Outdoors Memoirs

From being nicknamed 'God of offside' to charting the future of team India, Sourav Ganguly is undoubtedly one of the greatest captains to have played for the country. His records speak for himself: 18,000+ international runs and 11,000 runs in ODI matches including 22 centuries with an average of 41.02! Moreover, Sourav still has the highest win/loss ratio (even higher than M.S. Dhoni’s) and also holds the record of the highest number of wins overseas as a test captain. What makes Sourav Chandidas Ganguly, the 'Prince of Kolkata', such a winner?

It’s been 85 years since Brian McFarlane first laced a pair of skates and tested the black ice on a tiny pond. And then he discovered the joy of hockey. Ultimately, there would be grade school hockey, high school hockey, junior hockey, college hockey, and, miraculously, two decades with the NHL Oldtimers anchoring his life. Now, in this revealing autobiography, he remembers it all. For Brian McFarlane, it has been a helluva life in hockey.

When journalist Brett Popplewell first heard about Dag Aabye, an aging former stuntman who lived alone inside a school bus on a mountain, running day and night through blizzards and heat waves, he was intrigued and bewildered. Captivated by the seemingly implausible tale of a wild super-athlete aging more slowly than the rest of us, he was determined to meet the apocryphal white-haired man who was pushing the boundaries of the human mind and body beyond what anyone could dream was possible.

On October 12, 1972, a plane carrying a team of young rugby players crashed into the remote, snow-peaked Andes. Out of the 45 original passengers and crew, only 16 made it off the mountain alive. For 10 excruciating weeks, they suffered deprivations beyond imagining, confronting nature head-on at its most furious and inhospitable. And to survive, these men and women not only had to keep their faith; they had to make an impossible decision: Should they eat the flesh of their dead friends?

In his late thirties, Jeff Chu left his job as a magazine writer and found himself at Princeton Theological Seminary’s “Farminary”—a twenty-one-acre working farm where students learn to cultivate the earth while examining life’s biggest questions. Now, he unpacks what he learned about creating “good soil,” both literally and figuratively, drawing lessons from the rhythms of growth, decay, and regeneration that define life on the land. In gorgeous, transporting reflections, Chu introduces us to the cast of characters, human and not, who became his teachers.

For a race as long as the mighty Tour (three weeks of testing the limits of human endurance), to have the ultimate victory decided by a margin of just eight seconds almost boggles the mind. But that's exactly what happened between American legend Greg LeMond and Laurent Fignon. After more than 2,000 miles in the saddle, it remains the smallest margin of victory in the Tour's 100-plus-year history.

In August 2015 bookmakers priced Leicester at 5000-1 to win the Premier League - the same odds as Elvis being found alive. On 2 May 2016, Leicester won, to ecstatic celebrations in the city and around the world. Leicester Mercury 's chief football writer, Rob Tanner, relives the great escape of 2015 to the curtain-closer at Stamford Bridge.

Lauren Fleshman has grown up in the world of running. One of the most decorated collegiate athletes of all time and a national champion as a pro, she was a major face of women’s running for Nike before leaving to shake up the industry with feminist running brand Oiselle and now coaches elite young female runners. Every step of the way, she has seen the way that our sports systems—originally designed by men, for men and boys—fail young women and girls as much as empower them. Written with heart and verve, Good for a Girl is a joyful love letter to the running life.

The definitive portrait of Kobe Bryant, from the author of Michael Jordan. Eighteen-time All-Star, scorer of 81 points in a single game, MVP, and one of the best shooting guards in NBA league history: Kobe Bryant is among basketball's absolute greatest players, and his importance to the sport is undeniable. Third on the NBA career scoring list and owner of five championship rings, he is an undisputed all-time great, one deserving of this deep and definitive biography.

Despite the howling protests from his peers, no one's ever been more willing to spill the beans on what it's really like inside the pro cycling peloton than the sarcastic scribe Phil Gaimon. Building on the outrageous success of his hilarious 2014 debut, Pro Cycling on $10 a Day: From Fat Kid to Euro Pro, Gaimon gathers the absolute gems from his monthly Q & A feature column in VeloNews magazine into his new book, Ask a Pro.

Ross Edgley famously ran a marathon pulling a 1.4-tonne car and climbed a rope the height of Everest (8,848 m), after living with Yamabushi warrior monks in Japan and partaking in Shamanic pain rituals with fire ants in the Amazon jungle. On his epic 1,780-mile journey around Great Britain, which lasted 157 days, Ross swam through giant jellyfish, arctic storms, ‘haunted’ whirlpools and polluted shipping lanes, going so hard, and so fast, his tongue fell apart.

He is considered by many the greatest basketball player ever produced by the hoops-crazy state of Kentucky. In two years at the University of Kentucky, he scored over 1,000 points, led the Wildcats to a Sweet Sixteen appearance and was nicknamed “King Rex.” The first player ever drafted by the Charlotte Hornets, he spent twelve seasons in the NBA, dazzling in dunk contests and sinking one of the most memorable buzzer-beaters in league history. But by the end of his career, Rex Chapman was harboring a destructive secret.

As the world’s most popular UFC fighter, Georges "Rush" St-Pierre seems almost impossibly tough and dominant. But long before he was "GSP", as his millions of fans know him, he was just a kid harassed by bullies. But he was also a kid who, thanks to years of practicing martial arts, invented his own way of life. He became a black belt in karate at the age of 12. In his later teens, working as a garbage collector to finance his unique and innovative training methods, GSP learned from repeated losses and ultimately found a way to triumph in a highly competitive field.

At the beginning of his memoir Life Lived Wild: Adventures at the Edge of the Map, Rick Ridgeway tells us that if you add up all his many expeditions, he’s spent over five years of his life sleeping in tents: “And most of that in small tents pitched in the world’s most remote regions.” It’s not a boast so much as an explanation. Whether at elevation or raising a family back at sea level, those years taught him, he writes, “to distinguish matters of consequence from matters of inconsequence.” He leaves it to his listeners to do the final sort of which is which.

Isolated by Mexico's deadly Copper Canyons, the blissful Tarahumara Indians have honed the ability to run hundreds of miles without rest or injury. In a riveting narrative, award-winning journalist and often-injured runner Christopher McDougall sets out to discover their secrets. In the process, he takes his readers from science labs at Harvard to the sun-baked valleys and freezing peaks across North America, where ever-growing numbers of ultra-runners are pushing their bodies to the limit.

Aaron Judge, the hulking superman who carried an easy aw-shucks demeanor from small-town California to stardom in the Big Apple, had long established his place as one of baseball’s most intimidating power hitters. Baseballs frequently rocketed off his bat like cannon fire, dispatching heat-seeking missiles toward the “Judge’s Chambers” seating area in right field, sending delirious fans scattering for souvenirs. But even in a high-tech universe where computers measure each swing to the nth degree, Roger Maris’s American League mark of sixty-one home runs seemed largely out of reach.

In early 2015, Roderick Toombs, aka Rowdy Roddy Piper, began researching his own autobiography with a trip through Western Canada. He was rediscovering his youth, a part of his life he never discussed during his sixty-one years, many spent as one of the greatest talents in the history of pro wrestling. Following his death due to a heart attack that July, two of his children took on the job of telling Roddy's story, separating fact from fiction in the extraordinary life of their father.

Pro wrestler and political commentator Tyrus goes deep into his wild but triumphant life story, from his painfully dysfunctional upbringing to bodyguarding for Snoop Dogg, to becoming a wrestling icon and one of the most provocative on-air voices today.

Wit’s End isn’t just a state of mind. It’s the name of a gravel road, the address of a rundown, off-the-grid cabin, 120 shabby square feet of fixer-upper Patrick Hutchison purchased on a whim in the mossy woods of the Cascade Mountains in Washington state. To say Hutchison didn’t know what he was getting into is no more an exaggeration than to say he’s a man with nearly zero carpentry skills. Well, used to be. You can learn a lot over six years of renovations. CABIN is the story of those renovations, but it's also a love story; of a place, of possibilities, and of the process of construction.

NHL tough guys all tell the same story. They all grew up dreaming of skating in the big league as stars. Then one day, a coach tells them the only way to make it is to drop the gloves. And every guy says the same thing: I'll do whatever it takes to play in the NHL. Not Stu Grimson, though. When he was offered a contract to patrol the ice for the Calgary Flames, he said no thanks, and went to university instead. And that's the way Grimson has approached his career and his life: on his own terms.