Explorer Memoirs

His name was David Crockett. He never signed his name any other way, but popular culture transformed his memory into "Davy Crockett", and Hollywood gave him a raccoon hat he hardly ever wore. Best-selling historian Michael Wallis casts a fresh look at the frontiersman, storyteller, and politician behind these legendary stories.

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?

Take That Leap recounts Nigel's unanticipated adventures as an entrepreneur, emerging philanthropist, and avid outdoorsman. Get inside his head as he negotiates deals with the big boys and wrestles with the myths surrounding work-life balance and being an entrepreneur. Be there with him through the crazy challenges of simultaneously launching a start-up and a family all the way through to the even zanier challenges of becoming a steward of Pachamama (Mother Nature).

Why do we travel, what are we looking for, and will we recognize it if we find it? With the author’s 50th birthday looming, there seemed a need for something significant to happen. Not seeing an expiry date on his birth certificate made it hard to gauge when to have a mid-life crisis, but he’d almost definitely left it too late.

Erik Weihenmayer is the first and only blind person to summit Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth. Descending carefully, he and his team picked their way across deep crevasses and through the deadly Khumbu Icefall; when the mountain was finally behind him, Erik knew he was going to live. His expedition leader slapped him on the back and said something that would affect the course of Erik’s life: “Don’t make Everest the greatest thing you ever do.” No Barriers is Erik’s response to that challenge.

Michael Palin journeys to a vast country of unimaginable contrasts - Brazil. An economic powerhouse, it is host to a staggering variety of peoples. He starts his journey in the north, in the remote mountains and forests on the border with Venezuela, and finishes in the south at the legendary Iguaçu Falls. He travels by river-boat, float-plane and foot to visit tribes deep in the jungle, samples life in the agricultural and mining heartland of Brazil, experiences the modernism of Brasília and the heady mix of Rio de Janeiro, and ventures into the favelas.

Keith Foskett refused to let his dark mood define his limitations. Unknowingly suffering with depression, he took to hiking the wilds of Scotland to face the inner demons that threatened to gnaw him to the bone. From the craggy Highlands of the Cape Wrath Trail and West Highland Way to the canals crisscrossing the low country, 600 miles of unforgiving hiking terrain called his name.

American Oz is a rollicking, gritty, adventurous story of life in the secretive subculture of traveling carnivals. You'll never see your state fair or street festival the same way again. Comerford writes a bold, inspiring true story of a year working behind the scenes with the colorful characters and legends of carnivals. He shares stories of freaks, a carnival pimp, a tramp gold miner, and the last king of the sideshows.

He was the original 20th-century enfant terrible with the looks of a Greek god who blazed like a comet across the worlds of art, photography, and fame. The scion of several old WASP fortunes, he was by instinct an adventurer, and the more dangerous the escapade, the better. Journalist and author Graham Boynton was a friend for more than 30 years, spending time with Beard at his bush camp in Africa, in London, and at his Long Island home. From hundreds of Boynton’s interviews with Beard’s closest friends, former lovers, and fellow artists comes this intimate portrait.

In the spring of 1804, at the behest of President oThomas Jefferson, a party of explorers called the Corps of Discovery crossed the Mississippi River and started up the Missouri, heading west into the newly acquired Louisiana Territory.

Few American icons provoke more enduring fascination than Charles Lindbergh - renowned for his one-man transatlantic flight in 1927, remembered for the sorrow surrounding the kidnapping and death of his firstborn son in 1932, and reviled by many for his opposition to America's entry into World War II.

Grief was gnawing at me, trapping my body in a cycle of pain with no offer of relief, making me restless and not letting me go. I desired liberosis, to care less about things. I desperately sought inner and outer liberation. I was having sleepless nights. My soul knew the solution, but my body was not listening until the moment came when I just longed to leave. I wished to free myself from this situation, wipe it from my being, and surround myself with the wilderness.

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.

Jeff takes the listener on powerfully engaging adventures to some of the most uncertain and challenging landscapes on the planet. From guiding a blind man to the summit of Mount Everest to leading a trauma team on the front lines of the war in Mosul, Jeff has lived an extraordinary life wrought with chaotic moments and complex environments.

When Travis Nelson arrived in London, he expected to embark on a new life and a new job. Coming from California, he'd uprooted his wife and his cat, Sigrid, and planned to be here for the long haul. Then Covid-19 struck. Travis's new job vanished as the company cut staff. For two years, and through successive lockdowns, he was stuck in limbo in an unfamiliar city, trying to find his way.

Faced with an empty nest, stagnant jobs, and an economy in freefall, Kim Brown Seely and her husband decided to embark on a grand adventure. On an impulse, they purchased a sailboat, learned to sail, and set off toward untamed wilderness in search of the elusive blonde Kermode bear that only lives in a secluded forest in the Pacific Northwest.

From well-known nature and adventure writer Dan Koeppel, whose work has appeared in Audubon and National Geographic Adventure, comes this true story of one bird watcher's incredible achievements.

Here is the story of the infamous 1910 race to the South Pole, as told by its fearless yet desperate leader, Robert Falcon Scott. The New York Times called Scott's Last Expedition "A splendid record of heroism not soon to be forgotten."

Mawson's Will is the dramatic story of what Sir Edmund Hillary calls "the most outstanding solo journey ever recorded in Antarctic history." For weeks in Antarctica, Douglas Mawson faced some of the most daunting conditions ever known to man: blistering wind, snow, and cold; loss of his companion, his dogs and supplies, the skin on his hands and the soles of his feet; thirst, starvation, disease, snowblindness - and he survived.

The career of John Charles Frémont (1813-90) ties together the full breadth of American expansionism from its 18th-century origins through its culmination in the Gilded Age. Tom Chaffin's biography demonstrates Frémont's vital importance to the history of American empire and illuminates his role in shattering long-held myths about the ecology and habitability of the American West.