• Better by Atul Gawande. Surgeon's essays on thought-provoking topics, incl. malpractice, death-row doctors, the rise in C-sections, propriety.
  
  
• The Color of Water by James McBride. Memoir of growing up doubly-alienated: half-black, half-Jewish. Their driven mother and where they found identity, belonging.
  
  
• The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. Also loved his Botany of Desire. These books changed the way I eat and what I feed my family.
  
  
• The Wild Trees by Richard Preston. The still-wild and mythic world of giant redwoods and the people who climb and study them.
  
  
• Blue Latitudes by Tony Horwitz. Informative and entertaining juxtaposition of Captain Cook's voyages with author's own journey in Cook's wake.

Faint heart never won fair lady...

I love a good disaster, be it storm, shipwreck, fire, or human hubris. Here are some recent favorites:

• Halsey's Typhoon by Robert Drury and Tom Clavin. How a massive storm almost wiped out Halsey's Pacific fleet in WWII.

• Forever on the Mountain by James Tabor. Terrible, fatal mountaineering expedition on Denali (McKinley).

• Skeletons on the Zahara by Dean King. Shipwreck and enslavement in the desert by nomads! What's not to love?

• The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough. ALL his books are fabulous. If you remember Catherine Marshall's Julie, this is that flood.