Explorer Memoirs

Aron Ralston, an experienced twenty-seven-year-old outdoorsman, was on a days solitary hike through a remote and narrow Utah canyon when he dislodged an eight-hundred- pound boulder that crushed his right hand and wrist against the canyon wall. Emerging from the searing pain, Aron found himself completely stuck. No one knew where he was; no one was coming to rescue him. With scant water and food, and a cheap pocketknife his only tool, he eliminated his options one by one.

Le 7 février 2017, à 22 h 50, Mike Horn, seul et sans assistance, achève sa traversée de l'Antarctique. 5 100 km en 57 jours dans des conditions extrêmes qui l'ont poussé au bout de sa résistance. Un incroyable combat contre les éléments qui fait de cet aventurier le plus grand explorateur des temps modernes.

Feel the pulse of the ocean with the audiobook version of Amphibious Soul narrated and crafted by Academy Award winner Craig Foster – featuring calming ocean sounds and original music composed using wild-found instruments from the Great African Seaforest.

During the American Revolution and the border conflicts that followed, Simon Girty's name struck terror into the hearts of U.S. settlers in the Ohio Valley and the territory of Kentucky. Girty (1741-1818) had lived with the Natives most of his life. Scorned by his fellow white frontiersmen as an "Indian lover," Girty became an Indian agent for the British. He accompanied Native raids against Americans, spied deep into enemy territory, and was influential in convincing the tribes to fight for the British.

On May 14, 1804, a party of explorers dispatched by President Thomas Jefferson set off up the Missouri River into America's newly acquired Louisiana Territory. Under the leadership of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the men of the Corps of Discovery would cross the continent and into history.

An adrenaline-fueled travel memoir of life in the wild among the planet’s most ferocious and fascinating predators. Over the last forty years, bestselling science-fiction writer Alan Dean Foster has journeyed around the globe to encounter nature’s most fearsome creatures. His travels have taken him into the heart of the Amazon rain forest on the trail of deadly tangarana ants, on an elephant ride across the sweeping green plains of central India in search of the elusive Bengal tiger, and into the waters of the Australian coast to come face-to-face with great white sharks. Packed with pulse-pounding adventure and spiked with rapier wit, Predators I Have Known is a thrilling look at life and death in the wild.

Travel across the US with David Reynolds as he explores Route 50, one of the few remaining two-lane highways running from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Driving as slowly as safety permits, stopping frequently and often going backwards to have a second look at something glimpsed in passing, Reynolds talks to people on the streets, in bars and cafes, motels and gas stations. They talk about everything from slavery and the traditional Indian sundance, to cannabis in Colorado and tornadoes in Kansas, and about everyone from George Washington and Aaron Burr to Marilyn Monroe and the Eagles.

The rags-to-riches story of one of America's wealthiest and least-known financial giants, self-made billionaire Kirk Kerkorian - the daring aviator, movie mogul, risk taker, and business tycoon who transformed Las Vegas and Hollywood to become one of the leading financiers in American business. Kerkorian combined the courage of a World War II pilot, the fortitude of a scrappy boxer, the cunning of an inscrutable poker player, and an unmatched genius for making deals.

The Trail is a moving story of how nature helps us find what’s missing in our lives. The tale begins with Gil, who in the wake of his father’s death and recently fired from his job, agrees to accompany his father’s old hiking partner Syd on a month-long trek on the John Muir Trail. There’s just one problem: Gil hates camping and is woefully unprepared for the rigors of the journey. Moreover, he soon learns Syd may not survive the hike.

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.

In this grand and thrilling narrative, the acclaimed biographer of Magellan, Columbus, and Marco Polo brings alive the singular life and adventures of Sir Francis Drake, the pirate/explorer/admiral whose mastery of the seas during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I changed the course of history.

Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was an intrepid explorer and the most famous scientist of his age. His restless life was packed with adventure and discovery, whether climbing the highest volcanoes in the world or racing through anthrax-infested Siberia. He came up with a radical vision of nature, that it was a complex and interconnected global force and did not exist for man's use alone. Ironically, his ideas have become so accepted and widespread that he has been nearly forgotten.

Meet Doctor Ben MacFarlane - a very modern flying doctor. His job is get on a plane and bring patients home after holiday disasters, gap year crises, embarrassing incidents on business trips and all the other things that can go wrong when we head overseas. Holiday SOS is his extraordinary story. It’s a unique medical memoir of the people he helps - and a year in the life of one of the world’s most frequent flyers!

Everywhere hailed as a masterpiece of historical adventure, this enthralling narrative recounts the experiences of 12 American sailors who were shipwrecked off the coast of Africa in 1815, captured by desert nomads, sold into slavery, and subjected to a hellish two-month journey through the bone-dry heart of the Sahara. The ordeal of these men - who found themselves tested by barbarism, murder, starvation, death, dehydration, and hostile tribes that roamed the desert on camelback - is made indelibly vivid in this gripping account of courage, brotherhood, and survival.

Alison Wright covered human conflict with her camera until her own life was nearly cut short during a horrific bus accident with a logging truck on a remote jungle road in Laos. Suffering from excruciating life-threatening injuries, she drew upon her years of meditation practice, concentrating upon each breath, believing it to be her last.

Born in the late 1880s to a gritty mining magnate who made his millions in the California gold rush and a well-bred mother descended from one of New York’s distinguished families, society beauty Louise Arner Boyd was raised during a glittering era. After inheriting a staggering family fortune, she began leading a double life. She fell under the spell of the north in the late 1920s after a sailing excursion to the Arctic Ocean. Over the next three decades, she achieved international notoriety as a rugged and audacious polar explorer while maintaining her lifestyle as a society woman.

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 81 years and killed about 8,900 people. That day also became the deadliest in the history of Everest, with 18 people losing their lives on the mountain.

Growing up in the Canadian Rockies, the mountains have always been home for Jenny Tough. Travelling the world, she's always discovered commonalities with mountains—and mountain people. Her major project is to run solo and unsupported across a mountain range on every continent where indigenous mountain people live isolated from the outside, urban world. Running solo and unsupported comes with obvious logistical as well as physical challenges, but running is also a common language.

It was 13 October 1972. Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, carrying a team of young rugby players, their families and friends, took off for the very last time. A deadly miscalculation saw F571 crash directly into the Andean mountains to devastating consequences: the body of the plane broke violently into two, its floor torn to smithereens; seats flew out of the air taking passengers with them. In the weeks that followed, the remaining people who were on board - the society of the snow - emerged to fight a dire, gruelling battle for survival.

No American president has been more enthusiastic in appreciating the wilderness and in conserving our nation’s natural treasures than Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919). And no other president wrote more about nature and his explorations of it than T. R., in scattered books, such as African Wilderness, and in his countless letters, including those collected in The Selected Letters of Theodore Roosevelt).