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To the Edges of the Earth: 1909, the Race for the Three Poles, and the Climax of the Age of Exploration
By Edward J. Larson. 2018
Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award From the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, a "suspenseful" (WSJ) and "adrenaline-fueled" (Outside) entwined narrative of…
the most adventurous year of all time, when three expeditions simultaneously raced to the top, bottom, and heights of the world. As 1909 dawned, the greatest jewels of exploration—set at the world’s frozen extremes—lay unclaimed: the North and South Poles and the so-called “Third Pole,” the pole of altitude, located in unexplored heights of the Himalaya. Before the calendar turned, three expeditions had faced death, mutiny, and the harshest conditions on the planet to plant flags at the furthest edges of the Earth.In the course of one extraordinary year, Americans Robert Peary and Matthew Henson were hailed worldwide at the discovers of the North Pole; Britain’s Ernest Shackleton had set a new geographic “Furthest South” record, while his expedition mate, Australian Douglas Mawson, had reached the Magnetic South Pole; and at the roof of the world, Italy’s Duke of the Abruzzi had attained an altitude record that would stand for a generation, the result of the first major mountaineering expedition to the Himalaya's eastern Karakoram, where the daring aristocrat attempted K2 and established the standard route up the most notorious mountain on the planet. Based on extensive archival and on-the-ground research, Edward J. Larson weaves these narratives into one thrilling adventure story. Larson, author of the acclaimed polar history Empire of Ice, draws on his own voyages to the Himalaya, the arctic, and the ice sheets of the Antarctic, where he himself reached the South Pole and lived in Shackleton’s Cape Royds hut as a fellow in the National Science Foundations’ Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. These three legendary expeditions, overlapping in time, danger, and stakes, were glorified upon their return, their leaders celebrated as the preeminent heroes of their day. Stripping away the myth, Larson, a master historian, illuminates one of the great, overlooked tales of exploration, revealing the extraordinary human achievement at the heart of these journeys.Inside this book, you'll find stories of 50 extraordinary people such as:Evel Knievel, who jumped his motorcycle over 14 Greyhound…
busesThe Iceman, the most well-preserved human, found in the ice after 5,300 yearsSam Patch, who jumped Niagara Falls for $75Helen Thayer, who walked to the North Pole aloneRoy Sullivan, who was struck by lightning 7 timesThese intriguing facts and hundreds more await curious readers, amateur historians, and anyone who aspires to the altogether extraordinary!In the tradition of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, Robert Sapolsky, a foremost science writer and recipient of a MacArthur…
Genius Grant, tells the mesmerizing story of his twenty-one years in remote Kenya with a troop of savanna baboons."I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla,&” writes Robert Sapolsky in this witty and riveting chronicle of a scientist&’s coming-of-age in Africa. An exhilarating account of Sapolsky&’s twenty-one-year study of a troop of rambunctious baboons in Kenya, A Primate&’s Memoir interweaves serious scientific observations with wry commentary about the challenges and pleasures of living in the wilds of the Serengeti—for man and beast alike. Over two decades, Sapolsky survives culinary atrocities, gunpoint encounters, and a surreal kidnapping, while witnessing the encroachment of the tourist mentality on Africa. As he conducts unprecedented physiological research on wild primates, he becomes enamored of his subjects—unique and compelling characters in their own right—and he returns to them summer after summer, until tragedy finally prevents him. By turns hilarious and poignant, A Primate&’s Memoir is a magnum opus from one of our foremost science writers.South: The Endurance Expedition (Penguin Modern Classics)
By Ernest Shackleton. 2002
The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition was perhaps the most ambitious, elaborate and confident of all the British attempts to master the…
South Pole. Like the others it ended in disaster, with the Endeavour first trapped and then crushed to pieces in the ice and its crew trapped in the Antarctic, seemingly doomed to a slow and horrible death. In the face of extraordinary odds, Shackleton, the expedition's leader, decided on the only course that might just save them: a 700 nautical mile voyage in a small boat across the ferocious Southern Ocean in the forelorn hope of reaching the only human habitation within range: a small whaling station on the rugged, ice-sheeted island of South Georgia.South tells the story both of the whole astonishing expedition and of Shackleton's journey to rescue his men - one of the greatest feats of navigation ever recorded.One of the greatest nineteenth-century scientist-explorers, Alexander von Humboldt traversed the tropical Spanish Americas between 1799 and 1804. By the…
time of his death in 1859, he had won international fame for his scientific discoveries, his observations of Native American peoples and his detailed descriptions of the flora and fauna of the 'new continent'. The first to draw and speculate on Aztec art, to observe reverse polarity in magnetism and to discover why America is called America, his writings profoundly influenced the course of Victorian culture, causing Darwin to reflect: 'He alone gives any notion of the feelings which are raised in the mind on first entering the Tropics'.A New Voyage Round the World
By William Dampier. 2020
'A roaring tale ... remains as vivid and exciting today as it was on publication in 1697' GuardianThe pirate and…
adventurer William Dampier circumnavigated the globe three times, and took notes wherever he went. This is his frank, vivid account of his buccaneering sea voyages around the world, from the Caribbean to the Pacific and East Indies. Filled with accounts of raids, escapes, wrecks and storms, it also contains precise observations of people, places, animals and food (including the first English accounts of guacamole, mango chutney and chopsticks). A bestseller on publication, this unique record of the colonial age influenced Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels and consequently the whole of English literature.Edited with an Introduction by Nicholas ThomasTo the Greatest Heights: Facing Danger, Finding Humility, and Climbing a Mountain of Truth
By Vanessa O'Brien. 2021
This riveting and uplifting memoir by Vanessa O&’Brien, record-breaking American-British explorer, takes you on an unexpected journey to the top…
of the world&’s highest mountains. Long before she became the first American woman to summit K2 and the first British woman to return from its summit alive, Vanessa O&’Brien was a feisty suburban Detroit teenager forced to reinvent her world in the wake of a devastating loss that destroyed her family.Making her own way in the world, Vanessa strove to reach her lofty ambitions. Soon, armed with an MBA and a wry sense of humor, she climbed the corporate ladder to great success, but after the 2009 economic meltdown, her career went into a tailspin. She searched for a new purpose and settled on an unlikely goal: climbing Mount Everest. When her first attempt ended in disaster, she trudged home, humbled but wiser. Two years later, she made it to the top of the world. And then she kept going.Grounded by a cadre of wise-cracking friends and an inimitable British spouse, Vanessa held her own in the intensely competitive world of mountaineering, summiting the highest peak on every continent, and skiing the last degree to the North and South Poles. She set new speed records for the Seven Summits, receiving a Guinness World Record and the Explorers Grand Slam, and finally made peace with her traumatic past. During her attempt on K2, she very nearly gave up. But on the &“savage mountain,&” which kills one out of every four climbers who summit, Vanessa evolved from an adventurer out to challenge herself to an explorer with a high-altitude perspective on a changing world—and a new call to share her knowledge and passion across the globe.Told with heart and humor, Vanessa&’s journey from suburban Detroit to Everest&’s Death Zone to the summit of K2 and beyond, is a transformative story of resilience, higher purpose, and the courage to overcome any obstacle.Dedicated to getting runners the tools they need to succeed, Canadian Running gives professional advice and inspiration on everything you…
need to be faster, fitter and healthier. The magazine provides the latest on training, gear reviews, nutrition information and recipes, tips on the best places to run and race, and the inside story on the elite running scene.Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World
By Andrea Pitzer. 2021
In the bestselling tradition of Hampton Sides&’s In the Kingdom of Ice, a &“gripping adventure tale&” (The Boston Globe) recounting…
Dutch polar explorer William Barents&’ three harrowing Arctic expeditions—the last of which resulted in a relentlessly challenging year-long fight for survival.The human story has always been one of perseverance—often against remarkable odds. The most astonishing survival tale of all might be that of 16th-century Dutch explorer William Barents and his crew of sixteen, who ventured farther north than any Europeans before and, on their third polar exploration, lost their ship off the frozen coast of Nova Zembla to unforgiving ice. The men would spend the next year fighting off ravenous polar bears, gnawing hunger, and endless winter.In Icebound, Andrea Pitzer masterfully combines a gripping tale of survival with a sweeping history of the great Age of Exploration—a time of hope, adventure, and seemingly unlimited geographic frontiers. At the story&’s center is William Barents, one of the 16th century&’s greatest navigators whose larger-than-life ambitions and obsessive quest to chart a path through the deepest, most remote regions of the Arctic ended in both tragedy and glory. Journalist Pitzer did extensive research, learning how to use four-hundred-year-old navigation equipment, setting out on three Arctic expeditions to retrace Barents&’s steps, and visiting replicas of Barents&’s ship and cabin.&“A resonant meditation on human ingenuity, resilience, and hope&” (The New Yorker), Pitzer&’s reenactment of Barents&’s ill-fated journey shows us how the human body can function at twenty degrees below, the history of mutiny, the art of celestial navigation, and the intricacies of building shelters. But above all, it gives us a firsthand glimpse into the true nature of courage.The Mountain: My Time on Everest
By Ed Viesturs, David Roberts. 2013
In national bestseller The Mountain, world-renowned climber and bestselling author Ed Viesturs and cowriter David Roberts paint a vivid portrait…
of obsession, dedication, and human achievement in a true love letter to the world’s highest peak.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.The highest mountain on earth, Everest remains the ultimate goal for serious high-altitude climbers. Viesturs has gone on eleven expeditions to Everest, spending more than two years of his life on the mountain and reaching the summit seven times. No climber today is better poised to survey Everest’s various ascents—both personal and historic. Viesturs sheds light on the fate of Mallory and Irvine, whose 1924 disappearance just 800 feet from the summit remains one of mountaineering’s greatest mysteries, as well as the multiply tragic last days of Rob Hall and Scott Fischer in 1996, the stuff of which Into Thin Air was made.Informed by the experience of one who has truly been there, The Mountain affords a rare glimpse into that place on earth where Heraclitus’s maxim—“Character is destiny”—is proved time and again.Running Against the Tide: True Tales from the Stud of the Sea
By Captain Lee, Michael Shohl. 2018
From the star of Bravo&’s hit reality show Below Deck comes Running Against the Tide, the &“Stud of the Sea&’s&”…
first-ever memoir recounting his journey from landlocked Saginaw, Michigan to the high seas, where he has spent more than twenty-five years as a superyacht captain.The cast members of Below Deck are known for their catfights, scheming, personal attacks, and long-held grudges, but what keeps viewers coming back week after week is resident hero Captain Lee, the only cast member to appear in all five seasons.But you don&’t have to be one of Below Deck&’s 1.5 million weekly viewers to appreciate Captain Lee&’s story, which offers a glimpse behind-the-scenes at the luxury yachting industry and one of Bravo&’s biggest franchises. From having to reclaim his drunk captain's lost papers in the Dominican Republic to unwittingly crewing a drug boat out of Turks and Caicos to navigating the outrageous demands of the super-rich in New York City, Captain Lee's tales from the high seas run the gamut, proving time and time again why he&’s a fan favorite: he&’s occasionally profane, he&’s often surprising, but he&’s never dull and, for the first time, he&’s here to tell all.Ten Million Aliens: A Journey Through the Entire Animal Kingdom
By Simon Barnes. 2015
For Discovery Channel enthusiasts, this scientific foray into life on planet earth examines how the world&’s creatures--both weird and wonderful--are…
inextricably linked.Life on planet earth is not weirder than we imagine. It’s weirder than we are capable of imagining. And we’re all in it together: humans, blue whales, rats, birds of paradise, ridiculous numbers of beetles, molluscs the size of a bus, the sexual gladiators of slugs, bdelloid rotifers who haven’t had sex for millions of years and creatures called water bears: you can boil them, freeze them and fire them off into space without killing them.We’re all part of the animal kingdom, appearing in what Darwin called “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful." In this breathtakingly audacious book, Simon Barnes has brought us all together, seeking not what separates us but what unites us. He takes us white-water rafting through the entire animal kingdom in a book that brings in deep layers of arcane knowledge, the works of Darwin and James Joyce, Barnes’s own don’t-try-this-at-home adventures in the wild, David Attenborough and Sherlock Holmes. Ten Million Aliens opens your eyes to the real marvels of the planet we live on.Everest, Inc.: The Renegades and Rogues Who Built an Industry at the Top of the World
By Will Cockrell. 2024
Featuring original interviews with mountain guides and climbers—including Jimmy Chin and Conrad Anker—this vivid and authoritative adventure history chronicles one…
of the least likely industries on Earth: guided climbing on Mount Everest.Anyone who has read Jon Krakauer&’s Into Thin Air or has seen a recent photo of climbers standing in line to get to the top of Everest may think they have the mountain pretty well figured out. It&’s an extreme landscape where bad weather and incredible altitude can occasionally kill, but more so an overcrowded, trashed-out recreation destination where rich clients pad their egos—and social media feeds—while exploiting local Sherpas. There&’s some truth to these clichés, but they&’re a sliver of the story. Unlike any book to date, Everest, Inc. gets to the heart of the mountain through the definitive story of its greatest invention: the Himalayan guiding industry. It all began in the 1980s with a few boot-strapping entrepreneurs who paired raw courage and naked ambition with a new style of expedition planning. Many of them are still living and climbing today, and as a result of their astonishing success, ninety percent of the people now on Everest are clients or employees of guided expeditions. Studded with quotes from original interviews with more than a hundred western and Sherpa climbers, clients, writers, filmmakers, and even a Hollywood actor, Everest, Inc. foregrounds the voices of the people who have made the mountain what it is today. And while there is plenty of high-altitude drama in unpacking the last forty years of Everest tragedy and triumph, it ultimately transcends stereotypes and tells the uplifting counternarrative of the army of journeymen and women who have made people&’s dreams come true, and of the Nepalis who are pushing the industry into the future.In this personal journey, ultra-light backpacker and sought-after speaker Glen Van Peski shares the life lessons he has learned through…
years of lightening his pack and helping others.Adventures provide the richness and texture to a life well lived. So remain open. Keep saying yes to life's opportunities. Glen Van Peski helped revolutionize backpacking by creating ultralight equipment, which allows people to take less so they can do more in the wilderness. During decades of championing ultralight backpacking, Glen became aware that &“take less, do more&” is more than just a hiking slogan. As he reduced his pack weight, he realized that the lessons learned applied to all areas of life. Now he wants to share the lessons he learned to help others live full and vibrant lives—lives characterized by purpose, meaning, and joy. In this book, you will discover transformative life lessons, which may go against the grain of popular thought but have been proven to change lives for the better. You'll learn that: Often the best strategy for achieving goals comes from subtracting rather than adding. When your first instinct is generosity, the long-term dividends will be greater than if you strive to gain your own advantage. Revising the stories you tell yourself about situations will reframe your life and increase gratitude. By investing creatively in relationships, you will generate more joy in your life. Making friends with failure will cause you to grow and improve. take less. do more. It's a revolutionary idea that will transform your life and free your soul to find your purpose—and maybe a little bit of adventure too.Ghost Town Living: Mining for Purpose and Chasing Dreams at the Edge of Death Valley
By Brent Underwood. 2024
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A long-abandoned silver mine for sale sounded like an adventure too great to pass up, but…
it turned into much more—a calling, a community of millions, and hard-earned lessons about chasing impractical dreams.&“Inspiring and meditative—the story of man vs nature and man vs himself.&”—Ryan Holiday, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Obstacle is the WayThe siren song of Cerro Gordo, a desolate ghost town perched high above Death Valley, has seduced thousands since the 1800s, but few fell harder for it than Brent Underwood, who moved there in March of 2020, only to be immediately snowed in and trapped for weeks.It had once been the largest silver mine in California. Over $500 million worth of ore was pulled from the miles of tunnels below the town. Butch Cassidy, Mark Twain, and other infamous characters of the American West were rumored to have stayed there. Newspapers reported a murder a week. But that was over 150 years ago.Underwood bet his life savings—and his life—on this majestic, hardscrabble town that had broken its fair share of ambitious men and women. What followed were fires, floods, earthquakes, and perhaps strangest, fame. Ghost Town Living tells the story of a man against the elements, a forgotten historic place against the modern world, and a dream against all odds—one that has captured millions of followers around the world.He came looking for a challenge different from the traditional 9-5 job but discovered something much more fulfilling—an undertaking that would call on all of himself and push him beyond what he knew he was capable of. In fact, to bring this abandoned town back to life, Brent had to learn a wealth of new self-sufficiency and problem-solving skills from many generous mentors.Ghost Town Living is a thrilling read, but it&’s also a call to action—to question our too-practical lives and instead seek adventure, build something original, redefine work, and embrace the unknown. It shows what it means to dedicate your life to something, to take a mighty swing at a crazy idea and, like the cardsharps who once haunted Cerro Gordo, go all in.Kingbird Highway: The Biggest Year in the Life of an Extreme Birder
By Kenn Kaufman. 2006
An ornithologist&’s account of his youthful, year-long, cross-country birdwatching adventure: &“A fascinating memoir of an obsession.&” —Booklist At sixteen, Kenn…
Kaufman dropped out of the high school where he was student council president and hit the road, hitching back and forth across America, from Alaska to Florida, Maine to Mexico. Maybe not all that unusual a thing to do in the seventies, but what Kenn was searching for was a little different: not sex, drugs, God, or even self, but birds. A report of a rare bird would send him hitching nonstop from Pacific to Atlantic and back again. When he was broke he would pick fruit or do odd jobs to earn the fifty dollars or so that would last him for weeks. His goal was to set a record—most North American species seen in a year—but along the way he began to realize that at this breakneck pace he was only looking, not seeing. What had been a game became a quest for a deeper understanding of the natural world. Kingbird Highway is a unique coming-of-age story, combining a lyrical celebration of nature with wild, and sometimes dangerous, adventures, starring a colorful cast of characters.Winter Brothers: A Season at the Edge of America
By Ivan Doig. 1982
A blend of modern-day travel memoir and nineteenth-century history, &“infused with the fresh air and spirit of the Northwest&” (The…
New York Times Book Review). The author of the acclaimed This House of Sky and Mountain Time provides a magnificent evocation of the Pacific Northwest through his exploration of the unpublished diaries of James Gilchrist Swan, an early settler of the region who was drawn there from Boston in the 1850s. Winter Brothers fuses excerpts from these diaries with author Ivan Doig&’s own journal entries, as he travels in Swan&’s footsteps one winter along the once-wild coastline of Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. What emerges is a remarkable interaction of two minds, a dialogue across time that links the present with the reality of the American frontier. &“Absorbing . . . A double portrait of striking clarity, yet with wonderfully subtle hues.&” —San Francisco ChronicleThe Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica
By David G. Campbell. 1992
The acclaimed author and biologist shares “a superb personal account [of Antarctica] . . . a remarkable evocation of a land at the…
bottom of the world” (Boston Globe).During the 1980s, biologist David Campbell spent three summers in Antarctica, researching its surprisingly plentiful wildlife. In The Crystal Desert, he combines travelogue, nature writing and science history to tell the story of life's tenacity on the coldest of Earth's continents. Between scuba expeditions in Admiralty Bay, Campbell remembers the explorers who discovered Antarctica, the whalers and sealers who despoiled it, and the scientists who laid the groundwork to decipher its mysteries. Chronicling the desperately short summers in beautiful, lucid prose, he presents a fascinating portrait of the evolution of life in Antarctica and of the continent itself.Winner of the John Burroughs Medal for Natural History Writing and a Houghton Mifflin Literary FellowshipHashish
By Henry De Monfreid. 2007
Nobleman, writer, adventurer and inspiration for the swashbuckling gun runner in the Adventures of Tintin, Henri de Monfried lived by…
his own account ‘a rich, restless, magnificent life’ as one of the great travellers of his or any age. Infamous as well as famous, his name is inextricably linked to the Red Sea and the raffish ports between Suez and Aden in the early years of the twentieth century. This is a compelling account of how de Monfried seeks his fortune by becoming a collector and merchant of the fabled Gulf pearls, then is drawn into the shadowy world of arms trading, slavery, smuggling and drugs. Hashish was the drug of choice, and de Monfried writes of sailing to Suez with illegal cargos, dodging blockades and pirates.From New York Times bestselling author Hampton Sides, an epic account of the most momentous voyage of the Age of…
Exploration, which culminated in Captain James Cook&’s death in Hawaii, and left a complex and controversial legacy still debated to this day.&“Sides has mastered the art of you-are-there historical narrative. A thrilling and necessary update to one of history&’s most consequential cultural collisions." —John Vaillant, New York Times bestselling author of Fire Weather and The TigerOn 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 in the 1700s. Cook was renowned for his peerless seamanship, his humane leadership, and his dedication to science-–the famed naturalist Joseph Banks accompanied him on his first voyage, and Cook has been called one of the most important figures of the Age of Enlightenment. He was also deeply interested in the native people he encountered. In fact, his stated mission was to return a Tahitian man, Mai, who had become the toast of London, to his home islands. On previous expeditions, Cook mapped huge swaths of the Pacific, including the east coast of Australia, and initiated first European contact with numerous peoples. He treated his crew well, and endeavored to learn about the societies he encountered with curiosity and without judgment.Yet something was different on this last voyage. Cook became mercurial, resorting to the lash to enforce discipline, and led his two vessels into danger time and again. Uncharacteristically, he ordered violent retaliation for perceived theft on the part of native peoples. This may have had something to do with his secret orders, which were to chart and claim lands before Britain&’s imperial rivals could, and to discover the fabled Northwest Passage. Whatever Cook&’s intentions, his scientific efforts were the sharp edge of the colonial sword, and the ultimate effects of first contact were catastrophic for Indigenous people around the world. The tensions between Cook&’s overt and covert missions came to a head on the shores of Hawaii. His first landing there was harmonious, but when Cook returned after mapping the coast of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, his exploitative treatment of the Hawaiians led to the fatal encounter.At once a ferociously-paced story of adventure on the high seas and a searching examination of the complexities and consequences of the Age of Exploration, THE WIDE WIDE SEA is a major work from one of our finest narrative nonfiction writers.