Walking Memoirs

In 1948, the Appalachian Trail had been a continuous, 2,000-mile footpath for eleven years, but no one had walked its length alone in a continuous journey—until Earl Shaffer, a quiet Pennsylvanian, became a hiking legend and the first of what is now more than 5,500 A.T. "thru-hikers," walking from Georgia to Maine as spring arrived to each area. In 1998, he hiked again as a 50th-anniversary celebration, to far greater publicity. This is the lyrical account of his fabled 1948 walk.

Akasha demystifies the alternative healing modalities that will help you recover from a traumatic brain injury and move out of the space of PTSD into a calmer, more peaceful existence. The extraordinary journey the book takes you on through the chaotic experience of post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury will touch your heart and inspire you to believe in yourself and what you are capable of. It is put in terms easy to understand how the modalities work, and what they do for you. This is a great guide book for those unfamiliar with alternative healing.

On an autumn morning in 1849, Henry David Thoreau stepped out his front door to walk the beaches of Cape Cod. Over a century and a half later, Ben Shattuck does the same. With little more than a loaf of bread, brick of cheese, and a notebook, Shattuck sets out to retrace Thoreau’s path through the Cape’s outer beaches, from the elbow to Provincetown’s fingertip.

In the spring of 2021, worn down by pandemic isolation, Merilyn Simonds asked her friend Beth Robinson if she’d like to go for a walk. Simonds had just turned 70, which struck her as mysterious, even frightening stage of life. Yet she was still active, still writing and felt as strong as ever. Beth had just hit her centenary, a smart, vibrant woman who'd held a job until she was 99, still lived alone, and was as awake to the world as a person half her age. Who better to ask what might come next?

By the time Brittany Penner is seven years old, she has loved and lost twenty-one foster siblings who have come into her family and left—all of them Indigenous like her. "When will it be my turn?" she asks her mother time and time again. "When will I be taken away?" You won't be, she is told. You're adopted. You're here to stay. You're the lucky one.

"I never set out to hike 10,000 miles. It just sort of happened over the course of a decade." And so goes Lawton Grinter's compelling collection of short stories that have been over ten years and 10,000 trail miles in the making. I Hike brings the reader trailside with blissful moments on the highest mountain ridges to the mental lows of mosquito hell and into some peculiar situations that even seasoned hikers may find unbelievable.

In her third memoir, Portland-based author Caroline Kurtz travels the coast of Oregon on foot in her late sixties, tracing the boundary of sand and salt water, rock and forests, carrying her shelter and food as she navigates the edges of solace and resolution after the death of her husband.

This book restores a little-known advocate of Indian rights to her place in history. In June 1889 a widowed Brooklyn artist named Catherine Weldon traveled to the Standing Rock Reservation in Dakota Territory to help Sitting Bull hold on to land that the government was trying to wrest from his people. Her efforts were counterproductive; she was ordered to leave the reservation, and the Standing Rock Sioux were bullied into signing away their land. But she returned with her teenage son, settling at Sitting Bull's camp on the Grand River.

In Walking through Fire, Nawal El Saadawi, author of Woman at Point Zero and one of the Arab world’s greatest writers, tells the story of the later years of a life which shaped an iconic voice in global feminism. Covering her life in Nasser’s then Sadat’s and Mubarak’s Egypt, we learn about Saadawi’s experience of marriage and motherhood, and we travel with her into exile after her life was threatened by religious extremists. Filled with warmth as well as critical reflection, this book reveals the later years of a remarkable life dedicated to the fight for justice and equality.

The Police have sold more than 50 million albums, made Rolling Stone's Greatest Artists of All Time list, and finished a triumphant world reunion tour in 2008. Now British journalist Chris Campion draws on extensive research and new interviews to trace the inside saga of this iconic group, including the unorthodox business strategies employed by manager Miles Copeland that took them to the top and the intense rivalry that drove Sting, Andy Summers, and Stewart Copeland to split at the height of their success in the 1980s.

We all know Sydney is full of corruption and crime, but none of us expected to read about a Sydney businessman being shot in the back of his head, in his driveway, in front of his nine-year-old son, in Cremorne. Nor that the order would come from a Point Piper millionaire. Kate McClymont is Australia's best-known investigative journalist. Kate and McGurk received intel that he was going to be 'hit'. Before the two could meet, McGurk was murdered.

In 1986, Ricky Ross started a full-time career in music, which has lasted for over 35 years. His earlier working life was spent in youth work and teaching in his home city of Dundee, and his adopted home of Glasgow. It was in these two cities where he spent his formative years learning how to write and play songs. Having always written about the people and places who've made an impact on his life, it's no surprise that this is how he has approached Walking Back Home, his first-ever memoir.

After finding himself homeless, Army veteran Jake Sansing decides to walk across America. Motivated by helping others and hoping to ease his symptoms of PTSD, his trek carries him much further than he intended. Follow along on this incredibly detailed journey that takes him from Tennessee to Maryland, to California, to Florida, to Alaska, back to Florida, and back to California again. Alone and unsupported, Jake must battle the elements, loneliness, near-death experiences, and, inevitably, his inner demons.

Corey King was diagnosed with a chronic, incurable disease at age 47. Eight years later, Corey continues his story of fighting disability with humor, honesty, and realistic optimism. Walking with Parkinson chronicles Corey's journey from diagnosis through denial and acceptance and finally, to defiance. He believes that challenges are made to be overcome and that we all have a purpose, and he illustrates his belief with stories from his own life.

In Clare Balding's family, walking just took too long - she galloped through the countryside and she galloped through life. Then, in 1999, Clare took a call from a BBC producer looking for a presenter for a new radio series. "Do you walk?" she asked. "Well, I walk the dog...." That series, Ramblings, is still going strong - and Clare's caught the walking bug. Now she wants her family to share some of that pleasure. Her and her brother Andrew are determined to conquer the Wayfarer's Walk, a 71-mile route. What could possibly go wrong?

Growing up in abject poverty, terrorized by a boarder who lived in the root cellar, Athena Demetrios repressed the memories, thrusting her into a downward spiral of melancholy and despair. Transcendence and healing would come through reliving the horrors of her past through hypnotic regression. A powerful spiritual experience opened doors into other dimensions, which began an odyssey where truth became stranger than fiction.

The Fulani are the largest surviving group of nomads on the planet. In Walking with Abel, Anna Badkhen embeds herself with a family of Fulani cowboys - nomadic herders in Mali's Sahel grasslands - as they embark on their annual migration across the savanna.

The story begins in the warm climes of New Zealand in the South Pacific when an online friendship between an American and a New Zealander blossoms into romance, and it concludes among the Eskimo in the wintry wilds of remote Alaska. For adventurous romantics and armchair travelers alike.

Two vicars, their marriage in tatters with wounds reaching far back into the past, set out on a journey to find healing and restoration. Their route will take them from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, but will it help them find their way home?

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....