To Timbuktu: A Journey Down the Niger, by Mark Jenkins (William Morrow, $25). "It's a wonder there is a human left alive on the continent of Africa," the author muses as he assembles his medical kit in preparation for the first-ever descent of the Niger River's unexplored headwaters.

The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea, by Sebastian Junger (W. W. Norton, $24). In October 1991, three powerful weather systems, including the remnants of Hurricane Grace, collided over the North Atlantic in a sudden, unforecasted "act of meteorological defiance." It was "a storm that could not possibly have been worse," a once-in-a-century tempest that sent 100-mile-per-hour winds and 100-foot waves, among the highest measured anywhere in the world. Junger, a journalist whose coverage of the disaster began with an article in this magazine ("The Storm," October 1994), has written something akin to a cinematic special-effects thriller about the horrific experiences of those who were caught in the gale, including the crew of a National Guard helicopter, one of whom drowned when the craft was ditched in the sea. The heart of Junger's book is his reconstruction of the final hours of the six men aboard the Andrea Gail, a 72-foot swordfish boat from Gloucester, Massachusetts, that was 500 miles from home when the storm hit. Weaving together interviews with friends and family of the doomed crew and meticulous nautical and medical research, Junger unfolds the dire events of the journey, right down to the moments when the men are "suspended, open-eyed and unconscious, in the flooded enclosures of the boat."

Photographs by Clay Ellis