Two friends decide to walk the length of the Grand Canyon. What could go wrong? As this wildly entertaining book demonstrates, everything you can imagine, and then some. Fedarko takes us for a ride that’s often harrowing, frequently hilarious and full of wonderful nature writing.

For this account of America in the 1990s, Ganz ditches the familiar narrative about a decade of relative peace and prosperity for a disturbing tale of populists, nativists and demagogues who, acting on the margins of U.S. politics, helped shatter the post-Cold War consensus and usher in antidemocratic forces that plague the country today.

Sides tracks Captain Cook’s third and final voyage across the globe, painting a vivid and propulsive portrait of an explorer reckoning with the fallout of what he and others had wrought in expanding the map of Europe’s power.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s American wife, Fanny Van de Grift, was a powerful personality in her own right: an individualist who paid no mind to conventional gender roles, and a brave and sometimes reckless adventurer who encouraged Stevenson’s penchant for a wandering life.