The Whole Earth Catalog made a very significant impact on two generations of Americans between 1968 and 1980. This book, Whole Earth Field Guide (MIT Press, 2016), aims to account for this success by publishing a selection of extracts from the books recommended to readers by the editorial staff. By selecting eighty texts from the almost one thousand items in the Last Whole Earth Catalog (1971), this book gives an overall impression of the diversity of texts cited. A critical apparatus is provided, with headnotes for each text and an introduction to each section. The book is introduced by a history of the founding of the Whole Earth Catalog and Stewart Brand's activities as its leading light.

Caroline Maniaque-Benton is a professor of history of architecture at Ecole Nationale Superieure d'Architecture de Normandie and member of IPRAUS/Umr AUSser (CNRS 3329). She is also associated with University Paris Est. Maniaque-Benton is the author of Le Corbusier and the Maisons Jaoul (2009). Her works on alternative architectural practice and thinking in the 1960s has been published in Ant Farm: 1968-1978 (University of California Press, 2004) and Space, Travel, and Architecture (Ashgate, 2009). Her previous Graham Foundation supported book, French Encounters with the American Counterculture 1960-1980, was published by Ashgate in 2011. An extended version of this book is published in French under the title Go West! Des architectes au pays de la contre-culture (Parenthèses, 2014). She is past fellow of the Canadian Centre for Architecture and CASVA scholar at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.