Outdoors Memoirs

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.

In Tales from the New Jersey Devils Locker Room, former New Jersey goalie Chico Resch and coauthor Mike Kerwick bring listeners along for a wild ride from the lean early seasons to the three Stanley Cup championships of this beloved team.

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.

Fred Sasakamoose, torn from his home at the age of seven, endured the horrors of residential school for a decade before becoming one of 120 players in the most elite hockey league in the world. He has been heralded as the first Indigenous player with Treaty status in the NHL. After twelve games, he returned home. When people tell Sasakamoose's story, this is usually where they end it. Sasakamoose's groundbreaking memoir sheds piercing light on Canadian history and Indigenous politics, and follows this man's journey to reclaim pride in a heritage that had been used against him.

Mark Messier is one of the most accomplished athletes and dynamic leaders in the history of professional sports. He won the Stanley Cup five times with the Edmonton Oilers during their dynasty years and once more with the New York Rangers, ending the team’s 54-year championship drought. He is second on the all-time career lists for playoff points and third for regular season games played and for regular season points. Notably, he is the only player to have captained two different NHL franchises to championships.

When Tiger Woods went on an extraordinary majors run between 1999 and 2008, one man stood at his side: his caddie Steve Williams. Together Steve and Tiger dominated the PGA Tour and won an astonishing 13 major championships, their sights set on breaking Jack Nicklaus’s record 18 majors. Before they could overtake Nicklaus, however, their partnership ended abruptly, and a 12-year period without talking began. Years later, the two reconnected. Together We Roared offers an inside look at what it is like to ride alongside greatness.

World-famous competitive skydiver and coach Dan Brodsky-Chenfeld presents proven tools and techniques for success and explains how they can be used in everyday life. Dan survived a plane crash from which 16 of the 22 people on board were killed. He was left critically injured and woke up from a six-week-long coma with a broken neck, broken skull, severe head trauma, a collapsed lung, and other serious internal injuries. Against all odds, Dan recovered and went on to become one of the greatest competitive skydiver in the world.

It takes a certain kind of person to do whatever is necessary to make a living as a mixed martial arts fighter. And it takes another kind of person to stand out from all the rest as both a wild man and a rock star. Chris Leben, otherwise known as "The Crippler", is that kind of person. Leben's reputation started when he appeared on the inaugural season of The Ultimate Fighter, a reality show and competition where hopeful fighters live together and vie for a UFC contract and a path to greatness.

For the first time in depth and in public, Olympic soccer gold-medalist Christine Sinclair, the top international goal scorer of all time and one of Canada's greatest athletes, reflects on both her exhilarating successes and her heartbreaking failures. Playing the Long Game is a book of earned wisdom on the value of determination and team spirit, and on leadership that changed the landscape of women's sport.

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.

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.

The definitive biography of a legendary athlete. The Shrug. The Shot. The Flu Game. When most people think of him, they think of his beautiful shots with the game on the line, his body totally in sync with the ball - hitting nothing but net. But for all his greatness, this scion of a complex family from North Carolina's Coastal Plain has a darker side: He's a ruthless competitor and a lover of high stakes. There's never been a biography that encompassed the dual nature of his character and looked so deeply at Jordan on and off the court - until now.

Scotty Bowman is recognized as the best coach in hockey history, and one of the greatest coaches in all of sports. He won more games and more Stanley Cups than anyone else. Despite all the changes in hockey, he coached at the very top for more than four decades, his first Cup win and his last an astonishing thirty-nine years apart. Yet perhaps most uniquely, different from anyone else who has ever lived or ever will again, he has continuously experienced the best of hockey since he was fourteen years old.

Raised in Dublin, Ireland, in a devoutly Catholic family, Rebecca Quin constantly invented new ways to make her mother worry—roughhousing with the neighborhood kids, hosting secret parties while her parents were away, enrolling in a warehouse wrestling school, nearly breaking her neck and almost kneecapping a WWE star before her own wrestling career even began—and she was always in search of a thrilling escape from the ordinary.

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.

Girl in the Woods is Aspen Matis' exhilarating true-life adventure of hiking from Mexico to Canada - a coming of age story, a survival story, and a triumphant story of overcoming emotional devastation. On her second night of college, Aspen was raped by a fellow student. Overprotected by her parents who discouraged her from telling of the attack, Aspen was confused and ashamed.

As one of the NHL's most polarizing players, Sean Avery turned the rules of professional hockey on their head. For 13 seasons, he played for some of the most storied franchises in the league, including the Detroit Red Wings, the Los Angeles Kings, and the New York Rangers, making his mark in each city as a player who was sometimes loved, sometimes despised, and always controversial. In Offside, Avery displays his trademark candor about the world of pro hockey and does for it what Jim Bouton's game-changing Ball Four did for baseball.

Dreams of becoming the next Nadia Comaneci led Jennifer Sey to become a gymnast at the age of six. Her early success and love of the sport propelled her and her family to great sacrifice so that she could become a National Team member and one of America’s elite gymnasts by age 11. But as she set her sights higher, Jennifer began to change, setting her mental and physical health aside in the name of winning.

One of the inspirations for the major motion picture Everest, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Keira Knightley. This is the true story of a 24-hour period on Everest when members of three separate expeditions were caught in a storm and faced a battle against hurricane-force winds, exposure, and the effects of altitude, which ended the worst single-season death toll in the peak's history.

Chuck Noll won four Super Bowls and presided over one of the greatest football dynasties in history, the Pittsburgh Steelers of the 70s. Later inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, his achievements as a competitor and a coach are the stuff of legend. But Noll always remained an intensely private and introspective man, never revealing much of himself as a person or as a coach, not even to the players and fans who revered him.