Showing results by publisher "----RM Alexander" in Adventurers, Explorers & Survival

Short daily reflections from one of the world's favourite adventurers. Best-selling author Bear Grylls has survived a free-fall parachute accident that left him with a broken back, possibly unable to walk again; falling down a mountain in the Rockies, severing a finger in the Vietnam jungle, a broken shoulder in Antarctica. He passed the gruelling training to join the SAS, crossed the North Atlantic in an open inflatable boat, and held the highest ever open-air formal dinner party, in a balloon at 25,000 feet.

In April 1878, Mark Twain and his family traveled to Europe. Overloaded with creative ideas, Twain had hoped that the sojourn would spark his creativity enough to bring at least one of the books in his head to fruition. Instead, he wrote of his walking tour of Europe, describing his impressions of the Black Forest, the Matterhorn, and other attractions. Neglected for years, A Tramp Abroad sparkles with Twain’s shrewd observations and highly opinionated comments on Old World culture.

"La nostra lingua manca di parole per esprimere questa offesa, la demolizione di un uomo". Con ostinazione e pacatezza, Primo Levi non ha mai smesso di cercare le parole per raccontare l'atrocità della deportazione e del campo di sterminio di Auschwitz, in cui venne internato dal febbraio 1944 al 27 gennaio 1945. Parole di testimonianza sconvolgente e di grande potenza narrativa che vengono qui accolte e restituite ad alta voce da Roberto Saviano.

Just why exactly hadn't anyone attempted to motorcycle from India to Burma before, and how hard could it actually be? Against his better judgment, woefully unprepared, and desperately trying to impress his new aristocratic girlfriend, Andrew Benfield decides to find out.

Hans Florine is a big-wall climbing legend in his own time. He holds the speed record on the Nose route of El Capitan, a 3,000-foot granite cliff in Yosemite Valley that's considered the Everest of the rock-climbing world. But Florine's story is not one of super-human athletic prowess; it's one of persistence and dogged determination. In 30 years of climbing, he's ascended the Nose a mind-blowing, death-defying 100 times, more than anyone else ever has, and most likely ever will. In On the Nose, Florine describes the most dangerous, pivotal, and inspirational of those climbs.

CIVIL: Life After the Foreign Legion is the author's follow-up to Appel: A Canadian in the French Foreign Legion. During his recent return to France, he shares with you his past in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Algeria as a security contractor and more.

A young man heads off on a journey to find out if magic still exists in the world, to know its wonder, and to see if it might save him when his own life is unexpectedly at stake. Instead of retreating after being deported from Mexico, or beaten up in Guatemala, he travels to the Caribbean where he meets a Rastafarian Don Juan who teaches him about the "natural mystic", a magical tradition that had travelled to the Caribbean centuries earlier with the slavery trade.

When Adam Piggott rode his motorbike across Australia chasing a girl he barely knew, he didn't understand much about anything at all. He wanted to change his life, but he didn't know how or what to change. The girl was the catalyst that forced him out of his comfortable existence. This is the story of how a young man with no direction ended up working as a river guide in a range of exotic locations around the world.

Boyhood in the 1960s and ‘70s was a time for exploration and mischief. Author Michael Tougias found more than his share of misadventures in the woods and on the water: some life-threatening, but others innocently hilarious. Over time - and after reading a multitude of adventure books - these experiences took shape in his quest to be a mountain man, owning a cabin in the forest and living off the land. Part of that dream would come true, but only after a family tragedy that shook his world and forced changes in his life.

For the past year, veteran journalists Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal traveled more than 25,000 miles across the Americas, chronicling costly experiments, contentious politics, and new technologies to save our beloved birds from the brink of extinction. Through this compelling drama, A Wing and a Prayer offers hope and an urgent call to action: Birds are dying at an unprecedented pace. But there are encouraging breakthroughs across the hemisphere and still time to change course, if we act quickly.

In November 1922, a new door to the ancient past was opened. The discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun would be the most astonishing of the young century. Howard Carter was the lead archaeologist, but the years of excavations were funded and engineered by the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, George Herbert, whose country house Highclere Castle is today known as the set of Downton Abbey. In dramatic detail, calling on Highclere Castle’s archives to throw new light on the lustrous settings and striking characters, this book reveals the true story behind the thrilling discoveries made in Egypt.

Kangchenjunga is the third highest mountain in the world and a notoriously difficult and dangerous mountain to climb. First climbed from the west in 1955 by a British team comprising Joe Brown, George Band, Tony Streather and Norman Hardie, it waited over 20 years for a second ascent. The third ascent, from the north, followed in 1979 by a four-man team including the visionary British alpinist Doug Scott.

Peter Beard lived an astonishing life. The artist, wildlife photographer, and bon vivant enthralled and inspired both because of his work and his legendary lifestyle. In Twentieth-Century Man, Wallace has rendered this towering figure in all of his contradictions and complexities—a deeply romantic and idiosyncratic personality, beloved by so many, whose sensibilities nonetheless remained firmly rooted in an era characterized by racist and colonialist attitudes. Stirring and visceral, Twentieth-Century Man is the definitive portrait of Peter Beard.

From the beginning, it was clear that Ralph Nutter was an exceptional navigator. Rapid promotion followed when he was assigned as Maj. Gen. Curtis the Eagle LeMay's personal navigator. Later, he was picked by Maj. Gen. Haywood Possum Hansell, the 20th Air Force Commander, to be his personal navigator. The author's vivid recollections of those halcyon years make for exciting, informative listening.

Depressed and suicidal, Helen was admitted to a psychiatric ward and sectioned under the Mental Health Act. At her lowest, she almost succeeded in taking her own life. But somehow, she endured and later, she recovered. love lay down beside me and we wept sprang from these emotionally shattering experiences.

On the afternoon of July 13, 1977, having become the first climbers to reach the summit of the Ogre, Doug Scott and Chris Bonington began their long descent. In the minutes that followed, any feeling of success from their achievement would be overwhelmed by the start of a desperate fight for survival. And things would only get worse.

Migration, terrorism, the tensions between global capitalism and nationalism, the promise and peril of a technological and communications revolution: these forces shaped the life and work of Joseph Conrad at the dawn of the 20th century. In this brilliant new interpretation of one of the great voices in modern literature, Maya Jasanoff reveals Conrad as a prophet of globalization as we recognize it today.

On 21 November 1915, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship, Endurance, finally succumbed to the crushing ice. Its crew watched in silence as the stern rose twenty feet in the air and then, it was gone. The miraculous escape and survival of all twenty-eight men on board have entered legend. And yet, the iconic ship that bore them to the brink of the Antarctic was considered forever lost. A century later, an audacious plan to locate the ship was hatched. The Ship Beneath the Ice gives a blow-by-blow account of the two epic expeditions to find the Endurance.

In 2014, Mount Everest was closed to all climbers after a devastating avalanche claimed the lives of 16 Nepali mountain workers ferrying loads up through the Khumbu Icefall on the mountain's southern approach through Nepal. Almost a year to the day later, in late April 2015, the mountain was once more rocked to its core after a large earthquake struck Nepal, sending shock waves rippling across the Himalayas.

In the summer of 1942, 22-year-old Franci Rabinek - designated a Jew by the Nazi racial laws - arrived at Terezin, a concentration camp and ghetto 40 miles north of her home in Prague. Franci, a spirited and glamorous young woman, was known among her fellow inmates as the Prague dress designer. During an Auschwitz selection, Franci would spontaneously lie to Nazi officer Dr Josef Mengele and claim to be an electrician. It was a split-second decision that would go on to endanger - and save - her life.