Travel Writing Memoirs

Steve Hoffman is a perfectly comfortable middle-aged Minnesotan man who has always been desperately, pretentiously in love with France, more specifically with the idea of France. To follow that love, he and his family move, nearly at random, to the small, rural, scratchy-hot village of Autignac in the south of the country, and he immediately thinks he’s made a terrible mistake.

Tania Aebi was an unambitious 18-year-old, a bicycle messenger in New York City by day, a Lower East Side barfly at night. In short, she was going nowhere - until her father offered her a challenge: Tania could choose either a college education or a 26-foot sloop. The only catch was that if she chose the sailboat, she'd have to sail around the world - alone. She chose the boat, and for the next two and a half years and 27,000 miles, it was her home.

Recalling some of the most memorable escapades ever conducted in the Canadian Arctic with bush planes, Flying to Extremes takes place in the late ’60s and early ’70s from a base at Yellowknife, in the heart of the Northwest Territories. Beyond recounting so many near-mishaps, this book is also about colorful people: the trappers, prospectors, miners, adventurers and gold-ingot thieves who constituted the fauna at the main bar in Yellowknife in those days.

The history of Iceland began 1,200 years ago, when a frustrated Viking captain and his useless navigator ran aground in the middle of the North Atlantic. Suddenly, the island was no longer just a layover for the Arctic tern. Instead, it became a nation whose diplomats and musicians, sailors and soldiers, volcanoes and flowers, quietly altered the globe forever. How Iceland Changed the World takes readers on a tour of history, showing them how Iceland played a pivotal role in events as diverse as the French Revolution, the Moon Landing, and the foundation of Israel.

In 1930, two novice paddlers - Eric Sevareid and Walter C. Port - launched a secondhand 18-foot canvas canoe from the Minnesota River at Fort Snelling for an ambitious summer-long journey from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay. Without benefit of radio, motor or good maps, the teenagers made their way over 2,250 miles of rivers, lakes, and difficult portages.

In May 2018, former Monty Python stalwart and intrepid globetrotter Michael Palin ventured into the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, camera crew in tow, to gain a glimpse of life in the most notoriously secretive and cut-off nation on earth. His resulting two-part documentary for Channel 5 fascinated millions and won universal plaudits.

In Pole to Pole we join Michael Palin on the second of his epic challenges. Travelling from the North Pole to the South Pole, he experiences every extreme the globe has to offer. As he crosses 16 countries by train, truck, raft, Ski-Doo, barge, balloon and bicycle, he meets a diverse range of fascinating characters and landscapes while his own endurance is tested to the limit. With his customary aplomb, he plunges himself into the local cultures, starring in a crayfish documentary in Novgorod, attending a baby-rolling ceremony at a Cypriot wedding, and consulting an Mpulugu witch-doctor.

Fuzzy-haired, neurotic, cello-playing Catrina is devastated when her lover, Jack, leaves her to go surfing on the other side of the world. Trapped in a dead-end job and torn by his departure, Catrina dreams of running away. But how do you run away when you're flat broke? Luckily, her friend Andrew comes up with a plan: they'll get an old van, turn it into a camper, and busk their way from Norway to Portugal, via the midnight sun. Andrew is one of her oldest friends and they share many of the same passions.

In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a chance to "read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least, sleep to my heart's content," but when Christiane arrives she is shocked to realize that they are to live in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, battling the elements every day, just to survive.

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

When American writer Stephanie Saldana finds herself in an empty house at the beginning of Nablus Road, the dividing line between East and West Jerusalem, she is a new wife trying to navigate a fragile terrain, both within her marriage and throughout the country in which she has chosen to live. Pregnant with her first child, Stephanie struggles to protect her family, their faith, and herself from the cracks of Middle Eastern conflict that threaten to shatter the world around her.

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.

In Ruth Reichl’s latest book—one that will delight her fans and convert those as yet uninitiated to her charming tales—the author brings to life her adventures in pursuit of good meals and good company. Picking up where Tender at the Bone leaves off, Comfort Me with Apples recounts Reichl’s transformation from chef to food writer, a process that led her through restaurants from Bangkok to Paris to Los Angeles and brought lessons in life, love, and food.

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.

A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India. Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man, and a deluded American religious seeker.

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.

In 2018, amateur cyclist Jenny Graham left family and friends behind in Scotland to become the fastest woman to cycle around the world. Alone and unsupported, she crossed the finish line at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin four months later, smashing the female record by nearly three weeks. With infectious wit and honesty, Jenny brings listeners into her remarkable Round the World adventure, as she takes on four continents, 16 countries – and countless cups of coffee.

After years of watching Kenyan athletes win the world's biggest races, Adharanand Finn set out to discover just what it was that made them so fast - and to see if he could keep up. Packing up his life he moved from Devon to Iten, in Kenya, to eat with, interview, sleep beside and - most importantly – run with, some of the greatest runners in the world. In the distance rests his dream, to join the best of the Kenyan athletes in an epic first marathon across the Kenyan plains.

The third and most ambitious of Michael Palin's adventures is a voyage of epic proportions - the circumnavigation of the Pacific Rim. He travels for almost a year through the 18 countries that border the world's largest ocean, and is forced to negotiate mountains, plunging gorges, cross glaciers and dodge icebergs. Volcanoes also mark Palin's journey. He climbs one which has freshly erupted and follows great rivers like the Yangtze and the Amazon to some of the most remote places on earth.

At age 26, Maarten Troost decided to pack up his flip-flops and move to a remote South Pacific island. The idea of dropping everything and moving to the ends of the earth was irresistibly romantic. But he should have known better.