Explorer Memoirs

This is a brilliant dual biography charting British Robert Scott's and Norwegian Roald Amundsen's race to the South Pole during 1911-12. Huntuford's is the accepted, definitive account of the race and a reassessment of the two men. Thoroughly researched, revealing the adventures and misfortunes that befell them both, he describes the driving ambitions of the era, and the complex, often deeply flawed individuals who were charged with carrying them out.

An inspiring selection of hand-picked adventures, chosen by Ed Stafford. For those who don’t mind a bit of discomfort in order to experience the wilder side of our amazing planet. Open your mind and reboot your soul with these unforgettable adventures.

Dive into this edge-of-your-seat world of survival where courage and resilience overcome the impossible. Can you imagine surviving without supplies in a small boat adrift on the Pacific Ocean for 14 months? Could you find your way through a Peruvian jungle after falling two miles from the sky—without a parachute? How might you survive the relentless battle against nature and captors while being forced to walk in the heat of the Sahara Desert?

Après avoir traversé des centaines d'épreuves, le corps fatigué et l'esprit déstabilisé par le soleil qui ne se couche jamais, alors même que sa traversée de l'Antarctique en solitaire est avancée, Frédéric Dion est victime d'une mauvaise bourrasque et perd son traîneau. Commence alors son combat contre le vent, la poudrerie naissante et le froid mordant afin de retrouver au plus vite son matériel de survie. D'expérience, Frédéric sait qu'il ne lui reste qu'une vingtaine de minutes, car, passé ce seuil, son traîneau sera recouvert de neige et impossible à repérer.

Michael Palin is off again, this time to the seemingly desolate Sahara Desert. There's no easy way across, as he and his team discover on their most challenging expedition yet.

Fuzzy-haired, neurotic, cello-playing Catrina is devastated when her lover, Jack, leaves her to go surfing on the other side of the world. Trapped in a dead-end job and torn by his departure, Catrina dreams of running away. But how do you run away when you're flat broke? Luckily, her friend Andrew comes up with a plan: they'll get an old van, turn it into a camper, and busk their way from Norway to Portugal, via the midnight sun. Andrew is one of her oldest friends and they share many of the same passions.

Antarctica, June 6th 1998. 23-year-old Matt Lewis has just started his dream job: an observer aboard a deep sea fishing boat. As the crew haul in their lines for the day, the waves seem bigger than usual - they are casting shadows on the deck. A storm is brewing. What follows is an astonishing story of courage and tragedy. Lewis leads the escape onto three life rafts, where the battle for survival begins.

Imagine a young doctor, trained in the latest medical knowledge and state-of-the-art equipment, suddenly transported back to one of the world’s most isolated and unforgiving environments - Nome, Alaska. That’s what happen to Dr. Sims. His plans to become a pediatric surgeon were drastically changed when, on the eve of being drafted into the army to serve as a MASH surgeon in Vietnam, he was offered a commission in the US Public Health for assignment in Anchorage, Alaska, where he was scheduled to act as chief of pediatrics at the Alaska Native Medical Center.

Ray Mears is a household name through his television series Tracks, World of Survival, Bushcraft Survival, The Real Heroes of Telemark, and many more.

He is a private individual who shuns publicity whenever possible and would prefer to let his many skills tell their own tale - until now. In My Outdoor Life, Ray tells of his childhood and the formative years when he first developed a passion for both bushcraft and the martial arts skills that are central to his life.

À 105 ans, Woodrow Wilson Nickel sait qu’il sera le prochain à s’éteindre dans l’hôpital de vétérans où il vit. Mais il ne s’attendait pas à apprendre que les dernières girafes encore sur Terre risquent de disparaître avant lui. Car près de 90 ans plus tôt, le jeune Woody s’est lié d’amitié avec deux girafes rescapées, comme lui, du grand ouragan de Nouvelle-Angleterre de 1938. Ingénieux et sans attaches, il est devenu le chauffeur du convoi improvisé qui transporta ces surprenants mammifères à travers l’Amérique de la Grande Dépression jusqu’au zoo de San Diego en Californie.

In 1983, at the age of 56, Gerry Clark set out from New Zealand in his 10-meter homemade wooden yacht to circumnavigate Antarctica in a quest for new information about seabirds. In this graphic account of the ensuing three-year-eight-month voyage, he describes his adventures in some of the remotest, wildest, and most spectacularly beautiful parts of the world.

Explorer is the story of what first led Benedict Allen to head for the farthest reaches of our planet - at a time when there were still valleys and ranges known only to the remote communities who inhabited them. It is also the story of why, 30 years later, he is still exploring. It's the story of a journey back to a clouded mountain in New Guinea to find a man called Korsai who had once been a friend, and to fulfil a promise made as young men. It is also a story of what it is to be 'lost' and 'found'.

In January 1959, 10 experienced young skiers set out to travel to a mountain named Mount Otorten in the far north of Russia. During the trip, one of the skiers fell ill and returned. The remaining nine lost their way and ended up on another mountain slope known as Kholat Syakhl, or "Mountain of the Dead".

An exemplary travelogue of danger and achievement by the Frenchwoman Madame Alexandra David-Neel of her 1923 expedition to Tibet, the fifth in her series of Asian travels and her personal recounting of her journey to Lhasa, Tibet's forbidden city. In order to penetrate Tibet and reach Lhasa, she used her fluency of Tibetan dialects and culture, disguised herself as a beggar with yak hair extensions and inked skin, and tackled some of the roughest terrain and climate in the world.

Michele Graglia left Italy for Miami in 2007 to expand the family business. Caught in a thunderstorm, he ducked into a Johnny Rockets, got scouted by a renowned agent, and walked out a professional model. An elite modeling career brought expensive cars, penthouses, parties, and celebrities, but his accidental “American Dream” was never his own. Feeling the emptiness of a shallow, dark lifestyle, Michele set out for adventure and fulfillment, finding it in the unlikeliest place—a book about ultramarathon running.

A few days into her stop in Paris, Janice meets Christophe, the cute butcher down the street - who doesn't speak English. Through a combination of sign language and Franglais, they embark on a whirlwind Paris romance. She soon realizes that she can never return to the world of twelve-hour workdays and greasy corporate lingo. But her dwindling savings force her to find a way to fund her dreams again.

Holding on is all fourteen-year-old Stephanie Clare Smith can do when she's left home alone in New Orleans during the summer of 1973. As she seeks to ease her solitude through her summer school algebra class, her wandering in the city, and her friendship with a streetcar operator, adults—particularly men—fail her again and again, with devastating consequences.

In the 1930s, as official government expeditions set their sights on conquering Mount Everest, a little-known World War I veteran named Maurice Wilson conceives his own crazy, beautiful plan: He will fly a plane from England to Everest, crash-land on its lower slopes, then become the first person to reach its summit — completely alone.

The real story of one of the greatest explorers who ever lived by the man described by the Guinness Book of Records as ‘the world's greatest living explorer’. Sir Ranulph Fiennes is uniquely qualified to write a new biography of Captain Scott. This is the first biography of Scott by someone who has experienced the deprivations, the stress and the sheer physical pain that Scott lived through.

Christopher Columbus needed a sponsor for a dangerous expedition, but the King of Portugal wasn't interested. He repackaged his proposal for the Queen of Spain. She put Columbus on retainer and the rest is history. Columbus may not have been the first to discover America, but he had a great publicist. That's where Jeff Blumenfeld comes in. For many years, using a PR specialty called adventure marketing, Jeff has connected explorers and their projects with corporate sponsors looking to demonstrate product performance in extreme conditions.