David Grann's 6 favorite books about adventure and exploration

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published 4 November 2018

New Yorker staff writer David Grann is the author of the acclaimed best-sellers The Lost City of Z and Killers of the Flower Moon. His new work, The White Darkness, revisits a British explorer's 2015 attempt to make a solo trek across Antarctica.

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer (1996).

With his unflinching honesty and his ability to grip the reader, Krakauer is a master of the modern true adventure story. His book Into Thin Air, about a Mount Everest climbing disaster, is among the best adventure stories written. But its predecessor, which tells the story of a young man who disappeared into the Alaskan wilderness, illuminates perhaps better than any book I've encountered why human beings are drawn to explore the unknown — and, in the process, themselves.