Showing titles in Adventurers, Explorers & Survival

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.

Few American icons provoke more enduring fascination than Charles Lindbergh - renowned for his one-man transatlantic flight in 1927, remembered for the sorrow surrounding the kidnapping and death of his firstborn son in 1932, and reviled by many for his opposition to America's entry into World War II.

Amy's happy life changed forever when her mother suddenly passed. Abandoned by her family as they struggled to cope, she found herself facing hardships and exploitation alone, which eventually led to severe drug addiction at twelve years old. Now she shares what it was like to survive her new life in UK #1 bestselling author Toni Maguire's latest survivor story, Abandoned Child. This book, full of dark secrets and hard choices, follows Amy's journey from a victim to a fighter. The lesson? Change isn't easy, but it is worth it.

In The Mountain, veteran world-class climber and bestselling author Ed Viesturs—the only American to have climbed all fourteen of the world's 8,000-meter peaks—trains his sights on Mount Everest in richly detailed accounts of expeditions that are by turns personal, harrowing, deadly, and inspiring.

In 2017, world-class ultrarunner Hillary Allen was at the top of her sport - and it felt like she was running on top of the world as she competed in Norway's Tromsø Skyrace. Allen was nearly halfway through the 50-kilometer race when she fell 150 feet off an exposed ridge, fracturing her back and breaking multiple ribs, both feet, and both of her lower arms. Beginning with the dramatic story of her accident and rescue, Out and Back: A Runner's Story of Survival Against All Odds recounts Allen's fight to return to the life she loves.

Auckland Island is a godforsaken place in the middle of the Southern Ocean, 285 miles south of New Zealand. With year-round freezing rain and howling winds, it is one of the most forbidding places in the world. To be shipwrecked there means almost certain death. In 1864, Captain Thomas Musgrave and his crew of four aboard the schooner Grafton wreck on the southern end of the island. Utterly alone in a dense coastal forest, plagued by stinging blowflies and relentless rain, Captain Musgrave inspires his men to take action.

Sheila Kogan was not your typical pilgrim! This sixty-something, Jewish-Catholic, grandmother and dance teacher takes us on an unforgettable trek across Spain. With her, we flirt with Richard outside the Cathedral in Leon, reunite a sandal with a dancing Spaniard, weep with Meg over the loss of her daughter, and get a sensuous massage from a tyrannical angel. Close-to-the-bone, funny as well as heart-rending, the stories in Found Along The Way invite us to experience the Camino de Santiago as well as to journey inward, where fear and doubt battle trust and faith.

It’s the unfathomable modern legend that has become a testament to the resilience of the human spirit: the 1972 Andes plane crash and the Uruguayan rugby teammates who suffered 72 days among the dead and dying. It was a harrowing test of endurance that ended in a miraculous rescue. Now comes the unflinching and emotional true story by one of the men who found his way home. Four decades after the tragedy, a climber discovered survivor Eduardo Strauch’s wallet and returned it to him. It was a gesture that compelled Strauch to finally “break the silence of the mountains.”

As a young girl, Hannah Stowe was raised at the tide’s edge on the Pembrokeshire coast of Wales, falling asleep to the sweep of the lighthouse beam. Now in her midtwenties, working as a marine biologist and sailor, Stowe draws on her professional experiences sailing tens of thousands of miles in the North Sea, North Atlantic, Mediterranean, Celtic Sea, and the Caribbean to explore the human relationship with wild waters. Why is it, she asks, that she and so many others have been drawn to life at sea—and what might the water around us be able to teach us?

No Baggage is a memoir that will resonate with adventurers and homebodies alike - it's at once a romance, a travelogue, and a bright, modern take on the age-old questions: How do you find the courage to explore beyond your comfort zone? Can you love someone without the need for commitment or any expectations for the future?

A riveting true account of gold rush fever in mid-19th-century America, rich with the thrilling exploits of daring fortune seekers and dangerous outlaws. America was never the same after January 24, 1848. It was on that day that a carpenter named James Marshall discovered a tiny nugget of gold while building a sawmill at Sutter's Fort, just east of Sacramento, California. Marshall's find ignited a fever the nation had never known before.

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....

Near the end of her life, Mary Mann Hamilton (1866-c.1936) was encouraged to record her experiences as a female pioneer. The result is the only known firsthand account of a remarkable woman thrust into the center of taming the American South - surviving floods, tornadoes, and fires; facing bears, panthers, and snakes; managing a boardinghouse in Arkansas that was home to an eccentric group of settlers; and running a logging camp in Mississippi that blazed a trail for development in the Mississippi Delta.

His plan was to stay in Iowa, maybe get a job counting duck, or do a little farming. But events conspired to fling Carter Niemeyer westward and straight into the jaws of wolves. From his early years wrangling ornery federal trappers, eagles, and grizzlies, to winning a skinning contest that paved the way for wolf reintroduction in the Northern Rockies, Niemeyer reveals the wild and bumpy ride that turned a trapper - a killer - into a champion of wolves.

On the morning of May 20, 1927, a little-known pilot named Charles Lindbergh waited to take off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island. He was determined to claim the $25,000 Orteig Prize promised to the first pilot to fly nonstop from New York to Paris - a contest that had already claimed six men's lives. Just 25 years old, Lindbergh had never before flown over water. Yet 33 hours later, his single-engine monoplane, The Spirit of St. Louis, touched down in Paris.

During the Golden Era of Exploration, Captain Robert Scott and his competitor Roald Amundsen conquered the unconquerable: Antarctica. Their perilous race to the South Pole claimed Scott’s life and became the stuff of legend as well as endless scrutiny. In this compelling biography of Captain Scott and his fatal journey, renowned modern-day explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes, holder of ten expeditionary records, has written the definitive book on this hotly debated subject.

In a collection of gripping stories of adventure, Doug Peacock, loner, iconoclast, environmentalist, and contemporary of Edward Abbey, reflects on a life lived in the wild, asking the question many ask in their twilight years: “Was It Worth It?”

Spaceflight historian Amy Shira Teitel tells the riveting story of the female pilots who each dreamed of being the first American woman in space. This dual biography of audacious trailblazers Jackie Cochran and Jerrie Cobb presents these fascinating and fearless women in all their glory and grit, using their stories as guides through the shifting social, political, and technical landscape of the time.

Lieutenant William Frederick “Bill” Harris was 25 years old when captured by Japanese forces during the Battle of Corregidor in May 1942. This son of a decorated Marine general escaped from hell on earth by swimming eight hours through a shark-infested bay; but his harrowing ordeal had just begun. Shipwrecked on the southern coast of the Philippines, he was sheltered by a Filipino aristocrat, engaged in guerilla fighting, and eventually set off through hostile waters to China.

Meet Doctor Ben MacFarlane - a very modern flying doctor. His job is get on a plane and bring patients home after holiday disasters, gap year crises, embarrassing incidents on business trips and all the other things that can go wrong when we head overseas. Holiday SOS is his extraordinary story. It’s a unique medical memoir of the people he helps - and a year in the life of one of the world’s most frequent flyers!