A closer look at distant shores

Judith Schalansky pairs maps of fifty remote islands she has never visited with short essays about their strange histories, making distance itself the subject.

Donald Richie travels among the small islands of Japan’s Inland Sea in the 1960s, meeting fishermen, priests and young people and recording a way of life he saw disappearing.

John Steinbeck recounts a 1940 collecting voyage with the marine biologist Ed Ricketts in the Gulf of California, mixing tide-pool science with philosophy and conversation.

Jonathan Weiner follows Peter and Rosemary Grant through years of measuring finches on a tiny Galápagos island, where they watched natural selection change a population in real time.

David Quammen travels to islands from Madagascar to the Aru archipelago to explain island biogeography, and why species confined to small places are especially likely to disappear.