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A dramatic account of the deadly avalanche on Everest—and a return to reach the summit.On April 25, 2015, Jim Davidson…
was climbing Mount Everest when a 7.8-magnitude earthquake released avalanches all around him and his team, destroying their only escape route and trapping them at nearly 20,000 feet. It was the largest earthquake in Nepal in eighty-one years and killed nearly 8,900 people. That day also became the deadliest in the history of Everest, with eighteen people losing their lives on the mountain.After spending two unsettling days stranded on Everest, Davidson's team was rescued by helicopter. The experience left him shaken, and despite his thirty-three years of climbing and serving as an expedition leader, he wasn’t sure that he would ever go back. But in the face of risk and uncertainty, he returned in 2017 and finally achieved his dream of reaching the summit.Suspenseful and engrossing, The Next Everest portrays the experience of living through the biggest disaster to ever hit the mountain. Davidson's background in geology and environmental science makes him uniquely qualified to explain why the seismic threats lurking beneath Nepal are even greater today. But this story is not about “conquering” the world’s highest peak. Instead, it reveals how embracing change, challenge, and uncertainty prepares anyone to face their next “Everest” in life.By Alan Partridge. 2016
As seen on This Time with Alan Partridge on BBC One. THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERPraise for Nomad: 'Funniest book of…
the year' Sunday Telegraph'Alan Partridge's Nomad is almost certainly the funniest book ever written' Caitlin Moran'Sensationally funny. What brilliant writing' Richard Osman'Sensational' Jenny Colgan'Hilarious' Jon Ronson'Brilliantly funny' Marcus BrigstockIn ALAN PARTRIDGE: NOMAD, Alan dons his boots, windcheater and scarf and embarks on an odyssey through a place he once knew - it's called Britain - intent on completing a journey of immense personal significance.Diarising his ramble in the form of a 'journey journal', Alan details the people and places he encounters, ruminates on matters large and small and, on a final leg fraught with danger, becomes - not a man (because he was one to start off with) - but a better, more inspiring example of a man. This deeply personal book is divided into chapters and has a colour photograph on the front cover. It is deeply personal. Through witty vignettes, heavy essays and nod-inducing pieces of wisdom, Alan shines a light on the nooks of the nation and the crannies of himself, making this a biography that biographs the biographer while also biographing bits of Britain.By Andrew Harvey, Linda Tucker. 2013
In this captivating, suspenseful memoir, white lion conservationist Linda Tucker describes her perilous struggle to protect the sacred white lion…
from the merciless and mafia-like trophy-hunting industry, armed only with her indomitable spirit and total devotion. Her story begins in 1991 with a heart-stopping misadventure in the Timbavati Reserve of South Africa. Tucker--then a successful advertising executive--and a group of fellow travelers found themselves surrounded by a pride of angry lions. There was no way out, night had fallen, and the battery in their only flashlight was beginning to flicker. Miraculously, a local medicine woman, with two youngsters in tow, passed, trancelike and fearless, through the lions and escorted them all to safety. For Tucker, that life-threatening experience became a life-changing one. She abandoned her career, left Europe, and returned to Timbavati to track down the medicine woman who had saved her: Maria Khosa. Upon seeing Tucker again, Khosa only smiled and said, "What took you so long?" She had been expecting her, and there was so much to do. Under Khosa's shamanic tutelage, Tucker learned of her sacred destiny: to be the "keeper of the white lions," believed to be angelic beings sent to Earth to save humanity at a time of crisis. Khosa also prophesized that the queen of the white lions--the embodiment of the mother of Ra, the sun god--would soon be born, on a day and in a place considered holy by Westerners. On December 25, 2000, in the little South Africa town of Bethlehem, a snowy white lion cub, Marah, was born. From the moment of her first meeting with Marah, Tucker's story immediately takes off into battle, as she dedicates her every waking moment to prying Marah and her siblings from the grips of the trophy-hunting industry. Compellingly written in the intimate style of a journal, Tucker describes with unflinching honesty her fears, doubts, hopes, and dreams, all the while unfolding for us an unforgettable tale of adventure, romance, spirituality, and most of all, justice.By Lee Sandlin. 2013
With 16 pages of black-and-white illustrationsFrom the acclaimed author of Wicked River comes Storm Kings, a riveting tale of supercell…
tornadoes and the quirky, pioneering, weather-obsessed scientists whose discoveries created the science of modern meteorology. While tornadoes have occasionally been spotted elsewhere, only the central plains of North America have the perfect conditions for their creation. For the early settlers the sight of a funnel cloud was an unearthly event. They called it the "Storm King," and their descriptions bordered on the supernatural: it glowed green or red, it whistled or moaned or sang. In Storm Kings, Lee Sandlin explores America's fascination with and unique relationship to tornadoes. From Ben Franklin's early experiments to the "great storm war" of the nineteenth century to heartland life in the early twentieth century, Sandlin re-creates with vivid descriptions some of the most devastating storms in America's history, including the Tri-state Tornado of 1925 and the Peshtigo "fire tornado," whose deadly path of destruction was left encased in glass. Drawing on memoirs, letters, eyewitness testimonies, and archives, Sandlin brings to life the forgotten characters and scientists who changed a nation--including James Espy, America's first meteorologist, and Colonel John Park Finley, who helped place a network of weather "spotters" across the country. Along the way, Sandlin details the little-known but fascinating history of the National Weather Service, paints a vivid picture of the early Midwest, and shows how successive generations came to understand, and finally coexist with, the spiraling menace that could erase lives and whole towns in an instant.By David Roberts, Jon Krakauer. 2011
Finding Everett Ruess by David Roberts, with a foreword by Jon Krakauer, is the definitive biography of the artist, writer,…
and eloquent celebrator of the wilderness whose bold solo explorations of the American West and mysterious disappearance in the Utah desert at age 20 have earned him a large and devoted cult following. More than 75 years after his vanishing, Ruess stirs the kinds of passion and speculation accorded such legendary doomed American adventurers as Into the Wild's Chris McCandless and Amelia Earhart. "I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the street car and the star sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities." So Everett Ruess wrote in his last letter to his brother. And earlier, in a valedictory poem, "Say that I starved; that I was lost and weary; That I was burned and blinded by the desert sun; Footsore, thirsty, sick with strange diseases; Lonely and wet and cold . . . but that I kept my dream!" Wandering alone with burros and pack horses through California and the Southwest for five years in the early 1930s, on voyages lasting as long as ten months, Ruess also became friends with photographers Edward Weston and Dorothea Lange, swapped prints with Ansel Adams, took part in a Hopi ceremony, learned to speak Navajo, and was among the first "outsiders" to venture deeply into what was then (and to some extent still is) largely a little-known wilderness. When he vanished without a trace in November 1934, Ruess left behind thousands of pages of journals, letters, and poems, as well as more than a hundred watercolor paintings and blockprint engravings. A Ruess mystique, initiated by his parents but soon enlarged by readers and critics who, struck by his remarkable connection to the wild, likened him to a fledgling John Muir. Today, the Ruess cult has more adherents--and more passionate ones--than at any time in the seven-plus decades since his disappearance. By now, Everett Ruess is hailed as a paragon of solo exploration, while the mystery of his death remains one of the greatest riddles in the annals of American adventure. David Roberts began probing the life and death of Everett Ruess for National Geographic Adventure magazine in 1998. Finding Everett Ruess is the result of his personal journeys into the remote areas explored by Ruess, his interviews with oldtimers who encountered the young vagabond and with Ruess's closest living relatives, and his deep immersion in Ruess's writings and artwork. It is an epic narrative of a driven and acutely perceptive young adventurer's expeditions into the wildernesses of landscape and self-discovery, as well as an absorbing investigation of the continuing mystery of his disappearance. In this definitive account of Ruess's extraordinary life and the enigma of his vanishing, David Roberts eloquently captures Ruess's tragic genius and ongoing fascination.From the Hardcover edition.By Anthony Sattin. 2014
T. E. Lawrence was one of the most charismatic characters of the First World War; a young archaeologist who fought…
with the Arabs and wrote an epic and very personal account of their revolt against the Turks in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Yet this was not the first book to carry that iconic title. In 1914 the man who would become Lawrence of Arabia burnt the first Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a manuscript in which he described his adventures in the Middle East during the five years before the war. Anthony Sattin uncovers the story Lawrence wanted to conceal: the truth of his birth, his tortuous relationship with a dominant mother, his deep affection for an Arab boy, the intimate details of the extraordinary journeys he took through the region with which his name is forever connected and the personal reasons that drove him from being a student to becoming an archaeologist and a spy.Young Lawrence is the first book to focus on the story of T. E. Lawrence in his twenties, before the war, during the period he looked back on as his golden years. Using first-hand sources, museum records and Foreign Office documents, Sattin sets these adventures against the background of corrosive conflicts in Libya and the Balkans. He shows the simmering defiance of Arabs, Armenians and Kurds under Turkish domination, while uncovering the story of an exceptional young man searching for happiness, love and his place in the world until war changed his life forever.By Levison Wood. 2016
WINNER OF THE 2016 EDWARD STANFORD ADVENTURE TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD'Levison Wood has breathed new life into adventure…
travel.' Michael Palin'Levison Wood is a great adventurer and a wonderful storyteller.' Sir Ranulph Fiennes'Britain's best-loved adventurer... he looks like a man who will stare danger in the face and soak up a lot of pain without complaint.' The TimesFollowing in in the footsteps of the great explorers, WALKING THE HIMALAYAS is Levison Wood's enthralling account of crossing the Himalayas on foot. His journey of discovery along the path of the ancient trade route of the Silk Road to the forgotten kingdom of Bhutan led him beyond the safety of the tourist trail. There lies the real world of the Himalayas, where ex-paratrooper Levison Wood encountered natural disasters, extremists, nomadic goat herders, shamans (and the Dalai Lama) in his 1,700-mile trek across the roof of the world. WALKING THE HIMALAYAS is a tale of courage, stamina and the kindness of strangers that will appeal to the adventurer in us all.By Archie Carr. 1956
The Windward Road, published in 1956, made history. When Archie Carr began to rove the Caribbean to write about sea…
turtles, he saw that their numbers were dwindling. Out of this appeal to save them grew the first ventures in international sea turtle conservation and the establishment of the Caribbean Conservation Corporation.In addition to sea turtle biology, Carr recorded his general impressions, producing a natural history sprinkled with colorful stories.By Daniel Barbarisi. 2021
&“Chasing the Thrill lives where all the best stories reside, on that thin edge between amazing and impossible." —Christopher McDougall, author of Born…
to Run"I devoured this book in one sitting.&”—Susan Casey, author of Voices in the OceanA full-throttle, first-person account of the treasure hunt created by eccentric millionaire art dealer—and, some would say, robber baron—Forrest Fenn that became the stuff of contemporary legend. When Forrest Fenn was given a fatal cancer diagnosis, he came up with a bold plan: He would hide a chest full of jewels and gold in the wilderness, and publish a poem that would serve as a map leading to the treasure's secret location. But he didn't die, and after hiding the treasure in 2010, Fenn instead presided over a decade-long gold rush that saw many thousands of treasure hunters scrambling across the Rocky Mountains in pursuit of his fortune. Daniel Barbarisi first learned of Fenn's hunt in 2017, when a friend became consumed with decoding the poem and convinced Barbarisi, a reporter, to document his search. What began as an attempt to capture the inner workings of Fenn's hunt quickly turned into a personal quest that led Barbarisi down a reckless and potentially dangerous path, one that found him embroiled in searcher conspiracies and matching wits with Fenn himself. Over the course of four chaotic years, several searchers would die, endless controversies would erupt, and one hunter would ultimately find the chest. But the mystery didn't end there. Full of intrigue, danger, and break-neck action, Chasing the Thrill is a riveting tale of desire, obsession, and unbridled adventure.By Sebastian Junger. 2021
A profound rumination on the concept of freedom from the New York Times–bestselling author of Tribe Throughout history, humans have…
been driven by the quest for two cherished ideals: community and freedom. The two don’t coexist easily; we value individuality and self-reliance yet are utterly dependent on community for our most basic needs. In this intricately crafted and thought-provoking book, Sebastian Junger examines the tension that lies at the heart of what it means to be human. For much of a year, Junger and three friends—a conflict photographer and two Afghan war vets—walk the railroad lines of the east coast of the United States. It is an experiment in personal autonomy, but also in interdependence. Dodging railroad cops, sleeping under bridges, cooking over fires and drinking from creeks and rivers, the four men forge a unique reliance on one another. In Freedom, Junger weaves his account of this journey with other topics: primatology and boxing strategy, the history of labour strikes and Apache renegades, the role of women in resistance movements, and the brutal reality of life on the Pennsylvania frontier. Written in exquisite, razor-sharp prose, the result is a powerful examination of the primary desire that defines us.Three of Sir Ranulph Fiennes acclaimed bestsellers in one eBook collection – his epic biography of CAPTAIN SCOTT (‘Fiennes own…
experiences allow him to write vividly and with empathy’ Daily Mail); his enthralling autobiography, MAD, BAD AND DANGEROUS TO KNOW (‘The memoir of a supreme sportsman, an uber-earthling who could show the Martians a thing or two about what the best of us can achieve’ Financial Times); and the story of his unconventional, extraordinary family, MAD DOGS AND ENGLISHMEN (‘History at its best and most approachable’ Country Life).By Nick Papadimitriou. 2012
Nick Papadimitriou has spent a lifetime living on the margins, walking and documenting the landscapes surrounding his home in Child's…
Hill, North London, in a study he calls Deep Topography. Part meditation on nature and walking, part memoir and part social history, his arresting debut is first and foremost a personal inquiry into the spirit of a place: a 14-mile broken ridge of land on the fringes of Northern London known as Scarp. Conspicuous but largely forgotten, a vast yet largely invisible presence hovering just beyond the metropolis, Scarp is a vast storehouse of regional memory. We join the author as he explores and reimagines this brooding, pregnant landscape, meticulously observing his surroundings, finding surprising connections and revealing lost slices of the past. SCARP captures the satisfying experience of a long, reflective walk. Whether talking about the beauty of a bird or a telegraph pole, deaths at a roundabout or his own troubled past, Papadimitriou celebrates the poetry in the everyday. His captivating prose reveals that the world around us is alive and intrinsically valuable in ways that the trappings of day-to-day life lead us to forget, and allows us to re-connect with something more authentic, more immediate, more profound.By Kate Adie. 2002
Kate Adie's story is an unusual one. Raised in post-war Sunderland, where life was 'a sunny experience, full of meat-paste…
sandwiches and Sunday school', she has reported memorably and courageously from many of the world's trouble spots since she joined the BBC in 1969. THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS encompasses Adie's reporting from, inter alia, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, Tiananmen Square and, of course, the Gulf War of 1991. It offers a compelling combination of vivid frontline reporting and evocative writing and reveals the extraordinarily demanding life of the woman who is always at the heart of the action. Although an intensely private person, Kate Adie also divulges what it's like to be a woman in a man's world - an inspiration to many working women.By Artemis Cooper. 2012
Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) was a war hero whose exploits in Crete are legendary, and above all he is widely…
acclaimed as the greatest travel writer of our times, notably for his books about his walk across pre-war Europe, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water; he was a self-educated polymath, a lover of Greece and the best company in the world. Artemis Cooper has drawn on years of interviews and conversations with Paddy and his cloest friends as well as having complete access to his archives. Her beautifully crafted biography portrays a man of extraordinary gifts - no one wore their learning so playfully, nor inspired such passionate friendship.By Tori James. 2012
‘You fall you’re dead,’ the voice inside my head told me. I was balancing on a knife-edge ridge, sheer drops…
either side of me. The cold was chilling me to my core. But I could not give up. I had to focus, The summit was within reach.Everest: the highest mountain in the world and also one of the most dangerous. On May 24 2007, Tori James made history when she became the first Welsh woman, and youngest British woman, to climb to the summit of Everest. It was an amazing achievement for the petite farmer’s daughter from Pembrokeshire. In Peak Performance Tori shares the inspiration and drive that helped her to succeed in reaching the ‘rooftop of the world’.'Macklin recounts, with beautiful detail, the following years of Narcisse's life and his transformation . . . a great read…
for anyone interested in Australia and its overlooked history'Ronan Breathnach, Irish Examiner 'A truly remarkable account drawing upon a version Pelletier gave when he eventually returned to his native France and also on anthropological studies of the Daintree people.' Piers Akerman, Daily Telegraph, Sydney 'An unforgettable tale of transformation and upheaval.'Stuart McLean, Daily Telegraph, SydneyA young boy abandoned in an alien landscape thousands of miles from home is adopted by local people and becomes one of them, welcomed into their community, marrying a wife and raising a child. After seventeen years, he is stolen back to his 'real' life, where he has another family, but dreams constantly of what he has left behind.This is the remarkable true story of a French cabin boy Narcisse Pelletier who, after disembarking from his ship the Saint-Paul with the rest of its crew in search of drinking water, found himself separated from his shipmates and in the end abandoned on the north coast of Queensland, Australia. Narcisse was adopted by an Aboriginal group who welcomed him as one of their own for seventeen years, during which time he had a family of his own. In 1875, though, he was kidnapped by the brig John Bell and was returned eventually to his family in Saint-Gilles, France, where he became a lighthouse keeper. Robert Macklin makes skilful use of Narcisse's own memoir Chez les sauvages along with new research to tell this extraordinary story.Robert is a Queenslander so knows the terrain and the people of the area in which Narcisse was left behind. Through Noel Pearson's Cape York Institute, he has arranged to meet descendants of the people who took the French cabin boy in and who know the stories of his time in Australia. Robert has also had access to a great deal of material on the early history of the Cape through the Australian National Library. He has drawn on the significant resources of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) in Canberra on Aboriginal culture and history in Queensland and the Cape. In addition, he has made use of Narcisse Pelletier's own writings, including his account of his time in Australia, as well as several contemporaneous accounts of the Kennedy expedition to the area, including one from a member of the party. The author has made several trips to Cape York and one to Saint-Gilles and Saint-Nazaire in France.By Peter Allison. 2009
Join a top safari guide for hair-raising and hilarious tales of South Africa, animals and close escapes.It shouldn't be fun…
to be charged by an animal that could easily crush you, but top safari guide Peter Allison gets an odd thrill every time an elephant charges his beaten-up Jeep or a peckish crocodile looks at him sideways. By now you'd think the bestselling author of DON'T RUN, Whatever You Do would know how to keep out of trouble. But from avoiding territorial hippos and hungry lions to dodging landmines and getting lost on the unforgiving savannah, Peter has had his fair share of close calls. Drawing on his experiences in South Africa, Botswana, Mozambique and Namibia, Don't Look Behind You! is another book of funny, true safari stories, perfect for telling around a campfire.By Ranulph Fiennes. 2003
Sir Ranulph Fiennes is uniquely qualified to write a new biography of Captain Scott. This is the first biography of…
Scott by someone who has experienced the deprivations, the stress and the sheer physical pain that Scott lived through; he has suffered all but the final tragedy endured by the much maligned Scott. He is determined to put the record straight. As well as being the definitive biography of Scott, written with the full and exclusive cooperation of the Scott Estate, this book traces the way that Scott's reputation has been attacked and his achievements distorted.'Sir Ranulph Fiennes has done Captain Scott's memory some service...he has certainly written a more dispassionate and balanced account than Huntford ever set out to do.' - Simon Courtauld, SpectatorBy Juliane Koepcke. 2012
On December 24th 1971, the teenage Juliane boarded the packed flight in Peru to meet her father for Christmas. She…
and her mother fought to get some of the last seats available and felt thankful to have made the flight. The LANSA airplane flew into a heavy thunderstorm and went down in dense Amazon jungle hundreds of miles from civilization.She fell two miles from the sky, still strapped to her plane seat, into the jungle. She was the sole survivor among the 92 passengers, which included her mother, and Juliane s unexplainable survival has been called a modern-day miracle.With incredible courage, instinct and ingenuity, she crawled and walked alone for eleven days in the green hell of the Amazon. She survived using the skills she d learned in assisting her parents on their research trips into the jungle before coming across a loggers hut, and, with it, safety. Now she tells her fascinating story for the first time and on its 40th anniversary she shares not only the private moments of her survival and rescue but her inspiring life in the wake of the disaster.By Ranulph Fiennes. 2007
Ranulph Fiennes has travelled to the most dangerous and inaccessible places on earth, almost died countless times, lost nearly half…
his fingers to frostbite, raised millions of pounds for charity and been awarded a polar medal and an OBE. He has been an elite soldier, an athlete, a mountaineer, an explorer, a bestselling author and nearly replaced Sean Connery as James Bond.In his autobiography he describes how he led expeditions all over the world and became the first person to travel to both poles on land. He tells of how he discovered the lost city of Ubar in Oman and attempted to walk solo and unsupported to the North Pole - the expedition that cost him several fingers, and very nearly his life. His most recent challenge was scaling the north face of the Eiger, one of the most awesome mountaineering challenges in the world. Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes OBE, 3rd Baronet, looks back on a life lived at the very limits of human endeavour.'Even readers with a broadly low tolerance for macho heroism will find themselves gripped . . . compelling' - Time Out