Travel Biography

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.

Award-winning investigative journalist and contributing Wired editor Scott Carney leads listeners on a breathtaking journey through the macabre underworld of the global body bazaar, where organs, bones, and even live people are bought and sold on The Red Market. The Red Market sheds a blazing new light on the disturbing, billion-dollar business of trading in human body parts, bodies, and child trafficking, raising issues and exposing corruptions almost too bizarre and shocking to imagine.

A bracing memoir about self-discovery, liberating escape, and moving forward across an adventurous and volatile American landscape. One year. One national park at a time.

On November 21, 1914, after sailing more than ten thousand miles from Norway to the Antarctic Ocean, the Endurance finally succumbed to the surrounding ice. Ernest Shackleton and his crew had navigated the 144-foot, three-masted wooden vessel to Antarctica to become the first to cross the barren continent, but early season pack ice trapped them in place offshore. They watched in silence as the ship’s stern rose twenty feet in the air and disappeared into the frigid sea, then spent six harrowing months marooned on the ice in its wake.

Years ago, an overachieving and harried young mother accidentally flushed her gold watch down the toilet. Time passed, but the image of the lost watch continued to haunt her, a symbol of an overcommitted life. Two decades later, propelled by a series of curious coincidences, she leaves behind her busy professional life, her cell phone, and her family to escape the tyranny of time and walk 500 miles across Northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela.

Laura was in her early twenties and directionless when she quit her job to backpack in Bolivia. Fate landed her at a wildlife sanctuary on the edge of the Amazon jungle where she was assigned to a beautiful and complex puma named Wayra. Wide-eyed, inexperienced, and comically terrified, Laura made the scrappy, make-do camp her home. And in Wayra, she made a friend for life.

Keith Foskett’s dream of escape started with a single step. When the long-distance hiker chose to backpack all 2,180 miles of the Appalachian Trail, he left ordinary life behind for five months. Enduring an incredible test of physical and psychological strength, Foskett was pushed to his limits....

Richard Henry Dana, a law student turned sailor for health reasons, sailed in 1834 aboard the brig Pilgrim on a voyage from Boston around Cape Horn to California. Drawing from his journals, Two Years Before the Mast gives a vivid and detailed account, shrewdly observed and beautifully described, of a common sailor's wretched treatment at sea, and of a way of life virtually unknown at that time.

In 1958, while flying from one island to another, Audrey Sutherland sees the remote and roadless northeast side of Molokai, with its spectacular sea cliffs and waterfalls. Always an adventurer, she decides that she must find a way to explore this then inaccessible area. After much study, she determines that the best way for her to navigate these treacherous sea walls is to swim while towing an inflatable kayak. This is the story of fulfilling her dream, of planning then implementing, of launching and advancing, of retreating and reconnoitering, of challenge and success.

Across Islands and Oceans is the memoir of 25 year-old James Baldwin and his epic two-year, solo circumnavigation in Atom, his trusty but aging 28-foot sailboat.

Young and in love, their lives ahead of them, Tami Oldham and her fiancé, Richard Sharp, set sail from Tahiti under brilliant blue skies, with Tami’s hometown of San Diego as their ultimate destination. But the two free spirits and avid sailors couldn’t anticipate that less than two weeks into their voyage, they would sail directly into one of the most catastrophic hurricanes in recorded history.

No one family has more experience of travelling together than the Whitehalls. Indeed they've been allowing us a window to their escapades for the past five years in the hit Netflix show Travels with My Father, and in this hilarious book, they have now decided to pool their advice for fellow travellers. To lay out the pitfalls of family holidays. The dos and don'ts, the highs and lows. In doing so, they are sharing some of their best anecdotes.

Just why exactly hadn't anyone attempted to motorcycle from India to Burma before, and how hard could it actually be? Against his better judgment, woefully unprepared, and desperately trying to impress his new aristocratic girlfriend, Andrew Benfield decides to find out.

On 8 August 1914, five days after the outbreak of World War One, the Endurance, a wooden-hulled, coal-fired icebreaker, set sail for the South Pole, in a bid to complete the first-ever trans-Antarctic expedition, which would cross the continent from the Weddell Sea to Scott's base at Cape Evans, via the Pole. However, despite the best planning, the ship succumbs to the ice floes of the Weddell Sea, and is subjected to months of uncontrollable drifting before its crew makes a scramble for Elephant Island, where they battle constant cold and starvation.

When expat blogger and mother of four Eva Melusine Thieme first harbors the idea of ringing out her three years in Africa on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, it sounds easy. In fact, it has all the trappings of a dream vacation: no cooking, no fighting kids, and an army of porters to lug everything up the mountain. What can go wrong? Tag along as Eva takes you on her journey up the slopes of Kilimanjaro together with her teenage son and a group of hilarious South African friends.

Best-selling and beloved author Frances Mayes discovers the hidden pleasures of Italy in a sumptuous travel narrative that crisscrosses the country, with inventive new recipes celebrating Italian cuisine.

Steinbeck and Capa's account of their journey through Cold War Russia is a classic piece of reportage and travel writing.Just after the Iron Curtain fell on Eastern Europe, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Steinbeck and acclaimed war photographer Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union to report for the New York Herald Tribune.

James Brabazon is narrating this story of war, violence, and political intrigue. He wanted a war. And, for his sins, he got one. James Brabazon was an ambitious young war reporter when he entered the chaos of the Liberian Civil War in 2002. Running with the infamous LURD rebels, he survived numerous deadly ambushes, the privations of dysentery and a dramatic two hundred-mile escape from Government troops through dense equatorial jungle. He even had a bounty put on his head.

When best-selling mystery writer David Rosenfelt and his family moved from Southern California to Maine, he thought he had prepared for everything. They had mapped the route, brought three GPSs for backup, as well as refrigerators full of food, and stoves and microwaves on which to cook them. But traveling with 25 dogs turned out to be a bigger ordeal than he anticipated, despite RVs, the extra kibble, volunteers (including a few readers), and camping equipment.

In the span of one unforgettable year, Coyne crisscrosses the country in search of its greatest golf experience, playing every course to ever host a US Open, along with more than two hundred hidden gems and heavyweights, visiting all fifty states to find a better understanding of his home country and countrymen. Coyne’s journey begins where the US Open and US Amateur got their start, historic Newport Country Club in Rhode Island.