Showing results by publisher "The Atavist" in Sports & Outdoors

In 1948, a young Australian mining engineer named Ben Carlin set out to do the impossible: circumnavigate the globe, by land and sea, in a single vehicle. The vehicle in question was an amphibious jeep developed by the U.S. Army, which Carlin christened Half-Safe, after a deodorant slogan. It was a mechanical mongrel that was supposed to move with equal ease across land and water but in practice wasn't much good for either one. Undaunted, Carlin and his wife Elinore set off across the Atlantic Ocean with dreams of fame and fortune, and of carving a small notch in history.

In 1910, the United States - its population exploding, its frontier all but exhausted - was in the throes of a serious meat shortage. But a small and industrious group of thinkers stepped forward with an answer, a bold idea being endorsed by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and The New York Times. Their plan: to import hippopotamuses to the swamps of Louisiana and convince Americans to eat them.

Manny Ansar and Iyad Ag Ghali had little in common - one was a politically connected intellectual, the other a rebel waging war on behalf of his nomadic people in the middle of the Sahara. They did share one thing, though: a passion for Mali's desert blues, a haunting mix of traditional music infused with the influence of Elvis Presley, Bob Marley, and Jimi Hendrix.

In 1928, on a desolate island off the coast of Haiti, the American writer William Seabrook came face-to-face with a zombie. "The eyes were the worst," Seabrook would later write in The Magic Island, his book about Haitian voodoo culture. "They were in truth the eyes of a dead man." The book sold half a million copies, forever changing popular culture by introducing the zombi cadavre - the walking dead - to the American imagination.

Vanessa Veselka grew up a child in motion. After her parents split, she'd lived in nine states by the age of seven, eventually landing with her mother in 1970s Greenwich Village. Along the way she became enthralled with a distant part of her identity: her father's ceremonial adoption into the Tlingit, an Alaskan native people of legendary martial prowess. As an adult her childhood memories of Tlingit warrior tales would transform into a quest to understand her own connection to a distant people and their history.

Who would be the first aviator to singlehandedly fly all the way around the globe? That was all anyone wanted to know in the summer of 1933, when Wiley Post and Jimmie Mattern set out from New York in a pair of wood-and-canvas propeller planes. Post, a one-eyed Oklahoma farm boy with a desperate past, was as comfortable in the cockpit as he was socially awkward back on the ground.

Manute Bol was the first African-born player in the NBA and, at seven foot seven inches, the tallest. In the 1980s and 90s he was also among the league's most fearsome shot-blockers and its most beloved figures. Off the basketball court, however, Bol's story was more remarkable than most fans ever knew. Activist, gambler, joker, rebel-Bol was a complex man whose fate was inextricably bound with that of the Sudan, his homeland.

Mark Moffett doesn't just study ants, he travels among them. Moffet holds a Harvard Ph.D. in entomology and is an accomplished scientist, an award-winning author and journalist, and one of the best nature photographers of his generation. Years ago, this free-spirited naturalist left academia behind to plunge into the deepest jungles and observe insect societies up close. Now author Nicholas Griffin takes us inside Moffett's own world, to explore his death-cheating quest for discovery.

Lifelong baseball fanatic and former college ball player Abe Streep had long since grown disillusioned with the slick spectacle of modern major-league baseball when he discovered the Santa Fe Fuego, a scrappy upstart team struggling through its first season in an independent professional league that few baseball fans had even heard of. The Fuego players were paid barely fifty dollars a week.

It was one of the strangest sights the Coast Guard pilots had ever seen: a tall-masted wooden ship, the kind that sailed centuries ago, capsizing in the wind and towering waves of Hurricane Sandy off the coast of North Carolina. It looked like something out of a movie - and, in a way, it was. The ship was the Bounty, a replica of a British merchant vessel of the same name whose crew famously mutinied in 1789. She had been built for a Marlon Brando film in the 1960s - and now she was sinking, her 16-person crew fleeing into the sea amid the splintered wood and torn canvas.