Showing titles in Adventurers, Explorers & Survival

Why do we travel, what are we looking for, and will we recognize it if we find it? With the author’s 50th birthday looming, there seemed a need for something significant to happen. Not seeing an expiry date on his birth certificate made it hard to gauge when to have a mid-life crisis, but he’d almost definitely left it too late.

In 1999, Sierra Leone was in the midst of a brutal civil war where mindless violence, vicious amputation and the rape of young enslaved women were the everyday weapons of bloody conflict. It was also where rebel soldiers snatched the young Aminata Conteh-Biger from her father's arms, then held her captive for months. After she was released, the UNHCR recognised that her captors still posed a serious threat to her safety. So, still in her teens, she was put on a plane and flown to Australia to start afresh as a refugee in a land she knew nothing about.

In this personal journey, ultra-light backpacker and sought-after speaker Glen Van Peski shares the life lessons he has learned through years of lightening his pack and helping others. Adventures provide the richness and texture to a life well lived. So remain open. Keep saying "YES" to life's opportunities. Glen Van Peski helped revolutionize backpacking by creating ultralight equipment, which allows people to take less so they can do more in the wilderness. During decades of championing ultralight backpacking, Glen became aware that “take less, do more” is more than just a hiking slogan.

An exuberant biography of the life of the iconic photographer and naturalist Peter Beard, whose life and work captured the cultural imagination Peter Beard lived an astonishing life. The artist, wildlife photographer, and bon vivant enthralled and inspired both because of his work and his...

This book will give you a lighthearted view of an American who cannot speak or read any Korean but chooses to travel to volunteer and teach English for one month in the city of Gwangju in South Korea. The author returned the following year to volunteer in Seoul, at the Jogyesa Temple. This temple is the headquarters for the largest order of Korean Buddhism, the Jogye Order. Along with her struggles over the language, culture, and lifestyle, the author includes her findings on the achievements of today's South Korea.

In the summer of 1913, the wooden-hulled brigantine Karluk departed Canada for the Arctic Ocean. At the helm was Captain Bob Bartlett, considered the world’s greatest living ice navigator. The expedition’s visionary leader was a flamboyant impresario named Vilhjalmur Stefansson hungry for fame. Just six weeks after the Karluk departed, giant ice floes closed in around her. As the ship became icebound, Stefansson disembarked with five companions and struck out on what he claimed was a 10-day caribou hunting trip. Most on board would never see him again.

In the summer of 1942, the Rabinowitz family narrowly escaped the Nazi ghetto in their Polish town by fleeing to the forbidding Bialowieza Forest. They miraculously survived two years in the woods—through brutal winters, Typhus outbreaks, and merciless Nazi raids—until they were liberated by the Red Army in 1944. After the war, they trekked across the Alps into Italy, where they settled as refugees before eventually immigrating to the United States.

Abby Sutherland grew up sailing.Her father, Laurence, a shipwright, and her mother, Marianne, wanted their kids to develop responsibility, to see other cultures, to experience the world instead of watching it on TV. So they took them sailing down the coast of Mexico... for three years.When Abby...

A recent French biography begins, "Who doesn't know Nadar?" In France, that's a rhetorical question. Of all of the legendary figures who thrived in mid-19th-century Paris - a cohort that includes Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Gustave Courbet, and Alexandre Dumas - Nadar was perhaps the most innovative, the most restless, the most modern. The first great portrait photographer, a pioneering balloonist, the first person to take an aerial photograph, and the prime mover behind the first airmail service, Nadar was one of the original celebrity artist-entrepreneurs.

For the first twenty-seven years of his life, Ben McKelvey didn't spend too much time thinking about his brain, nor much about trauma. He was fit, carefree and happy working as a magazine journalist, writing listicles and doing celebrity junket interviews. Then one day, while boxing, he suffered a stroke. In the time it took for a left hook to be thrown, Ben disconnected from language and therefore the world. He wanted nothing more than to go back to normal life and, after a time, it looked like he had. Only normal life no longer felt normal. Ben's brain had changed, and so had he.

Set in the remote arctic region of Northern Canada, this book takes listeners on a harrowing canoe voyage that results in tragedy, redemption, and, ultimately, transformation. George Grinnell was one of six young men who set off on the 1955 expedition led by experienced wilderness canoeist Art Moffatt. Poorly planned and executed, the journey seemed doomed from the start. Ignoring the approaching winter, the men became entranced with the peace and beauty of the arctic in autumn.

Keith Foskett’s dream of escape started with a single step. When the long-distance hiker chose to backpack all 2,180 miles of the Appalachian Trail, he left ordinary life behind for five months. Enduring an incredible test of physical and psychological strength, Foskett was pushed to his limits....

The deepest cave on earth was a prize that had remained unclaimed for centuries, long after every other ultimate discovery had been made: both poles by 1912, Everest in 1958, the Challenger Deep in 1961. In 1969 we even walked on the moon. And yet as late as 2000, the earth’s deepest...

In July 1973, Bob Tininenko, his wife Linda, and his brother in-law Jim Fisher set sail from Tacoma, Washington, on a 31-foot trimaran, down the West Coast to Costa Rica. The journey was expected to take a matter of weeks, but 10 days into the cruise, the party encountered a freak storm off the coast of Northern California. When gale-force winds and 50-foot waves capsized their boat, the voyage became a nightmare. For 72 days, the trio was lost at sea. Challenged by nature and compromised by a bitter rivalry, their courage and will to live was put to the ultimate test.

The stories of Sinti and Roma suffering in Nazi Germany are all too often lost or untold. In this haunting account, Otto shares his story with a remarkable simplicity. Deeply moving, A Gypsy in Auschwitz is the incredible story of how a young Sinti boy miraculously survived the unimaginable darkness of the Holocaust.

He's climbed Everest not long after a heart bypass operation, he's run seven marathons on seven continents, he's hauled loaded sledges across both polar ice caps and he's circumnavigated the earth. Ran Fiennes truly is the world's greatest explorer, and this book celebrates his 80th birthday by showcasing his greatest achievements in his own words.

Bound for Distant Seas begins sailing author James Baldwin's epic tale of his second circumnavigation. His story is seasoned by his adventures during his first circumnavigation in 1984-86 as told in Across Islands and Oceans. Alone with little money aboard Atom, his now-engineless 28-foot sailboat, James embarks on his odyssey without the comforts and equipment most sailors consider essential.

The Last Englishman is an extraordinary travel memoir by an experienced long-distance hiker. If you believe there’s more to life than work, yearn for new horizons and challenges, and believe in overcoming adversity, then you’ll love Keith Foskett’s tale of exploration.

Two Brits, George and Mark, set off from New York City to explore the back roads of America. In this calamity-ridden travel tale, George sets out in true clichéd fashion to discover the real America. Throw in plenty of run-ins with the police, rapidly dwindling finances, and Josephine - the worst car in the world - and you have all the ingredients for a classic American road trip. Will George and Mark make it all the way to California? And then there is Rachel, George's girlfriend, left back in England.

This program is read by the author. World champion climber Sasha DiGiulian tells her story—from coming of age under the scrutiny of social media, navigating a male-dominated sport, and tackling her most heart-stopping climbs—and shares the power of perseverance and positivity. At age six...