5. DESERT SOLITAIRE
Edward Abbey
(1968)

OBVIOUSLY.

Three decades and change later, Cactus Ed is still Iggy Pop in a stale world of environmental classic rock. So punk that it transcends the natural history genre, Abbey's account of two seasons spent as a ranger in Arches National Park is about soul-searching, but without an ounce of New Age squish. "I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock." Argue with that.

4. THE SNOW LEOPARD
Peter Matthiessen
(1978)

SIMPLY PUT, The Snow Leopard gets to the heart of why we go to the mountains. There are many other fine books on the subject John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra comes to mind but none succeed, as Matthiessen's does, on so many levels.

One could say, for example, that it's a book about sheep. After all, it delivers a funny, anecdotal account of American zoologist George Schaller's field research on the Himalayan blue sheep, or bharal. ("Oh, there's a penis-lick!" G.S. cries out, observing the rut. "A beauty.") Then there's the mythic cat of the title, which had been glimpsed by only two Westerners when Matthiessen and Schaller set out to track it in 1973. And the place the mysterious Land of Dolpo, a last enclave of Tibetan culture. And finally, without ever becoming a book about recovery, The Snow Leopard charts how the author came back to life after a great loss his wife, Deborah, had died of cancer the year before he left for the Himalayas. "Why is death so much on my mind when I do not feel I am afraid of it?" Matthiessen asks, while walking a sheer Himalayan ridge. "Between clinging and letting go, I feel a terrific struggle. This is a fine chance to let go, to 'win my life by losing it.'"

3. WEST WITH THE NIGHT
Beryl Markham
(1942)

SURE, MARKHAM STARTS a touch self-consciously, wondering aloud where, in the blur of her career as a pilot in Kenya during the 1930s, she ought to begin this tour de force memoir. But if you haven't forgiven her this slightly contrived opening in three or four pages, we'd be surprised. The essence of a fascinating party guest, Markham is not only charming, but full of real adventures to tell from being mauled by a lion at age seven and nearly trampled by an elephant as an adult to bringing game hunters into (and, happily, back out of) the wild. Equally adept at telling a nail-biter as she is at waxing poetic about an African horizon or making you sorry her dog got gored by a warthog, you discover early and often why Hemingway gushed that she made him feel inadequate as a writer. "The only disadvantage in surviving a dangerous encounter," she observes, "lies in the fact that your story of it tends to be anticlimactic. You can never carry on right through the point where whatever it is that threatens your life actually takes it and get anybody to believe you. The world is full of skeptics." Markham is one of the few authors you are nearly always grateful to have as the hero of her own stories. Read her as soon as you can, but be prepared to fall in love with a ghost.

2. THE WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD
Apsley Cherry-Garrard
(1922)

SO MANY SUPERLATIVES have been heaped on this sick pup that it's hard not to feel a little jaded before you read it for yourself. Don't let the hype or, for that matter, the dozens of other books on Robert Falcon Scott's doomed 1911 South Pole expedition scare you off. Livelier than Scott's own writings (collected in Scott's Last Expedition) and more immediate than Roland Huntford's modern classic The Last Place on Earth, Cherry-Garrard's first-person account of this infamous sufferfest is a chilling testimonial to what happens when things really go south. Many have proven better at negotiating such epic treks than Scott, Cherry, and his crew, but none have written about it more honestly and compassionately than Cherry. "The horrors of that return journey are blurred to my memory and I know they were blurred to my body at the time. I think this applies to all of us, for we were much weakened and callous. The day we got down to the penguins I had not cared whether I fell into a crevasse or not."

1. WIND, SAND AND STARS
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
(1939)

LIKE HIS MOST FAMOUS creation, The Little Prince, that visitor from Asteroid B-612 who once saw 44 sunsets in a single day, Saint-Exupéry disappeared into the sky. Killed in World War II at age 44, "Saint Ex" was a pioneering pilot for Aéropostale in the 1920s, carrying mail over the deadly Sahara on the Toulouse-Dakar route, encountering cyclones, marauding Moors, and lonely nights: "So in the heart of the desert, on the naked rind of the planet, in an isolation like that of the beginnings of the world, we built a village of men. Sitting in the flickering light of the candles on this kerchief of sand, on this village square, we waited out the night." Whatever his skills as a pilot—said to be extraordinary—as a writer he is effortlessly sublime. Wind, Sand and Stars is so humane, so poetic, you underline sentences: "It is another of the miraculous things about mankind that there is no pain nor passion that does not radiate to the ends of the earth. Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world." Saint-Exupéry did just that. No writer before or since has distilled the sheer spirit of adventure so beautifully. True, in his excitement he can be righteous, almost irksome like someone who's just gotten religion. But that youthful excess is part of his charm. Philosophical yet gritty, sincere yet never earnest, utterly devoid of the postmodern cop-outs of cynicism, sarcasm, and spite, Saint-Exupéry's prose is a lot like the bracing gusts of fresh air that greet him in his open cockpit. He shows us what it's like to be subject and king of infinite space.