Explorer Memoirs

David Livingstone was a Scottish missionary and one of the greatest European explorers who ever lived. He fought all his life against slavery, and is remembered as a national hero for opening up the interior of the so-called "Dark Continent"; his expeditions had a tremendous influence on the colonization of Africa and the relation between Europeans and Africans. The son of a Christian missionary himself, Livingstone felt a spiritual calling to reach people in the interior of Africa in order to find new commercial routes and thus free the Africans from the plague of slavery.

CIVIL: Life After the Foreign Legion is the author's follow-up to Appel: A Canadian in the French Foreign Legion. During his recent return to France, he shares with you his past in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Algeria as a security contractor and more.

For centuries, the city of Alexandria Beneath the Mountains was a meeting point of East and West. Then it vanished. In 1833, it was discovered in Afghanistan by the unlikeliest person imaginable: Charles Masson, deserter, pilgrim, doctor, archaeologist, spy, one of the most respected scholars in Asia, and the greatest of nineteenth-century travelers.

Aspen’s and Justin’s paths serendipitously aligned on the Pacific Crest Trail when both were walking from Mexico to Canada, separately and alone - both using thru-hiking in hopes of escaping their pasts. Both sought to redefine themselves beneath the stars. By the time they made it to the snowy Cascade Range of British Columbia - the trail’s end - Aspen and Justin were in love.

Hans Florine is a big-wall climbing legend in his own time. He holds the speed record on the Nose route of El Capitan, a 3,000-foot granite cliff in Yosemite Valley that's considered the Everest of the rock-climbing world. But Florine's story is not one of super-human athletic prowess; it's one of persistence and dogged determination. In 30 years of climbing, he's ascended the Nose a mind-blowing, death-defying 100 times, more than anyone else ever has, and most likely ever will. In On the Nose, Florine describes the most dangerous, pivotal, and inspirational of those climbs.

"I never set out to hike 10,000 miles. It just sort of happened over the course of a decade." And so goes Lawton Grinter's compelling collection of short stories that have been over ten years and 10,000 trail miles in the making. I Hike brings the reader trailside with blissful moments on the highest mountain ridges to the mental lows of mosquito hell and into some peculiar situations that even seasoned hikers may find unbelievable.

Imagine giving up everything you own and walking across the country... for 28 years? Meet Peace Pilgrim, who crossed the U.S. on foot seven times with only the clothes on her back to spread her message of peace. From 1953 to 1981, she lived off the land and the kindness of those she met. Whenever trouble came her way - whether blizzards or black eyes - her sole response was love.

Two stories about William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army; two stories about amazing women aviators; and two true-to-life adventures!

Marie Colvin, described as "the greatest war correspondent of her generation", was killed in a rocket attack in February 2012 while reporting on the desperate suffering of civilians inside Syria's besieged Homs. Paul Conroy, who had forged a close bond with Colvin as they put their lives on the line time and time again to report from some of the world's most dangerous conflict zones, was with her.

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.

Timbuktu: the African city known to legend as a land of scholars, splendor and mystery, a golden age in the Sahara Desert. But to many it is a vaguely recognizable name - a flippant tag for "the most remote place on earth." With this fabled city as his goal, author Rick Antonson began a month-long trek. His initial plan? To get a haircut. Aided by an adventuresome spirit, Rick endures a 45-hour train ride, a swindling travel agent, "Third World, three-lane" roads, rivers, and a flat deck ferry boat before finally reaching Timbuktu.

In 1963, Jim Whittaker became the first American to summit Everest via the South Col route. Roughly two weeks after Whittaker's achievement, Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld, fellow American mountaineers on the same expedition, became the first climbers ever to summit the world's highest peak via the dangerous and forbidding West Ridge—a route on which only a handful of climbers have since succeeded.

An inventor, adventurer, entrepreneur, collector, and entertainer, and son of legendary scientist-astronaut Owen Garriott, Richard Garriott de Cayeux has been behind some of the most exciting undertakings of our time. A legendary pioneer of the online gaming industry - and a member of every gaming Hall of Fame - Garriott invented the multi-player online game, and coined the term "Avatar" to describe an individual's online character. In this fascinating memoir, Garriott invites listeners on the great adventure that is his life.

Jill Homer, a newspaper editor in Alaska, has an outlandish ambition: a 2,740-mile mountain bike race along the rugged Continental Divide. But Jill's dream starts to unravel the minute she sets it in motion. An accident during a race on the Iditarod Trail results in serious frostbite. As she struggles with painful recovery and uncertainties about leaving a good job to pursue a seemingly impossible pipe dream, her employer hands down an offer she can't refuse.

Leslie White knew she wanted more out of life - She found it in an unlikely place. Devastated from the loss of both parents to cancer nine months apart, Leslie vowed to change her life. She bought the neighbor’s old motorhome, found a job as a traveling histologist, and hit the road. But she found she could not trust the one person she was still holding onto.

In this dramatic, immersive, nonfiction, firsthand account of a single-handed sailing voyage, Trammell sails alone in a 30' Dufour Arpege from Jacksonville, Florida to the central and southern Bahamas. Searching for uninhabited islands, blue holes, serenity, surf, natural beauty, and adventure, he encounters all this, as well as foul weather, sharks, at least one near-death experience, beautiful sunsets, enchanting islands, a hermit, friendly sailors, coral reefs, whales, eels, and an old girlfriend.

The stories in this book are all true. Most began with a dream and conscientious study of maps and logistics. Others are true adventures. Most accounts are anecdotes taken from Cliff Jacobson's experiences as a professional canoeist guide in Minnesota and Canada.

Erik Weihenmayer was born with retinoscheses, a degenerative eye disorder that would leave him blind by the age of 13. But Erik was determined to rise above this devastating disability and lead a fulfilling and exciting life. In this poignant and inspiring memoir, he shares his struggle to push past the limits imposed on him by his visual impairment - and by a seeing world.

For the past year, veteran journalists Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal traveled more than 25,000 miles across the Americas, chronicling costly experiments, contentious politics, and new technologies to save our beloved birds from the brink of extinction. Through this compelling drama, A Wing and a Prayer offers hope and an urgent call to action: Birds are dying at an unprecedented pace. But there are encouraging breakthroughs across the hemisphere and still time to change course, if we act quickly.

Ejnar Mikkelsen was devoted to Arctic exploration. In 1910 he decided to search for the diaries of the ill-fated Mylius-Erichsen expedition, which had set out to prove that Robert Peary’s outline of the East Greenland coast was a myth, erroneous and presumably self-serving. Iver Iversen was a mechanic who joined Mikkelsen in Iceland when the expedition’s boat needed repair.