Travel Memoir

Spanning an extraordinary range of subjects and locations, these ten gripping essays show why Jon Krakauer is considered a standard-bearer of modern journalism.

Gertrude Bell was leaning in 100 years before Sheryl Sandberg. One of the great woman adventurers of the 20th century, she turned her back on Victorian society to study at Oxford and travel the world and became the chief architect of British policy in the Middle East after World War I. Mountaineer, archaeologist, Arabist, writer, poet, linguist, and spy, she dedicated her life to championing the Arab cause and was instrumental in drawing the borders that define today's Middle East.

A wisdom-filled memoir that doubles as a sweeping travelogue reaching from Boston to Sardinia and back again. Gorgeously written and culturally astute. The Boston Globe. When a big-city journalist quits her dream job to move to a remote Italian island for love, she discovers a whole new life beyond the romantic fantasies of Italy spun by books and movies. Struggling to adapt to a different culture, she buys a quirky house in the Sardinian countryside, goes to art school and becomes obsessed with home improvement and renovation.

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.

From village feasts and rustic tavernas to ancient piazzas and moonlit balconies, the smells, tastes, sounds, and soul of Umbria come alive in Marlena de Blasi's evocative memoir. By turns romantic and sensual, joyous and celebratory, touching and humorous, Marlena de Blasi's account of moving with her husband, Fernando, to Orvieto, the largest city in Italy's Umbria, will appeal to anyone who delights in travel and shares the fantasy of beginning a new life in a very different place.

For 18 years Ed Viesturs pursued climbing's holy grail: to stand atop the world's 14 8,000-meter peaks, without the aid of bottled oxygen. But No Shortcuts to the Top is as much about the man who would become the first American to achieve that goal as it is about his stunning quest. As Viesturs recounts the stories of his most harrowing climbs, he reveals a man torn between the flat, safe world he and his loved ones share and the majestic and deadly places where only he can go.

From early childhood, Dr. Hannah Mumby has loved wildlife, especially elephants. Her first wild elephant sighting at 24 changed the course of her life. Since then, she has devoted herself to studying these incredible animals and educating humanity about them. Hannah's field work has taken her around the world, where she has studied many elephant groups, including both orphaned elephants and the solitary elephant males. These remarkable animals have so much to teach us, Mumby argues, and Elephants takes listeners into their world as never before.

In Polish: This is a story about the journey of two brothers who travelled through the largest river in the world on...bikes. But not ordinary bikes - they were "Amazonian” bikes. The story is as bodacious as the trip itself, which seemed like an unachievable madness, but turned out to be a great adventure and a valuable life lesson. For one of its heroes it was a dream come true, for another the last chance for salvation. The book is written by Piotr Chmieliński - the first person on Earth who sailed through the Amazon River in a kayak.

Did Peary reach the North Pole? Was Admiral Byrd the first to fly over it? Did Frederick Cook actually make the first ascent of Mt. McKinley? Spanning 450 years of history, Great Exploration Hoaxes tells the spellbinding stories of ten men who pursued glory at any cost even the truth.

Ever since leaving his San Francisco business to his associates, filmmaker Christopher Strong has been doing what many of us dream of doing: cycling the French Country backroads with no fixed itinerary, tasting the land and the people as well as the food and wine. As a result of those memorable meetings with exceptional people in amazing places, Christopher Strong has morphed into: The Bicycle Gourmet. He has more than a few all tales to tell. In this audiobook, Christopher has selected his personal best. Close your eyes, open your ears, and glide down the French Country backroads.

Ex-paratrooper Christian Lewis had hit rock bottom, suffering with depression so severe he would shut himself in his bedroom for weeks. Then while surfing – his only respite – he cast his eyes along the coastline and realized it was the only place he really wanted to be.

In his small New England hometown, Mark Vanhoenacker spent his childhood dreaming of elsewhere—of the distant, real cities he found on the illuminated globe in his bedroom, and of one perfect metropolis that existed only in his imagination. These cities were the sources of endless comfort and escape, and of a lasting fascination. Streets unspooled, towers shone, and anonymous crowds bustled in the places where Mark hoped he could someday be anyone—perhaps even himself.

As a child, Maggie Downs often doubted that she would ever possess the courage to visit the destinations her mother dreamed of one day seeing. "You are braver than you think," her mother always insisted. That statement would guide her as, over the course of one year, Downs backpacked through seventeen countries - visiting all the places her mother, struck with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, could not visit herself - encountering some of the world's most striking locales while confronting the slow loss of her mother.

From dim sum in Hong Kong to giant platters of Peking duck in Beijing, fresh-baked croissants in Paris and pierogi on the snowy streets of Moscow, Platt takes us around the world, re-tracing the steps of a unique, and lifelong, culinary education. Providing a glimpse into a life that has intertwined food and travel in exciting and unexpected ways, The Book of Eating is a delightful and sumptuous trip that is also the culinary coming-of-age of a voracious eater and his eventual ascension to become, as he puts it, “a professional glutton.”

Different Natures takes you on three journeys. Each gives an honest and passionate insight into the evolution of a compulsive traveler. Looking for direction with the wrong eyes spawned Graham’s lust for wandering. The miles cleared his vision, and the hunger for longer distance grows with an insatiable appetite for new experiences.

Copyright 2008, Marilynn Hughes. Out-of-Body Travel Magazine: Comte St. Germain - Forgotten Immortal Mystic of the Mystery Schools (For more info - www.outofbodytravel.org)

When Ian Buruma arrived in Tokyo in 1975, Japan was little more than an idea in his mind, a fantasy of a distant land. A sensitive misfit in the world of his upper middle class youth, what he longed for wasn't so much the exotic as the raw, unfiltered humanity he had experienced in Japanese theater performances and films, witnessed in Amsterdam and Paris.

South Solo is a story of indomitable courage, of passion to save an endangered species like the albatross, and the unique adventure of solo kayaking in the frigid waters off Antarctica.

Pamela Olson, a small town girl from eastern Oklahoma, had what she always wanted: a physics degree from Stanford University. But instead of feeling excited for what came next, she felt consumed by dread and confusion. This irresistible memoir chronicles her journey from aimless ex-bartender to Ramallah-based journalist and foreign press coordinator for a Palestinian presidential candidate.

When Travels with Lizbeth was first published in 1993, it was proclaimed an instant classic. Lars Eighner's account of his descent into homelessness and his adventures on the streets has moved, charmed, and amused generations of readers and listeners. As Lars wrote, "When I began writing this account I was living under a shower curtain in a stand of bamboo in a public park. I did not undertake to write about homelessness, but wrote what I knew, as an artist paints a still life, not because he is especially fond of fruit, but because the subject is readily at hand."