Travel Writing Memoirs

In thinking about her native land, Julia Reed quotes another Southern writer, Willie Morris, who said, “It’s the juxtapositions that get you down here.” These juxtapositions are, for Julia Reed, the soul of the South and in her warmhearted and funny new audiobook, South Toward Home, she chronicles her adventures through the highs and the lows of Southern life - the Delta hot tamale festival, a masked ball, a rollicking party in a boat on a sand bar, scary Christian billboards, and the southern affection for the lowly possum.

The American West was a notion, not a nation. It was a process, not a place. The native animal and human life of the West was displaced, replaced, and exterminated - 60 million bison to make way for European bog animals, billions of passenger pigeons for nothing, and 90 percent of aboriginal native Americans, out of an original population of possibly a hundred million, by accident and design. Late in the summer of 2013, I set out to find the Old West, what it had been, and what had replaced it.

Not so long ago, two carefree 18-year-olds hitchhiked across a country of wide-open highways and wide-open people. Ride with them on this nostalgic look back at "America of the Big Heart". It was 1961, before the deaths of JFK and MLK and before Vietnam.

After a lifetime in broadcasting, Greg Dobbs, a two-time National Emmy Award-winning journalist and former foreign correspondent for ABC News, shares the funny, funky, scary, stupid, dangerous, distasteful, unwise, and unbelievable behind-the-scenes stories (including those of his Emmy Award-winning broadcasts) that a journalist can encounter in his lifetime - adventures that are possibly even more interesting than the news being covered. Dobbs tells his stories with the humor, empathy, and enthusiasm that only someone who has covered news in more than 80 countries could muster.

For more than half a century, a shared love of canals and narrowboats has been inseparable from the marriage of Timothy West and Prunella Scales. The two iconic actors have spent many of the happiest days of their life together enjoying the calming pleasures of watching land and nature unfold before them at four miles an hour.

This classic essay from Jon Krakauer is now available as an unabridged audiobook download. This essay is also included in the Classic Krakauer collection. From the best-selling author of Missoula and Into the Wild: a selection of the singular investigative journalism that made Krakauer famous, covering topics from avalanches on Mt. Everest to a volcano in Washington state; from a wilderness therapy program for teens to an extraordinary cave in New Mexico so unearthly that is used by NASA to better understand Mars.

An audiobook about our travels in a motor home across America and life. An inspirational audiobook about this great country, its people, our faith, selling everything we own, and following His plan, picking up the pieces after a death of a child, even going to heaven and living to tell about it...a story for everyone! At the end, a segment to answer questions as to the costs of RVing full-time, a how-to-do-it, and other important information before hitting the road.

Magdalena Wasiura's journal of living for a year in the Berber community in Morocco.

After purchasing one-way flights from New York City to Paris, Kyle James and his girlfriend Ashley quit their day jobs, planned futures, and daily paradigms to see as much of the world as they could. In 114 days, they trekked across 15 countries and 38 cities with nothing but their backpacks, their smartphones, and each other. Not Afraid of the Fall is the unvarnished story of their off-the-cuff journey: from cliff-jumping off Croatia's untouched coasts to bathing with rescued elephants in Thailand and far beyond.

In 1995, at the age of 23, Michael Meyer joined the Peace Corps and, after rejecting offers to go to seven other countries, was sent to a tiny town in Sichuan. Knowing nothing about China, or even how to use chopsticks, Meyer wrote Chinese words up and down his arms so he could hold conversations, and, per a Communist dean's orders, jumped into teaching his students about the Enlightenment, the stock market, and Beatles lyrics. Soon he realized his Chinese counterparts were just as bewildered by China's changes as he was.

Stranger in Every Land chronicles my journey out of the good ol' USA and into exotic Asian countries and inviting Pacific islands where I stayed long enough to no longer completely identify with my country of origin - but never long enough to fully be regarded as a native.

Recruited to work on a documentary, Julian goes to New York convinced he has hit big time at last. Finding the project cancelled, he wanders the city streets and, with nowhere else to go, decides to set out hitchhiking for San Francisco. Revisiting this timeless American journey finds an unseen nation in rough shape. Along the road are homeless people and anarchists who have dropped out of society altogether, and blue-collar Americans who seem to have lost all meaning in forgotten towns and food deserts.

Teresa O'Kane had always longed to see the world. She owned scads of travel books and maps and was about to buy yet another bookcase to hold the many Lonely Planet guides and travel essays that she had accumulated over the years when she turned to her husband and said, "I'm tired of storing our dreams. Let's live them!" Within a month, they bought one-way tickets to Morocco, leased out their home, and set out on a journey of the African continent top to bottom from Casablanca to Cape Town.

Simon Majumdar is probably not your typical idea of an immigrant. As he says, "I'm well rested, not particularly poor, and the only time I ever encounter 'huddled masses' is in line at Costco." But immigrate he did, and thanks to a Homeland Security agent who asked if he planned to make it official, the journey chronicled in Fed, White, and Blue was born. In it, Simon sets off on a trek across the United States to find out what it really means to become an American, using what he knows best: food.

This extraordinary travel book tells the true story of how in 1997 writer Michael Paterniti agreed to take a road trip from New Jersey to California, reuniting the preserved brain of the great scientist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) with his granddaughter Evelyn. Paterniti's improbable travelling companion is 84-year-old Thomas Harvey, the pathologist who not only removed Einstein's brain from his head during the autopsy but purloined it from Princeton Hospital also!

Manny Ansar and Iyad Ag Ghali had little in common - one was a politically connected intellectual, the other a rebel waging war on behalf of his nomadic people in the middle of the Sahara. They did share one thing, though: a passion for Mali's desert blues, a haunting mix of traditional music infused with the influence of Elvis Presley, Bob Marley, and Jimi Hendrix.

Lynn Schooler had recently lost a dear friend and was feeling his marriage slipping away from him when he set out on a daring journey - first by boat, then on foot - into the Alaskan wilderness to clear his head. His solo expedition, recounted in Walking Home, is filled with the awe and danger of being on one's own in the wild, being battered by the elements and even, for two harrowing days, becoming the terrified quarry of a grizzly bear. But the formidable, lonely landscape is also rich with human stories....

The unforgettable true story of larger-than-life whitewater raft guides Clancy Reece and Jon Barker, two men who share a love of wild rivers and an unbending will to live life on their terms, no matter the cost. Clancy's motto, "Anything worth doing is worth overdoing," leads them into a decade of beautiful - and beautifully strange - river adventures.

In this powerful, passionate chronicle, Noah Adams, the beloved host of NPR's All Things Considered, takes us on a river journey through the heart of Appalachia - a journey shared by pioneers and preachers, white-water daredevils, bluegrass musicians, and an unforgettable cast of vivid historical characters.

The incredible true story of four ordinary working mums from Yorkshire who took on an extraordinary challenge and broke a world record along the way, proving it's never too late to go on a life-changing adventure, experience the beauty and power of the elements, push the very limits of your abilities and rediscover who you are.