Adventure Biography

The wry, honest and often hilarious chronicles of a very brave and clever TV presenter, Arctic Explorer and general drawer of the Short Straw. Moving quickly on from the devastating crash that nearly killed him he ranges widely over his life and times: a visit to Glastonbury with James May reminds of him of his early years of playing in a band and how and why he never quite made it as a rock star.

This is the riveting true story of a young man’s solo bicycle odyssey: freezing in the Anatolian mountains of Turkey, confounded by butterflies in the empty Iranian desert, passing through the rubble of a coup in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and surviving dire illness in Pakistan's Indus valley. His journey ends in the heart of the subcontinent, having glimpsed true freedom. This is an account of humankind’s essential goodness, of trusting unseen hands that can steer us from disaster, and of learning that the way out is through.

In the beginning, a small, unlicensed game development company was hit with divine inspiration: They could make a lot of money (and escape the wrath of Nintendo) by creating games for Christians. With the release of the 1990 NES platformer, Bible Adventures, the developers saw what they had made, and it was good. Or, at least, good enough. Based on extensive research and original interviews with Wisdom Tree staff, Gabe Durham's audiobook investigates their rise and fall.

Wilbur Smith has lived an incredible life of adventure, and now he shares the extraordinary true stories that have inspired his fiction. From being attacked by lions to close encounters with deadly reef sharks, from getting lost in the African bush without water to crawling the precarious tunnels of gold mines, from marlin fishing with Lee Marvin to near death from crash-landing a Cessna airplane, from brutal school days to redemption through writing and falling in love, Wilbur Smith tells us the intimate stories of his life that have been the raw material for his fiction.

Matt Knott spent more than a decade traveling the globe as a private tutor. He has taught Shakespeare in Moscow, times tables in Tuscany and is still trying to figure out how to explain long division. With brilliant honesty and wit, he takes us inside a world most of us only glimpse speeding past in a luxury SUV. Unfolding across four continents and featuring a colourful cast of butlers, billionaires and yummy mummies, this is a hilarious and touching chronicle of an unforgettable time.

Taking 36 songs from his back catalogue, folk-punk icon Frank Turner explores his songwriting process. Find out the stories behind the songs forged in the hedonistic years of the mid-2000s North London scene, the ones perfected in Nashville studios and everything in between. Some of these songs arrive fully formed, as if they've always been there; some take graft and endless reworking to find 'the one'. In exploring them all, Turner reflects with eloquence, insight and self-deprecating wit on exactly what it is to be a songwriter.

Journeys to Impossible Places continues the story Simon started in his phenomenal Sunday Times best seller Step by Step, which traced the first decades of his life from depressed and unemployed teenager through to his early TV programmes. Now Simon takes us on the epic and thrilling adventures that followed, in beautiful, tricky and downright dangerous corners of the world, as he travelled through the Tropics, to remote paradise islands, jungles dripping with heat and life and on nerve-wracking secret missions.

A collection of life experiences, observations, and musings from the mind of singer-songwriter Dan May.

Wallace picked up the name "Big-Foot" while in a Mexican prison, because the prison attendants couldn’t find a boot large enough to fit him. Not only was he large of foot but also of deeds. Big-Foot Wallace was an Indian-fighter, hunter, and Texas Ranger. Few men have witnessed as many stirring incidents, had more hair-breadth escapes, or gone through more of the hardships and perils of a border life than Big-Foot Wallace.

After Kim and her husband, Brian, decide to quit their jobs to travel around the world, they're given a yellow envelope containing a check and instructions to give the money away. There are only three rules for the envelope: don't overthink it, share your experiences, and don't feel pressured to give it all away. Through Ecuador, Peru, Nepal, and beyond, Kim and Brian face obstacles, including major challenges to their relationship.

Mark Thompson, world-renowned radio personality heard every morning for 25 years on the nationally syndicated Mark and Brian Show originating from KLOS Radio, the rock of Southern California, delivers the story of a lifetime. More than his personal memoir, this book offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the morning drive, the celebrities, the studio politics, the passionate fans, the incredible live music, and the ingenious comedy bits that pumped life into two and a half decades of entertainment every weekday morning to generations of listeners all over the country.

Ed Stafford - adventurer extraordinaire and Guinness World Record holder for walking the length of the Amazon River - likes a challenge. Casting about for an adventure that would top the extraordinary feat he recounts in Walking the Amazon, Stafford decides to maroon himself on an uninhabited island in the South Pacific. His mission: to survive for 60 days equipped with nothing - no food, water, or even clothing - except the video cameras he would use to document his time.

George Murray Levick was the physician on Robert Falcon Scott's tragic Antarctic expedition of 1910. Marooned for an Antarctic winter, Levick passed the time by becoming the first man to study penguins up close. His findings were so shocking to Victorian morals that they were quickly suppressed and seemingly lost to history.

These were among the questions that philosophers wrestled with in mid-twentieth-century Britain, a period shadowed by war and the rise of fascism. In response to these events, thinkers such as Philippa Foot (originator of the famous trolley problem), Isaiah Berlin, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Gilbert Ryle, and J. L. Austin aspired to a new level of watchfulness and self-awareness about language as a way of keeping philosophy true to everyday experience.

Hangdog Days vividly chronicles the era when rock climbing exploded in popularity, attracting a new generation of talented climbers eager to reach new heights via harder routes and faster ascents. This contentious, often entertaining period gave rise to sport climbing, climbing gyms, and competitive climbing-indelibly transforming the sport. Jeff Smoot was one of those brash young climbers, and here he traces the development of traditional climbing "rules," enforced first through peer pressure, then later through intimidation and sabotage.

Situated in the early decades of the magnificent Mughal Empire, this first ever biography of Princess Gulbadan offers an enthralling portrait of a charismatic adventurer and unique pictures of the multicultural society in which she lived. Following a migratory childhood that spanned Kabul and north India, Gulbadan spent her middle years in a walled harem established by her nephew Akbar to showcase his authority as the Great Emperor.

Poppy Fields, Hollywood IT girl extraordinaire, accompanies her A-list mother to Paris, and why not? It's Paris! What her mother doesn't know is Poppy's on assignment. Her mission? To help bankrupt a drug cartel. To do that, she must access encrypted account numbers, evade a drug lord with a grudge, dodge a Russian oligarch, and align herself with a man who looks like a Norse god. Oh, and there's that plot - the one to launch a massive attack on the City of Lights.

Sheltered in a snow cave on Mount Elbrus, Dan Egan stares into the mouth of a storm on the tallest mountain on the European continent, a merciless mountain which claims more lives per year than Everest. In the belly of the beast, Egan takes stock of every moment that brought him here—the life of a Boston boy enthralled with self-determination and adventure. Egan emerges from the white haze of the storm to summit a climactic arc of perseverance we see repeated across decades on skis, on sailboats, in personal relationships, in entrepreneurial endeavors, and in examination of self.

Written seven years before The Town and the City officially launched his writing career, The Sea Is My Brother marks the pivotal point at which Kerouac began laying the foundations for his pioneering method and signature style. The novel chronicles the misadventures of two seamen who at first seem different but are really two sides of the same coin: 27-year-old Wesley Martin, who “loved the sea with a strange, lonely love,” and William Everhart, an assistant professor of English at Columbia College.

Shoji Morimoto was constantly being told by his boss, "It makes no difference whether you’re here or not," and that his presence contributed nothing to the company. Morimoto began to wonder whether a person who "does nothing" could still have actual value and a place in the world. Perhaps he could turn "doing nothing" into a service? With one tweet, Rental Person was born.