A National Parks Reading List
America's National Parks are vast, varied, and brimming with beauty—millions of acres of volcanoes, canyons, geysers, mountains, glaciers, deserts, wetlands, flora, and fauna. If you can't get to one of the parks this summer, we offer you a reading list with nonfiction titles about their history and memorable accounts of exploring the parks or working in them, and fiction titles, especially thrillers and mysteries, which delve into the dangers of the wilderness.
If you have a few minutes, we invite you to take a visual "vacation" to the parks through vintage images in our Digital Collections.
Non-Fiction
The Power of Scenery: Frederick Law Olmsted and the Origin of National Parks
by Dennis Drabelle
With nothing to put up against Europe’s cultural pearls—its cathedrals, castles, and museums—Americans in the pre-Yellowstone era came to realize that their plentitude of natural wonders might compensate for the dearth of manmade attractions. The Power of Scenery tells the fascinating story of how the national park movement arose, evolved, and has spread around the world.
Lassoing the Sun: A Year in America's National Parks
by Mark Woods
On the eve of his fiftieth birthday, a reporter from Florida embarks on a year-long trip to visit America's national parks, creating a story about family, the parks, and legacies.
The Adventure Gap: Changing the Face of the Outdoors
by James Edward Mills
In 2013, the first all-African American team of climbers challenged themselves on the dangerous and forbidding Denali mountain in Alaska. Mills uses the expedition and its team members' adventures as a jumping-off point to explore how minority populations view their place in wild environments and to share the stories of those who have already achieved significant accomplishments in outdoor adventures.Wild Rescues: A Paramedic's Extreme Adventures in Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Grand Teton
by Kevin Grange
A fast-paced, firsthand glimpse into the exciting lives of paramedics who work with the National Park Service: a unique brand of park rangers who respond to medical and traumatic emergencies in some of the most isolated and rugged parts of America.
Requiem for America's Best Idea: National Parks in the Era of Climate Change
by Michael J. Yochim
Yochim explains how climate change is already impacting the vegetation, wildlife, and the natural conditions in Olympic, Grand Canyon, Glacier, Yellowstone, and Yosemite National Parks.
Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods
by Christine Byl
A lively and lyrical account of one woman’s unlikely apprenticeship on a national-park trail crew and what she discovers about nature, gender, and the value of hard work.
Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park
by Conor Knighton
A CBS Sunday Morning correspondent presents a behind-the-scenery look at his year traveling to each of America’s National Parks, which turned out to be the road trip of a lifetime that changed his views on everything from God and love to politics and technology.
American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West
by Nate Blakeslee
An intimate account of the rise and reign of O-Six, the fabled Yellowstone wolf, describes how, after being hunted to near extinction by the 1920s, the species has managed to rebound through conservationists' efforts, in a book that discusses debates specifically affecting America's western regions.
Fiction
On Location
by Sarah Smith
When she gets the green light to produce a series about Utah’s national parks, Alia Dunn is thrilled until she meets her newest crew member, Drew Irons, the man who ghosted her, and as tensions rise between them, so does an undeniable attraction.
The Wild Inside
by Christine Carbo
A special agent for the Department of the Interior, Ted Systead, investigates a murder in Glacier National Park where a victim was tied to a tree and mauled by a grizzly bear.
Unquiet Ghosts
by Glenn Meade
Kathy Kelly's world was shattered when a plane carrying her husband and her two children vanished. Eight years later, Kathy has struggled to rebuild her life, but then wreckage of the plane is found in the wilderness of Great Smoky Mountain National Park hundreds of miles from where her husband's plane should have been. The pilot perished in the crash, but there is no sign of Jack or the children. Could they have made it out alive after all?
The Anna Pigeon Mystery Series
by Nevada Barr
Barr, a former ranger for the National Park Service, has written 19 books following park ranger Anna Pigeon as she solves mysteries set in the wilderness of the National Parks. The first in the series is Track of the Cat—Anna is looking for peace in the wilderness—and finds murder instead.
Celine
by Peter Heller
A missing-persons tracker who specializes in reuniting families to make amends for a loss in her own past, Celine searches for a presumed-dead photographer in Yellowstone, only to be targeted by a shadowy figure who wants to keep the case unsolved.
Valley Girls
by Sarah Nicole Lemon
When rebellious seventeen-year-old Rilla is sent from West Virginia to stay with her park ranger sister in Yosemite National Park, she risks everything as her summer becomes one ecstatic, harrowing experience after another.
Vanishing Edge
by Claire Kells
The rugged landscape of Sequoia National Park is a challenge on the best of days—but when a park ranger discovers an abandoned exclusive campsite with an empty tent and high-end technical gear scattered on the shores of an alpine lake, the wilderness takes on a sinister new hue.
Take Me With You
by Catherine Ryan Hyde
Burned-out teacher August Shroeder takes the ashes of his nineteen-year-old son on a road trip to Yellowstone and along the way meets two half-orphans who have nowhere to go.
Summaries provided via NYPL’s catalog, which draws from multiple sources. Click through to each book’s title for more.