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OUTDOOR BOOK REVIEWS HOME PAGE
NEWS & COMMENTARY
WINNERS OF THE NATIONAL OUTDOOR
BOOK AWARDS (NOBA)
NOBA WINNERS BY CATEGORY:
OUTDOOR LITERATURE
NATURAL HISTORY
LITERATURE
HISTORY/BIOGRAPHY
NATURE & ENVIRONMENT
CLASSIC AWARD
DESIGN/ARTISTIC MERIT
CHILDREN'S BOOKS
GUIDES (ADVENTURE)
GUIDES (NATURE)
INSTRUCTIONAL BOOKS
BEST BOOK LISTS:
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
ADVENTURE'S 100 BEST
ADVENTURE BOOKS
CHESSLER'S TOP 100
CLIMBING BOOKS
SIERRA MAGAZINE
READER'S FAVORITE
BOOKS
OUTSIDE'S 25 BEST
BOOKS OF THE LAST
100 YEARS
ASLE'S TOP 12
ENVIRONMENTAL BOOKS
THE REVIEWS 10 MOST
INFLUENTIAL
ENVIRONMENT BOOKS
OUTDOOR EDUCATION
SURVEY: BEST BOOKS
RECOMMENDATIONS:
TRAVEL LITERATURE BY
JEFF TUCKER
OUTDOOR LITERATURE
BY LIAM GUILAR
RIVER LITERATURE BY
LIAM GUILAR
THE OUTDOOR EXPERIENCE READING LIST:
READING LIST FOR AN
OUTDOOR LITERATURE
COURSE
OTHER SUGGESTIONS:
HUMBLE SUGGESTIONS
(A Few of Our Editor's
Own Works)
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Reviews
of the Winners of the Literature Category
National
Outdoor Book Awards (NOBA)
The most important book award
program in the outdoor field is the National
Outdoor Book Awards. Past winners of the Literature Category are listed
below:
 Winner:Landscapes
of the Interior
By Don Gayton, published by New Society Publishers.
Don Gayton does with the concept of landscape what writers like Edward
Abbey have done with the desert. It is a pioneering, personal journey
across a succession of landscapes from the Kokanee Range to the Columbia
Plateau to the tall grass prairie of Manitoba. Gayton is sometimes
scientific and other times lyrical and deeply philosophical. Through
it all, he is always original and fresh.
 Winner:Postcards
from the Ledge: Collected Mountaineering Writings of Greg Child
By Greg Child. Published by The Mountaineers.
Postcards from the Ledge establishes Greg
Child as one of most talented and versatile writers of the mountaineering
genre. A competent and experienced climber, he is an astute and objective
observer. He is humorous and serious, and as adept at elegant descriptions
of the high moments of life in the mountains as he is describing the sordid
and repulsive side of the sport.
Winner:The
Lost River: A Memoir of Life, Death, and Transformation on Wild Water
By Richard Bangs. Published by Sierra Club Books in conjunction
with Random House.
Since the early 1970s, Richard Bangs has been in the vanguard of river
exploration. He is particularly known for his bold ventures deep
into the recesses of Africa. In nearly a dozen books, Bangs has written
of his experiences, but in this book we see and learn more of him than
ever before. Primarily this book is about his 1996 pioneering run
of Ethiopia's Tekeze River, but the most interesting and telling part of
the story is the long, and sometimes tragic, path which led him there.
 Winner:
On
Celtic Tides: One Man's Journey Around Ireland by Sea Kayak
By Chris Duff. Published by St. Martin's
Press
A transfixing memoir, Celtic Tides is the
vivid account of the first ever circumnavigation of Ireland by kayak.
Told with sensitivity and care, Duff's odyssey is about a lone man and
a capricious sea and its moods of tranquillity and contrasting terror.
But the book is more than an adventure story. It's also about haunting
beauty, ancient history, and spiritual renewal found along the storm-lashed
coasts of an enchanting land.
 Winner:Where
the Pavement Ends: One Woman's Bicycle Trip Through Mongolia, China
and Vietnam. By Erika Warmbrunn.
Published by The Mountaineers Books, Seattle.
Vivid, often light-hearted, and honestly written,
Where
the Pavement Ends is the story of Erika Warmbrunn's incredible 8-month,
5,000-mile mountain bike ride across middle Asia. Skillfully crafted
with a sense of excitement and momentum that resembles coasting downhill
on a bicycle, Where the Pavement Ends provides fascinating glimpses of
East Asian life and landscapes along Warmbrunn’s journey. You'll
be drawn in by her openness and curiosity about life and rejoice in her
hard-earned accomplishments...
 Winner.
Rowing to Latitude. By Jill Fredston. Published
by North Point Press, New York. ISBN 0374281807.
In her debut book, Rowing to Latitude, Jill Fredston emerges
as a fresh new voice in outdoor literature: witty, touching, literate,
bold and honest. She also emerges as a true adventurer. Pioneering
the use of a recreational rowing shell, similar in shape and size to a
sea kayak, she and her husband travel more than twenty thousand miles through
the Arctic and sub-Arctic. This book is the story of those journeys,
but intricately woven among them are the joys and struggles of her life.
It's a marvelous book, one that will carry you away to the great hinterlands
of the north latitudes
 Winner.
The Beckoning Silence. By Joe Simpson. Published
by The Mountaineers Books, Seattle. ISBN 0898869412
This is the story of a mountaineer in the autumn of his career coming
to grips with his own mortality and dwindling physical resources.
An extraordinary storyteller, Joe Simpson takes us on a series of adventures
which span the globe, culminating in one final, career-ending climb of
the North Face of the Eiger. Simpson is at his best when the chips
are down and the line between life and disaster is stretched paper thin.
Hold onto your seat. In The Beckoning Silence, Simpson is
at his best.
Winner. Out There: In the Wild in a Wired Age. By Ted Kerasote. Voyageur Press, Stillwater,
Minnesota.
ISBN 0896585565
Ted Kerasote has a friendly style of writing, and in Out There you feel like you've settled
in a chat with an old friend. The chat,
in this case, centers on a trip that Kerasote has taken down the Horton River
of Canada's Northwest Territories. This not a trip where death is lurking around
every corner; rather it's a fine and thoughtful journey in which Kerasote
grapples with the use of GPS, satellite phones, and other technology in the
wilderness. Honestly written and well-crafted,
it says much about what has become of the outdoor experience.
 Winner. Where The Mountain Casts Its Shadow: The Dark Side of Extreme
Adventure. By Maria Coffey. St. Martin's Press, New
York. ISBN
0312290659
This is a moving and gracefully written story, one that has
been waiting to be told for a long time.
This is what it's like for the families and friends of mountaineers who
die or who are injured on expeditions. Maria
Coffey, who intimately knows the pain of losing a loved one to the mountains,
could have easily turned the book into a tirade against climbing. Instead she embraces adventure, emphasizing
again and again that risk serves an important role in contemporary
society. Nonetheless, she cautions that,
when we venture into the unknown, we should never forget the terrible costs of adventure
gone awry.
 Winner. Savage Summit: The True Stories of the First Five Women who
climbed K2, the World's Most Feared Mountain. By Jennifer Jordan. William Morrow, New
York. ISBN
0060587156
Savage Summit is a
brilliantly written account which follows the lives of five women who climbed K2. Shifting through hours of interviews and
written materials, Jennifer Jordan weaves together a riveting tale of
adventure, ambition, love and tragedy. This
book is so well written that it reads like a novel. Mark these words: Savage Summit is
destined to assume an honored place among some of the best climbing books ever
written.
Honorable Mention. At the Mercy of the River: An Exploration of the Last African Wilderness. By Peter Stark. Ballatine Books, New
York. ISBN 0345441818
At the Mercy of the
River easily could have been standard outdoor fare, a simple chronicle of
descending an African river. But master
story teller Peter Stark serves up something far more satisfying: an inward
journey. The outward journey a is trip
down Mozambique's
Lugend River,
but the river turns out to be more difficult than anyone had imagined, and the
party finds themselves pushed to the limits.
Using his descriptive prowess, Stark captures the heart-thumping
anxiety, the building tension between party members, and his own dark
uncertainties.
Winner. Being
Caribou. By Karsten Heuer. The Mountaineers Books, Seattle. ISBN 1594850100
Karsten Heuer has just married and he has an idea for the perfect
honeymoon: a five-month, thousand mile journey following the caribou
migration from
their winter range to their calving grounds in the Arctic
and back again. No stranger to
wilderness adventure herself, his wife and film maker, Leanne Allison
readily
agrees. Being Caribou is
Karsten's sensitively done book of the couple's adventurous
and inspiring journey. This a book full
of heart and soul, capturing, like no other, the exquisite beauty and
stark
realities of that timeless and most celebrated of all mammal migrations.
End
of Listing
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