Showing titles in Adventurers, Explorers & Survival

In the spring of 1983, massive flooding along the length of the Colorado River confronted a team of engineers at the Glen Canyon Dam with an unprecedented emergency that may have resulted in the most catastrophic dam failure in history. In the midst of this crisis, the decision to launch a small wooden dory named “The Emerald Mile” at the head of the Grand Canyon, just fifteen miles downstream from the Glen Canyon Dam, seemed not just odd, but downright suicidal.

In this revelatory, harrowing, and ultimately hopeful memoir, Gypsy-Rose Blanchard shares the painful realities she grew up with and the details of her life that only she knows. A victim of her mother’s Munchausen by proxy and child abuse survivor, Gypsy-Rose Blanchard’s unique and controversial case made headlines across the world. Now, she’s finally free to start living her life on her terms—and to tell her own story as only she can.

On July 12th, 1776, Captain James Cook, already lionized as the greatest explorer in British history, set off on his third voyage in his ship the HMS Resolution. Two-and-a-half years later, on a beach on the island of Hawaii, Cook was killed in a conflict with native Hawaiians. How did Cook, who was unique among captains for his respect for Indigenous peoples and cultures, come to that fatal moment? Hampton Sides’ bravura account of Cook’s last journey both wrestles with Cook’s legacy and provides a thrilling narrative of the titanic efforts and continual danger that characterized exploration.

With his characteristic color and flair, Capstick recalls the extraordinary careers of men like Colonel J.H. Patterson and Colonel Jim Corbett, who stalked legendary man-eaters through the silent darkness on opposite sides of the world; men like Karamojo Bell, acknowledged as the greatest elephant hunter of all time; men like the valiant Sasha Siemel, who tracked killer jaguars though the Matto Grosso armed only with a spear.

Speaking out for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, about the traumatic events of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie answers violence with art, and reminds us of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. Knife is a gripping, intimate, and ultimately life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art—and finding the strength to stand up again.

Even among iconic frontiersmen like John C. Fremont, Kit Carson, and Jedediah Smith, Jim Bridger stands out. A mountain man of the American West, straddling the fur trade era and the age of exploration, he lived the life legends are made of. Here, in a biography that finally gives this outsize character his due, Jerry Enzler takes this frontiersman's full measure for the first time—and tells a story that would do Jim Bridger proud.

A few years after quitting his job to follow an ill-advised dream of becoming a guide on the Colorado River, Kevin Fedarko was approached by his best friend, the National Geographic photographer Pete McBride, with a vision as bold as it was harebrained. Together, they would embark on an end-to-end traverse of the Grand Canyon, a journey that, McBride promised, would be “a walk in the park.” Against his better judgment, Fedarko agreed to the scheme, unaware that the small cluster of experts who had completed the crossing billed it as “the toughest hike in the world.”

In Arctic Adventure, Freuchen writes of polar bear hunts, of meeting Eskimos who had resorted to cannibalism during a severe famine, and of the thrill of seeing the sun after three months of winter darkness. Trained as a journalist before he headed north, Freuchen is a fine writer and great storyteller.

This memoir presents one human story, crafted into art by the power of words. Elisha's carefully planned life collapses with the breakup of a relationship she had built her life around, sending her on a journey into the depths of the global sexy Tantra scene. Wild Thing in Captivity is Eat, Pray, Love for Tantra. It's a coming-of-middle-age tale for Generation X.

Laura Hernández, periodista puertorriqueña, publica su libro y cuenta su proceso de ser acusada injustamente de un delito que no cometió. De ser ancla y reportera de televisión a ser encerrada en las peores cárceles del mundo, como lo son las de la República Dominicana. Por más de trece años, Laura Hernández guardó silencio. Pero en medio de su proceso de ser libre, no solo de la prisión humana sino de la cárcel del alma, de su deseo de desahogar, liberar el dolor, reencontrarse a sí misma y perdonar, escribe una historia conmovedora, que no podrás dejar de leer, porque cautivará tu corazón.

She was 17 years old on a Christmas Eve flight 40 years ago to join her father for Christmas when the unimaginable happened. The Lockheed L-188A Electra, on the way from Lima to Pucallpa, flew directly into a thunderstorm. A strike of lightning left the plane incinerated and Juliane Diller (Koepcke) still strapped to her plane seat falling through the night air two miles above the Earth. Her survival is unexplainable and considered a modern-day miracle. Her mother was among the 91 dead and Juliane the sole survivor.

This award-winning work of narrative nonfiction is a raw and haunting account of one girl’s journey through madness, loss, and a broken child welfare system in Los Angeles in the 1980s. Seven-year-old Leslie has a serious problem. Someone is trying to kill her. Her mother Roberta suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, and she writes rambling manifestos and forces her children to live on the run to evade capture by the Russian spies she believes are after them. With every psychotic break, Leslie and her younger brother face terrifying circumstances despite the fact that Roberta’s only wish...

The Apollo lunar missions of the 1960s and 1970s have been called the last optimistic acts of the 20th century. Twelve astronauts made this greatest of all journeys and were indelibly marked by it, for better or for worse. Journalist Andrew Smith tracks down the nine surviving members of this elite group to find their answers to the question "Where do you go after you've been to the Moon?"

Three friends, women in their fifties, set out to hike "the most beautiful long-distance trail in the world," the John Muir Trail. From the outset, their adventure is complicated by self-inflicted accidents and ferocious weather, then enriched when they "adopt" a young hiker abandoned by her partner along the trail.

For fans of The Lost City of Z, Walking the Amazon, and Turn Right at Machu Picchu comes naturalist and explorer Paul Rosolie’s extraordinary adventure in the uncharted tributaries of the Western Amazon - a tale of discovery that vividly captures the awe, beauty, and isolation of this endangered land and presents an impassioned call to save it.

In this thrilling memoir of a life spent exploring the most incredible places on Earth—from the Great African Seaforest to the crocodile lairs of the Okavango Delta—Craig Foster reveals how we can attend to the earthly beauty around us and deepen our love for all living things, whether we make our homes in the country, the city, or anywhere in between.

On average, around 350,000 U.S. students, and nearly one million students worldwide, study abroad every year. Yet since its inception in 1963, only about 73,000 total students from over 1500 colleges and universities have participated in Semester at Sea. It is a truly unique, exclusive, and intimate experience, where students and faculty study, work, and travel to the farthest reaches of the globe.

I was born and broken in Birkenhead, abused from infancy by a network of every kind of pervert from ‘thinks it’s love’ to ‘show it hurts’. I was unwanted, beaten, sold, swapped, photographed, filmed, left for dead, corrupted, blamed, betrayed, ignored and orphaned. But I was also born with a fire inside me. I call it my Phoenix Fire. I am no victim—that word only describes what happened to me. Nor am I a survivor because that implies I am over it. I am a Phoenix—a work in progress. This is my story....

In Campfire Stories: Close Calls, Steven Rinella invites seasoned hunters, anglers, adventurers, and outdoor professionals to share their tales of perilous adventures in the natural world, from run-ins with black bears and grizzlies to bad falls and severe hypothermia.

Why we think it’s a great listen: Seabiscuit was a runaway success, and Hillenbrand’s done it again with another true-life account about beating unbelievable odds. On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared....