Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio" in Travel & Tourism

"In mid-July of 1879, John Muir sailed for the first time through the sheer-walled fjords of Alaska's Inside Passage. 'Never before this,' he wrote, 'had I been embosomed in scenery so hopelessly beyond description.' During the previous 15 years, Muir had vanished into the north woods of Canada, walked a thousand miles from Kentucky to the Gulf of Mexico, and nested himself in the granite heart of California's Sierra Nevada mountains. Wild nature burned with volcanic intensity in the core of John Muir's soul."

Desiree Le Mire ran into the cave, anxious to explore, tempted by the legends of Inca gold. Harry Lamar and his brother Paul had no choice but to follow. After all, they could not let the beautiful dancer enter the black depths alone. Others lived there, however, protecting the gold of their ancestors, others now misshapen after generations of living underground. That was why no one who entered the cave ever emerged into daylight. But no one who had entered was as beautiful as Desiree - or as determined as the Lamars.

This sequel to King Solomon's Mines is filled with the spirit of adventure. Thrilled by rumors of a lost civilization, three Englishmen decide to travel to the heart of Africa with their Zulu guide where they meet with continual peril: an attack by a cruel warrior tribe, the scorch of underground volcanic fires, and an encounter with a huge species of ferocious black crab. Exhausted and depleted of supplies, the men at last arrive at a mysterious city in the highlands of the interior.

Rick Montoya has just moved from Santa Fe to Rome, embracing the life of a translator. He's beginning to settle in to la dolce vita when school friend Beppo, now senior in the Italian Art Squad, recruits Rick for an unofficial undercover role. Armed with a list of galleries, suspects, and an expense account, Rick arrives in Tuscany posing as a buyer for a Santa Fe gallery to flush out traffickers in priceless burial urns. However, before sunset on his first day in Volterra, the challenge intensifies. Rick has one quick conversation with a gallery employee who dies minutes later in a brutal fall from a high cliff.

When Christopher Hunt set off in search of Vietnam's notorious Ho Chi Minh Trail, he hardly expected to end up on a rickety, Russian-made motorcycle navigating 5,000 kilometers of paths rarely traveled by tourists and on roads missing from maps. Hunt left the United States expecting to explore the 1,700-kilometer highway that was once the supply route for the North Vietnamese Army. He soon found himself roaming the Vietnamese countryside in need of help and direction.

The Huck Finn of foreign correspondents provides a colorful account of old Honolulu, the island nobility, the City of Refuge on the Kona coast, and the active volcano of Kilauea. These selections of Mark Twain's newspaper dispatches are both charming and informative. The light touch of the great humorist is seldom missing as he reveals the "loveliest fleet of islands that lie anchored in any ocean".

In the wake of San Francisco Noir, Los Angeles Noir, and Orange County Noir - all popular volumes in the Akashic Noir Series - comes the latest California installment, Oakland Noir. Masterfully curated by Jerry Thompson and Eddie Muller, the "Czar of Noir", this volume will shock, titillate, provoke, and entertain. The diverse cast of talented contributors will not disappoint.

A continuation of the popular Very Christmas Series, this collection brings together the best French Christmas stories of all time in an elegant and vibrant collection featuring classics by Guy de Maupassant and Alphonse Daudet, plus stories by the esteemed 20th-century author Irène Némirovsky and contemporary writers Dominique Fabre and Jean-Philippe Blondel.

Phileas Fogg, a distinguished member of London's Reform Club, takes up a wager to circle the globe in just 80 days. Together with manservant Passepartout and a detective named Fix, Fogg makes a fantastic world tour utilizing every means of transportation available in the 1870s. This is a marvelous travelogue mixed with dazzling suspense, delightful fantasy, and lively comedy.

After a decade of chasing stories around the globe, intrepid travel writer Stephanie Elizondo Griest followed the magnetic pull home - only to discover that her native South Texas had been radically transformed in her absence. Ravaged by drug wars and barricaded by an 18-foot steel wall, her ancestral land had become the nation's foremost crossing ground for undocumented workers, many of whom perished along the way.

At the dawn of the 20th century, a young Lebanese adventurer leaves the Levant to explore the wilds of Africa, encountering an eccentric English colonel in Sudan and enlisting in his service. In this lush chronicle of far-flung adventure, the military recruit crosses paths with a compatriot who has dismantled a sumptuous palace in Tripoli and is transporting it across the continent on a camel caravan.

In Mississippi Noir, literary crime fiction master Tom Franklin has assembled a phenomenal short-story collection that highlights a mesmerizing and diverse set of styles and subject matter. Urban, suburban, and rural settings alike unveil new shades of darkness that fall upon Mississippi's past and present.

Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book. In the wake of Chicago Noir, Twin Cities Noir, and Kansas City Noir - all popular volumes in the Akashic Noir Series - comes the latest Midwest installment, St. Louis Noir. Masterfully curated by Scott Phillips, author of The Ice Harvest (adapted for film, starring John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton), this volume will chill the listener with heartland menace.

Laure Dugas is a champagne baby, born into a family of winemakers from two storied regions of France: Champagne and the Rhône Valley. But Laure wants little to do with the family business. It is only at age 23, when her uncle offers to send her to New York City to learn English and represent his wines to the American market, that Laure bids adieu to her boyfriend and begins her journey of discovery.

Since graduating from college with a journalism degree, Phil Cousineau's wanderlust has driven him to visit nearly 100 countries as a backpacker, a documentary filmmaker, a travel writer, a photographer, and an art and literary tour leader. For him, travel provides what his mentor Joseph Campbell called "the key to the realm of the muses".

One rainy morning in the winter of 1909, a man with an altogether average look about him quit his job at the London Morning Leader, kissed his wife and children goodbye, and took a train to Swansea in Wales, where he talked his way aboard a freighter bound for somewhere in the upper reaches of the Amazon. Three years later, Tomlinson published a book about his adventures. This book made him famous.

'The right good book,' says Mr. Tomlinson, 'is always a book of travel: it is about a life's journey.'

Driven by curiosity, wanderlust, and health crises, David Downie and his wife set out from Paris to walk across France to the Pyrenees. Starting on the Rue Saint-Jacques then trekking 750 miles south to Roncesvalles, Spain, their eccentric route takes 72 days on Roman roads and pilgrimage paths - a 1,100-year-old network of trails leading to the sanctuary of Saint James the Greater. It is best known as El Camino de Santiago de Compostela - "The Way" for short. The object of any pilgrimage is an inward journey manifested in a long, reflective walk. For Downie, the inward journey met the outer one: a combination of self-discovery and physical regeneration.

When ten-year-old Michael Baughman moves to Hawaii with his parents, he is troubled and confused. His father doesn’t provide the guidance Baughman needs, and the boy doesn’t know who to turn to. When a larger-than-life Hawaiian beach boy named Boat takes Baughman under his wing, the boy finds a teacher and mentor. Boat is 285 pounds of solid muscle and gentle spirituality.

The California revealed here is not the stereotypical land of movie stars, sensational trials, or tourist snapshots, but instead a remarkable patchwork of out-of-the-way places and everyday people. Former Los Angeles Times columnist Charles Hillinger hones in on what makes each county unique, such as Johnny Heinold's First and Last Chance tavern in Alameda County where Jack London first began writing his stories.

If you need an appendectomy, he can do it with a stone scalpel he fashioned himself. If you have a condition nobody can diagnose - "creeping eruption" perhaps - he can identify what it is and treat it. A baby with hair tourniquet syndrome, a human leg that's washed ashore, a horse with Lyme disease, a narcoleptic falling face-first in the street, a hermit living underground - hardly anything is off-limits for Dr. Timothy J. Lepore. This is the spirited, true story of a colorful, contrarian doctor on the world-famous island of Nantucket.