David Quammen

David Quammen is one of America’s most respected science writers and an accomplished novelist. His works include Blood Line (Johnson Books, $11.20) and The Boilerplate Rhino (Touchstone Books, $10.40). Here he lists six of his favorite memoirs.

Laughing in the Hills by Bill Barich (Ruminator Books, $11.20, out of print). The author sets out to chronicle a season of horseracing at a minor track in northern California. He does that, but also finds himself writing about the death of his mother, the dissolution of his marriage, and the civilization of Renaissance Florence. Indescribably deft, quirky, and meaningful.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence (Doubleday, $16.20). Yes, I know he was a self-dramatizing faker, to some degree, and a high-flown poseur. But he could write. And some of that stuff in the desert war against the Turks—who knows how much—did happen. It makes a tale.

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Walden by Henry David Thoreau (Courage Books, $5.98). By no coincidence do I juxtapose him with Lawrence: again, a guy who talked a wilder game than, it seems, he played. Leon Edel has revealed that Thoreau walked into town from the cabin each day to raid his mother’s cookie jar. So be it. Thoreau subtitled the book “Life in the Woods,” but to me its value lies in what is has to say about life in town. A towering act of moral imagination. It’s the bravest and truest thing that ever came out of the New England suburbs.

Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams (Vintage, $10.40). An unflinching chronicle of the salty inundation of a small, important wildlife reserve and, simultaneously, of the decline and death of the author’s mother. She shares that core concern with Bill Barich; everything else is different. Read them both, and learn a deep cross-sectional lesson about how to live and die courageously.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (Scribner, $17.60). Again, as with Lawrence’s and Thoreau’s, this book is not one to be relied on for accurate literal fact. Also, he maligns Ford Maddox Ford, a sometimes-superb novelist and generous older writer who deserved better treatment. But who can resist these sepia recollections—from the going-nuts, soon-to-be-dead Hemingway—of the days, back in Paris in the ’20s, “when we were very poor and very happy.”

Letters and Recollections by Robert Oppenheimer; edited by Alice Kimball Smith and Charles Weiner (Stanford University Press, $14.95). A very private glimpse into the life of America’s most brilliantly complicated tragic hero of the 20th century.