Mountain Memoir

Being inspired to act can take many forms. For some, it's taking a weekend to volunteer, but for Shannon Galpin, it meant leaving her career, selling her house, launching a nonprofit, and committing her life to advancing education and opportunity for women and girls. Focusing on the war-torn country of Afghanistan, Galpin and her organization, Mountain2Mountain, have touched the lives of hundreds of men, women, and children.

As Tammy explores mountains and beaches in paradise, she’s fueled by the allure of new cultures, creating memories that have made her who she is today. Throughout her island adventures to the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, and Curacao, as well as hikes through national parks in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, surprises lurk at every turn—from navigating floods to fending off avian ambushes. Embracing the chaos, Tammy turns each misadventure into a story worth telling.

At 54, Lisa Stewart set out to regain the fearless girl she once had been, riding her horse, Chief, 500 miles home. Hot, homeless, and horseback, she snapped back into every original cell. On an extraordinary homegoing from Kansas City to Bates and Vernon Counties in Missouri, Lisa exhausted herself, faced her past, trusted strangers, and stayed in the middle of her frightened horse to document modern rural America, the people, animals, and land.

Ever since she was a young girl, Virginia had to face many obstacles mentally, spiritually and physically to fit into this judgmental world. Feeling alone and misunderstood, Virginia faces what life has to throw at her with sheer determination and a bit of luck. When Virginia loses her way along her journey, she encounters forces both light and dark before she finds a genuine connection with the divine and starts to heal her broken soul with her unwavering faith.

Joe Mitchell and his family have lived in China off and on for a total of seven years beginning in 1993. During three of those years they lived on a one acre property with a minority Nosu family. This true, first person account is alive with stories of their lives there and the friendships they enjoyed.

With Mountain Madness, Clinton Crockett Peters chronicles his travels and personal transformation from a West Texas evangelical to mountain guide to humbled humanist after a near-fatal injury in Japan's Chichibu Mountains. From 2007 to 2010, Peters lived in Kosuge Village, nestled in central Japan's peaks, where he was the only foreigner in town. This essay collection profiles who he was before Japan, why he became obsessed with mountains, and his fallout from mountain obsession. Ultimately, the collection asks, how can landscape create and end identities?

On October 7, 1780, American Patriot and Loyalist soldiers battled each other at Kings Mountain, near the border of North and South Carolina. With over one hundred eyewitness accounts, this collection of participant statements from men of both sides includes letters and statements in their original form—the soldiers' own words—unedited and unabridged.

Climbing the Rough Side of the Mountain is the remarkable story of a couple who came together during the Civil Rights Movement and made fighting for equality and civil and workers’ rights their purpose for more than sixty years, overcoming adversity—with the strength of their love and commitment—to bring about meaningful change.

From the award-winning author of Ice Bear: The Cultural History of an Arctic Icon comes an intimate exploration of Alaska's northernmost mountain range with observations on Indigenous cultures, conservation, and intense cross-country travel, all shaped by respect for the land. Follow author Michael Engelhard through tussock-studded tundra for a remarkable tale of bear encounters and white-knuckled river moments, as well as poetic reflections on a vast, untamed landscape.

Stable Weight is a story of resilience, empowerment, and the transformative power of the human-animal bond, revealing how even the most sensitive soul can ditch being a good girl for becoming an independent woman.

In her hilarious yet sage debut essay collection, Midstokke demonstrates that battles with freeloading varmints, clogged stove pipes, childhood trauma, and one surprisingly aggressive boulder are unexpected, if not wonderfully entertaining, pathways to personal growth and joy. All the Things delivers the irreverent, fearless, and brilliant voice of a woman who laughs in the face of failure and soothes her wounds by splitting wood, often in her skivvies.

My family are followers of the Baha'i Faith, a religion founded in Iran and practiced by millions of people worldwide today. Muslims in Iran consider it a blasphemous, illegitimate religion. For more than four decades, Baha'is in Iran have been stripped of all human rights. We are routinely arrested, detained, tortured, imprisoned, and executed without cause. This is my story about what life was like living under Islamic rule.

Heroes are hard to come by - but there's one man whose legend has stood the test of two centuries, and whose name sits on Australia's highest peak. Tadeusz Kosciuszko: freedom fighter, friend of Thomas Jefferson and champion of liberty on two continents. Bestselling author Anthony Sharwood finds out why he's the hero the world needs right now.

Matchbox Mountain is a collection of stories told by the author about one year in her life in 1952 when she was 10 years old. Living in the mountains of western North Carolina in a house with no electricity, no running water, and no close neighbors, the author shares stories of how she and her siblings made their own world with little but creativity.

A friend's chance sighting of a hand-lettered "For Sale" sign sets Jan and Stu on a path that will change not only their domestic world, but their emotional one as well. Along the way, they find that the path ahead can be crooked, strewn with pitfalls just waiting to become pratfalls. Life at the university and in the theater never prepared accident-prone Stu for his new life as a would-be farmer, carpenter, and mountain man, nor Jan for some scary encounters with nature in the wild.

A journey back in time, The Golden Mountain is the gripping tale of four generations of Chinese women who live and die under the restrictions of their culture, except for one, the author. Her story tells of growing up in Hong Kong and of her transition to New York City where she struggled to meld the American dream with her ethnic background. Finally, at age 50, she dares to move into the present and understand the true nature of dreams and what it means to live.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist tells the story of the self-made billionaire who built the Kendall-Jackson empire from nothing into the biggest-selling brand of premium wines in the U.S. Jess Stonestreet Jackson was one of a small band of pioneering entrepreneurs who put California's wine country on the map. His life story is a compelling slice of history, daring, innovation, feuds, intrigue, talent, mystique, contrarianism, and luck, offering a unique window on the elegant, adventurous, and cut-throat worlds of Jackson's two passions: wine and horseracing.

Is there anything new to say about Thomas Jefferson and slavery? The answer is a resounding yes. Henry Wiencek's eloquent, persuasive book - based on new information coming from archaeological work at Monticello and on hitherto overlooked or disregarded evidence in Jefferson's papers - opens up a huge, poorly understood dimension of Jefferson's world. We must, Wiencek suggests, follow the money.

After decades as a long-haul trucker, Finn Murphy left the road and settled in Boulder County, Colorado. Before long he noticed that many of his neighbors were captivated by the prospect of vast riches in “the Hemp Space.” When hemp was legalized, after eighty years in federal exile, Colorado became the center of a hemp growing and processing boom. Figuring he’d harvest some of that easy money, Murphy bought a thirty-six-acre farm. What could go wrong? Well, pretty much everything…

In Wilderness and Mountain Lore explores the stories and adventures of visiting a mountain wilderness retreat over a 50-year period with a group of friends. We nearly always were able to reserve the only two cabins for the second week of June. Domke Lake is located in the North Cascades wilderness area of North Central Washington State. There is no electricity or phone service of any kind along with little change other than what nature has wrought.