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An Exploration
by Robert Moor
From the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller On Trails comes a wondrous new journey through the wilds of nature and the gnarls of history, exploring how trees—from the mightiest sequoia to the tiniest bonsai—can teach us to grow wise.
To truly grasp the wisdom of a tree, you need to begin thinking like one…
One day, on a whim, Robert Moor set out to climb a tree near his home—unwittingly embarking on what would become a decade-long, globe-spanning adventure of intellectual and spiritual transformation. Pursuing the hidden wisdom of trees, he scales to the very top of a giant sequoia while filming a nature documentary with David Attenborough; he treks through swamps in Papua to reach a treehouse-dwelling tribe of hunter-gatherers; and he journeys to a remote research camp in Tanzania, where he spends a memorable night sleeping in a chimpanzee nest, seeking to understand our deep evolutionary history. Eventually, having gained a radical new outlook on both our gnarled past and our ever-branching future, he joins an intrepid clan of climate activists risking everything to halt construction of a new oil pipeline and save an ancient forest.
Along the way, Moor learns the art of "tree-thinking," which, he discovers, has the power to break open some of humanity's oldest questions: What is the secret to truly growing old? How do we set down deeper roots in an increasingly chaotic world? Most importantly, how should we—as individuals, as communities, as stewards of the earth—live?
A witty and relentlessly curious excursion through philosophy, history, and science, what begins as an ode to the miracle of trees blossoms into a joyous, daring, fiercely hopeful endeavor to arborize humanity.
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (4/09/2026)
Well I have to laugh at myself—-the only way to survive. My book on The Trees: An Exploration is by Robert Moor which sounds a little heavy for me now. I don't remember when but I ordered the audio book Every Summer After by Carley Fortune. I feel asleep and woke up to the voice describing an exp...
-Lynne_G
"Brilliantly written, supremely intelligent, and philosophically provocative." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Moor's nature writing is beautiful and refreshingly original." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"In Trees is dazzlingly erudite, playful, profound, adventurous and, above all, eloquently, fiercely alive. Full of brilliant, mind-bending insights and wonderful surprises, this is the most life-affirming book I've read in a long time." —John Vaillant, National Book Award finalist for Fire Weather
"Robert Moor's brilliant In Trees is—like its subject—powerfully, fascinatingly arborescent. Moving from sky to earth, Moor unfurls in fine-grained prose the ancient, urgent story of how trees transform us. Reading it, I felt my senses of time, life, and process shift in ways I hadn't experienced before." —Robert Macfarlane, New York Times bestselling author of Is a River Alive?
This information about In Trees was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Hailed by The Wall Street Journal as a "philosopher on foot," Robert Moor is the bestselling author of On Trails and In Trees. Translated into more than a dozen languages, On Trails garnered the National Outdoor Book Award, the Pacific Northwest Book Award, and the William Saroyan International Prize. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, New York magazine, Outside, Emergence, and n+1, among other publications. He lives in Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia.
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When you climb a tree, the first thing you do is to hold on tight.
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