeys on the Trans-Siberian Railway for a 6,000-mile, cross-country trip from Moscow to the Pacific port of Vladivostok. In quadruple-bunked cabins and stopover towns sprinkled across the country’s snowy landscape, Greene speaks with ordinary Russians about how their lives have changed in the post-Soviet years.

Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art

By Carl Hoffman  |  William Morrow and Company  |  336 pages (Paperback)

On November 21, 1961, Michael C. Rockefeller, the 23-year-old son of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, vanished off the coast of southwest New Guinea when his boat capsized. He was on a collecting expedition for the Museum of Primitive Art, and his partner—who stayed with the boat and was later rescued—shared Michael’s final words as he swam for help: “I think I can make it.” Retracing Michael’s steps, author Hoffman traveled to the jungles of New Guinea, immersing himself in a world of former headhunters and cannibals, secret spirits and customs, and getting to know generations of local Asmat. Through exhaustive archival research, he uncovered hundreds of never-before-seen original documents and located witnesses willing to speak publicly for the first time in 50 years.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost

By Rebecca Solnit  |  Penguin Publishing Group  |  224 pages (Paperback)

Whether she is contemplating the history of walking as a cultural and political experience over the past 200 years or using the life of photographer Eadweard Muybridge as a lens to discuss the transformations of space and time in late 19th-century America, Rebecca Solnit has emerged as an inventive and original writer whose mind is daring in the connections it makes. This 2006 book draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnit’s own life to explore issues of wandering, being lost and the uses of the unknown. The result is a distinctive, stimulating and poignant voyage of discovery.

In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker’s Odyssey

By Samuel Fromartz  |  Viking Press  |  320 pages (Hardcover)

In 2009 journalist Samuel Fromartz was offered the assignment of a lifetime: to travel to France to work in a boulangerie. So began his quest to hone not just his homemade baguette but his knowledge of bread—from seed to table. For the next four years Fromartz traveled across the United States and Europe, perfecting his sourdough in California, his whole grain rye in Berlin and his country wheat in the South of France. Along the way he met historians, millers, farmers, wheat geneticists, sourdough biochemists and everyone in between, learning about the history of breadmaking, the science of fermentation and more. The result is an informative yet personal account of bread and breadbaking, complete with detailed recipes, tips and beautiful photographs.