Adventure Biography

Like an urban Dian Fossey, Wednesday Martin decodes the primate social behaviors of Upper East Side mothers in a brilliantly original and witty memoir about her adventures assimilating into that most secretive and elite tribe. After marrying a man from the Upper East Side and moving to the neighborhood, Wednesday Martin struggled to fit in. Drawing on her background in anthropology and primatology, she tried looking at her new world through that lens, and suddenly things fell into place.

In the late 2000s, Molly Bloom, a 20-something petite brunette from Loveland, Colorado, ran the highest stakes, most exclusive poker game in existence. Hundreds of millions of dollars were won and lost at her table. Molly's game became the game for those in the know - celebrities, business moguls and millionaires. Molly staged her games in palatial suites with beautiful views and exquisite amenities. She flew privately, dined at exquisite restaurants, hobnobbed with the heads of Hollywood studios, was courted by handsome leading men....

In American on Purpose, Craig Ferguson delivers a moving and achingly funny memoir of living the American dream as he journeys from the mean streets of Glasgow, Scotland, to the comedic promised land of Hollywood. Along the way, he stumbles through several attempts to make his mark - as a punk rock musician, a construction worker, a bouncer, and, tragically, a modern dancer.

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.

Picking up from where his first memoir left off, Dr Tom is back with more of his gloriously eccentric stories. Still based as a locum in his beloved Scotland, he now takes time out from the surgery for stints as a medical researcher, travelling wherever he is called, from Rio to Jerusalem, Vienna to Singapore.

In 1930, two novice paddlers - Eric Sevareid and Walter C. Port - launched a secondhand 18-foot canvas canoe from the Minnesota River at Fort Snelling for an ambitious summer-long journey from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay. Without benefit of radio, motor or good maps, the teenagers made their way over 2,250 miles of rivers, lakes, and difficult portages.

I heard the rustle again, too close and too real to ignore. I clutched the flashlight, stuck my head out of the mosquito net...and found myself face-to-face with a jaguar. Four travelers meet in Bolivia and set off into the Amazon rainforest on an expedition to find a hidden tribe and explore places tourists only dream of seeing. But what begins as the adventure of a lifetime quickly becomes a struggle for survival when they get lost in the wilds of the jungle. The group splits up after disagreements, and Yossi and his friend try to find their own way back without a guide.

Stanley Booth, a member of the Rolling Stones’ inner circle, met the band just a few months before Brian Jones drowned in a swimming pool, in 1969. He lived with them throughout their 1969 American tour, staying up all night together listening to blues, talking about music, ingesting drugs, and consorting with groupies. His thrilling account culminates with their final concert at Altamont Speedway - a nightmare of beating, stabbing, and killing that would signal the end of a generation’s dreams of peace and freedom.

From the author of the Magellan biography, Over the Edge of the World, a mesmerizing new account of the great explorer. Christopher Columbus's 1492 voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in search of a trading route to China, and his unexpected landfall in the Americas, is a watershed event in world history.

A catastrophic tornado struck Joplin, Missouri, in 2011. It was part of a larger tornado outbreak in the spring of that year and reached a maximum width of nearly one mile during its path through the southern part of the city, killing 158 people, and injuring over 1,000. It caused damages amounting to $2.8 billion, making it the costliest single tornado in US history. Lauren will bring her signature intensity to this distinctly American natural disaster, placing a young boy in the middle of one of the deadliest tornadoes to strike the United States since 1947.

The acclaimed author of seven ALA Best Books for Young Adults, Will Hobbs pens a spellbinding true-to-life adventure. With nothing but dogged determination, 15year-old Victor leaves his Mexican village to illegally enter the U.S. and help his starving family. Soon he must outwit gangs, drug-runners, and border agents as he endures shivering nights, blistering days, and gnawing hunger. But can his longing for the beckoning opportunity of El Norte carry him through such impossible obstacles?

Writer for the New York Times and GQ, Mark Adams is also the acclaimed author of Mr. America. In this fascinating travelogue, Adams follows in the controversial footsteps of Hiram Bingham III, who’s been both lionized and vilified for his discovery of the famed Lost City in 1911—but which reputation is justified?

Keith Foskett was the definition of restless. Drifting aimlessly, he knew a piece was missing from his life. But when a stranger in a Greek bar tells him about a world-famous pilgrim’s trail, the chance encounter sets Foskett’s life in a new 1,000-mile direction. On El Camino de Santiago, the wanderer copes with extreme temperatures, fake faith healers, and insatiable kleptomaniacs. Threatened with arrest for "not sleeping" and suffering with excruciating blisters, Foskett pushes himself to new limits. Can he find what he’s looking for and make it to the other side?

Young and in love, their lives ahead of them, Tami Oldham and her fiancé, Richard Sharp, set sail from Tahiti under brilliant blue skies, with Tami’s hometown of San Diego as their ultimate destination. But the two free spirits and avid sailors couldn’t anticipate that less than two weeks into their voyage, they would sail directly into one of the most catastrophic hurricanes in recorded history.

Chris and Chrissy Rouse, an experienced father-and-son scuba diving team, hoped to achieve widespread recognition for their outstanding but controversial diving skills. Obsessed and ambitious, they sought to solve the secrets of a mysterious, undocumented World War II German U-boat that lay under 230 feet of water, only a half day's mission from New York Harbor. In doing so they paid the ultimate price in their quest for fame.

Told with sincerity, humor, and wit, Trespassing Across America is both a fascinating account of one man's remarkable journey along the Keystone XL pipeline and a meditation on climate change, the beauty of the natural world, and the extremes to which we can push ourselves - both physically and mentally.

The New York Times best-selling memoir that inspired the film October Sky, Rocket Boys is a uniquely American memoir - a powerful, luminous story of coming of age at the dawn of the 1960s, of a mother's love and a father's fears, of a group of young men who dreamed of launching rockets into outer space... and who made those dreams come true. Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Homer Hickam's lush, lyrical memoir is a marvelously entertaining chronicle of triumph.

Nariman Karkaria, a young Parsi from Gujarat, had always wanted to see the world. So he left home as a teenager with fifty rupees in his pocket to do just that. After working in Hong Kong and Peking for a few years, in 1914, when war was in the air, he decided to volunteer for the British Army. Passing through China, Manchuria, Siberia, Russia and Scandinavia, he reached London early in 1915 and managed to register as a private with the 24th Middlesex Regiment. He was now a Tommy.

Combining accounts of legendary mountain ascents with vivid descriptions of his own forays into wild, high landscapes, Robert Macfarlane reveals how the mystery of the world's highest places has come to grip the Western imagination - and perennially draws legions of adventurers up the most perilous slopes. His story begins three centuries ago, when mountains were feared as the forbidding abodes of dragons and other mysterious beasts.

The Landscapes of Anne of Green Gables explores L. M. Montgomery's deep connection to the landscapes of Prince Edward Island that inspired her to write the beloved Anne of Green Gables series. From the Lake of Shining Waters and the Haunted Wood to Lover's Lane, you'll be immersed in the real places immortalized in the novels. Using Montgomery's journals, archives, and scrapbooks, Catherine Reid also explores the many similarities between Montgomery and her unforgettable heroine, Anne Shirley.