Books like Wicked River by Lee Sandlin

The World Until Yesterday: An Striking Look at the Adaptive Manners and Customs of Our Ancient Ancestors and How They Compare to Modern Society

A true‑story account of Holly FitzGerald’s honeymoon cut short by a plane crash in Peru and her husband’s struggle to survive on a makeshift raft down the Amazon River.

"As a kid growing up in Manhattan, William Helmreich played a game with his father they called "Last Stop." They would pick a subway line and ride it to its final destination, and explore the neighborhood there. Decades later, Helmreich teaches university courses about New York, and his love for exploring the city is as strong as ever. Putting his feet to the test, he decided that the only way to truly understand New York was to walk virtually every block of all five boroughs--an astonishing 6,000 miles. His epic journey lasted four years and took him to every corner of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Helmreich spoke with hundreds of New Yorkers from every part of the globe and from every walk of life, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former mayors Rudolph Giuliani, David Dinkins, and Edward Koch. Their stories and his are the subject of this captivating and highly original book. We meet the Guyanese immigrant who grows beautiful flowers outside his modest Queens residence in order to always remember the homeland he left behind, the Brooklyn-raised grandchild of Italian immigrants who illuminates a window of his brownstone with the family's old neon grocery-store sign, and many, many others. Helmreich draws on firsthand insights to examine essential aspects of urban social life such as ethnicity, gentrification, and the use of space. He finds that to be a New Yorker is to struggle to understand the place and to make a life that is as highly local as it is dynamically cosmopolitan." -- Publisher's description.

David Talbot explores San Francisco’s transformation from a quiet backwater to a vibrant cultural and political center between the late 1960s and early 1980s.

Linda Scott DeRosier chronicles her Appalachian upbringing and later life as a college professor, exploring how the hills of eastern Kentucky shaped her identity and choices.

The Big Sea traces Langston Hughes’s early adult years, detailing his experiences as a young poet in Harlem and a cook and waiter in Paris during the 1920s.