Showing titles in Adventurers, Explorers & Survival

Captain Kidd has gone down in history as America's most ruthless buccaneer. However, Captain William Kidd was no career cut-throat; he was a tough, successful New York sea captain who was hired to chase pirates. Across the oceans of the world, the pirate hunter, Kidd, pursued the pirate, Culliford. One man would hang in the harbor; the other would walk away with the treasure. The Pirate Hunter is both a masterpiece of historical detective work and a page-turner.

In a male-driven world, Bell managed to become one of the greatest policymakers the world has ever known; without her, the Middle East might very well be a much different place, and her influence in the territory gave her the nickname "Queen of the Desert". This biography tells the extraordinary story of one of the most adventurous and fascinating women you will ever encounter.

This is an incredible story of adventure, human ingenuity, persistence, and resilience that shows firsthand what it is to adventure as a woman in the most dangerous of circumstance, what it is to be truly alone in the wild, and why someone would challenge themselves with an expedition others would call crazy. For Marquis, her story is about freedom, being alive and wild by nature.

Au début des années soixante, Thompson, alors journaliste à San Francisco, est fasciné par les Hell's Angels. Son article sur ces seigneurs de la route fait sensation, il se lance dans la version longue : un an passé à rouler et à écrire à leurs côtés. Mais l'équipée se termine sauvagement : parce qu'il refuse de partager ses royalties, les Angels abandonnent l'homme de lettres sur une route, à moitié mort et le crâne défoncé à coups de pierres.

Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner recounts the remarkable career of Major John Wesley Powell, the distinguished ethnologist and geologist who explored the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, and the homeland of the Southwest Indian tribes. This classic work is a penetrating and insightful study of the Powell’s career, from the beginning of the Powell Survey, in which Powell and his men famously became the first to descend the Colorado River, to his eventual expulsion from the Geological Survey.

Stephen Alter was raised by American missionary parents in the hill station of Mussoorie, in the foothills of the Himalayas, where he and his wife Ameeta, now live. Their idyllic existence was brutally interrupted when four armed intruders invaded their house and viciously attacked them, leaving them for dead. The violent assault and the trauma of almost dying left him questioning assumptions he had lived by since childhood. For the first time, he encountered the face of evil and the terror of the unknown.

If the United States couldn’t catch up to the Soviets in space, how could it compete with them on Earth? That was the question facing John F. Kennedy at the height of the Cold War. On February 20, 1962, when John Glenn blasted into orbit aboard Friendship 7, his mission was not only to circle the planet; it was to calm the fears of the free world and renew America’s sense of self-belief. Mercury Rising recreates the tension and excitement of a flight that shifted the momentum of the space race and put the United States on the path to the moon.

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?”

In the late nineteenth century, close diplomatic relations existed between the United States and Russia. All that changed when George Kennan went to Siberia in 1885 to investigate the exile system and his eyes were opened to the brutality Russia was wielding to suppress dissent. Over ten months Kennan traveled eight thousand miles, mostly in horse-drawn carriages, sleighs, or on horseback. He endured suffocating sandstorms in the summer and blizzards in the winter. His interviews with convicts and political exiles revealed how Russia ran on the fuel of inflicted pain and fear.

In No Easy Way, his third volume of climbing memoirs following Vertical Pleasure and On Thin Ice, Fowler recounts a series of expeditions to stunning mountains in China, India, Nepal, and Tibet. Alongside partners including Paul Ramsden, Dave Turnbull, Andy Cave and Victor Saunders, he attempts striking, technically challenging unclimbed lines on Shiva, Gave Ding and Mugu Chuli - with a number of ascents winning prestigious Piolets d’Or, the Oscars of the mountaineering world.

Shortly after his death in 1957, The New York Times obituary of Peter Freuchen noted that except for Richard E. Byrd, and despite his foreign beginnings, Freuchen was perhaps better known to more people in the United States than any other explorer of our time. During his lifetime Freuchen's remarkable adventures, related in his books, magazine articles, and films, made him a legend. In 1910, Freuchen and his friend and business partner, Knud Rasmussen, the renowned polar explorer, founded Thule—a Greenland Inuit trading post and village only 800 miles from the North Pole.

Debra Newell is nothing if not a survivor. By the time she met John Michael Meehan online, she lived through a near-fatal childhood illness, an attempted rape in her 20s, the traumatic death of her sister at the hands of her brother-in-law, four failed marriages, and a litany of dating disasters. But despite those tragedies, she seemed to have it all: adoring children, a successful business, a fabulous penthouse apartment.

In January 1978, I slept in my bed at the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University as Ted Bundy stalked nearby. He grabbed an oak log from a stack of firewood, slipped through a back door with a broken padlock, and headed upstairs.He began twisting doorknobs. Room 9 was open, and he quietly and quickly killed one of my sleeping sorority sisters. Across the hall, he found another unlocked door and murdered again. Then, he turned the knob to my bedroom and found it was open. I remember the attack vividly. But Bundy wasn’t my first brush with death, and he wasn’t my last.

Our son Harry died in my arms when he was 10 months old. He had actually survived far longer than experts had predicted. Cared for by Acorns Children's Hospice, his support had cost over £100,000. Years later, inspired by another bereaved parent, I decided I would undertake a sponsored physical challenge that would take me well beyond my personal comfort zone: Having never swum further than around a mile, I decided to attempt swimming the infamous English Channel.

A few years after his release from a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp, in 1973, Colonel Joseph Kittinger retired from the Air Force. Restless and unchallenged, he turned to ballooning, a lifelong passion as well as a constant diversion for his imagination during his imprisonment. His primary goal was a solitary circumnavigation of the globe, and in its pursuit he set several ballooning distance records, including the first solo crossing of the Atlantic in 1984. But the aeronautical feats that first made him an American hero had occurred a quarter of a century earlier....

In 1849 Heinrich Barth joined a small British expedition into unexplored regions of Islamic North and Central Africa. One by one his companions died, but he carried on alone, eventually reaching the fabled city of gold, Timbuktu. His five-and-a-half-year, 10,000-mile adventure ranks among the greatest journeys in the annals of exploration, and his discoveries are considered indispensable by modern scholars of Africa.

David Roberts, "veteran mountain climber and chronicler of adventures" (Washington Post), has spent his career documenting voyages to the most extreme landscapes on earth. In Limits of the Known, he reflects on humanity's - and his own - relationship to extreme risk. Part memoir and part history, this book tries to make sense of why so many have committed their lives to the desperate pursuit of adventure.

For Allena Hansen, a vicious bear attack was "no biggie" compared to the trauma inflicted by her refined '60s upbringing, her stint as Playboy's token intellectual bimbo, and her cowgirl angst, which is enough to knock even Job for a loop.

In her debut memoir Never Alone: A Solo Arctic Survival Journey, Woniya shares how months of starving by herself in the Arctic wilderness brought more healing than suffering, and led to a deep sense of belonging and peace. Her story affirms the incredible strength of the human spirit and shows us that strength comes in many surprising forms. Never Alone's message is one of inspiration and learning to trust in ourselves and the land around us; embracing the wild and being wholly and beautifully human, flaws and all.

From a young age, her life was defined by uncertainty—by trauma and strength, sadness and hope, terrible lows and wondrous highs. As a teenager she found the courage to speak up after experiencing awful and ongoing child sexual abuse. This fight to find her voice would not be her last. The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner is Grace's story, in Grace's words, on Grace's terms. Like Grace, it is sharply intelligent, deeply felt and often blisteringly funny. And, as with all her work, it offers a constructive and optimistic vision for a better future for all of us.