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Featured Guest: Michael Pollan

	Walden by Henry David Thoreau This is a touchstone book for any American writing about our relationship to the natural world. Thoreau command of a distinctly American prose style is unmatched, and he pioneered the sort of participatory journalism I admire.
	Paper Lion: Confessions of a Last-String Quarterback by George Plimpton I first read this account of a writer playing quarterback for the Detroit Lions when I was 13 and it influenced me in ways it took me forty years to realize. Plimpton put himself in the middle of the story in a way that reinvented sports writing, showing journalists that more was to be gained from a stance of vulnerability and wonder than one of been-there-done-that sideline cynicism.
	How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman The most-thumbed and most-sauce-stained cookbook in my kitchen, Bittman’s comprehensive cookbook updates and improves on the Joy of Cooking that my mother relied on. Approachable, clear, and no more complicated than it absolutely needs to be.
	Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England by William Cronon This is the book that taught me how to look at the landscape historically, and made me question whether what I saw there was nature or culture or, most likely, a wonderfully inextricable knot of the two.
	Greatest Hits by Neil Young And not just because he?s part of Farm Aid, but because he has managed to sound completely fresh for nearly five decades.