Adventure & Exploration
"A wanderlust-whetting cabinet of curiosities on paper."-- New York Times
Inspiring equal parts wonder and wanderlust, Atlas Obscura is a phenomenon of a travel book that shot to the top of bestseller lists when it was first published and changed the way we think about the world, expanding our sense of how strange and marvelous it really is.
This second edition takes readers to even more curious and unusual destinations, with more than 100 new places, dozens and dozens of new photographs, and two very special features: twelve city guides, covering Berlin, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Cairo, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Moscow, New York City, Paris, Shanghai, and Tokyo. Plus a foldout map with a dream itinerary for the ultimate around-the-world road trip. More a cabinet of curiosities than traditional guidebook, Atlas Obscura revels in the unexpected, the overlooked, the bizarre, and the mysterious. Here are natural wonders, like the dazzling glowworm caves in New Zealand, or a baobob tree in South Africa so large it has a pub inside where 15 people can sit and drink comfortably. Architectural marvels, including the M. C. Escher-like stepwells in India. Mind-boggling events, like the Baby-Jumping Festival in Spain--and no, it's not the babies doing the jumping, but masked men dressed as devils who vault over rows of squirming infants.
Every page gets to the very core of why humans want to travel in the first place: to be delighted and disoriented, uprooted from the familiar and amazed by the new. With its compelling descriptions, hundreds of photographs, surprising charts, maps for every region of the world, and new city guides, it is a book you can open anywhere and be transported. But proceed with caution: It's almost impossible not to turn to the next entry, and the next, and the next.
The Endurance : Shackelton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing
This is one of my favorite Non-Fiction books of all time. In August 1914 The Endurance, lead by Ernest Shackelton and his twenty-eight crew members, set out to be the first explorers to cross the continent by way of the South Pole, taking scientific measurements and mapping a new territory. But the ship got trapped in ice. The crew abandoned ship, removing all they could before it sank, including their sled dogs, a few small boats and sledges, food and water, medical supplies and scientific equipment. The explorers had to survive and find their way back to civilization by crossing on ice flows and open water, all the while freezing cold and existing through unbearable hardships. The book captures the personalities of all the men who made this astonishing trip, as well as the descriptive icy landscape of the Antarctica. Time and time again they were faced with a new crisis, and the story builds in tension to a point where I, on my couch, thought it couldn’t get worse—and then it did. But Shackelton leads them home, eventually, every last one of them. A sobering and inspiring book.
Sarah Willis
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"Stylishly written, whimsical yet sophisticated, quirkily detailed and full of empathy . . . The Orchid Thief shows [Orlean's] gifts in full bloom."--The New York Times Book Review "Fascinating . . . an engrossing journey [full] of theft, hatred, greed, jealousy, madness, and backstabbing."--Los Angeles Times
"Orlean's snapshot-vivid, pitch-perfect prose . . . is fast becoming one of our national treasures."--The Washington Post Book World
"Orlean's gifts [are] her ear for the self-skewing dialogue, her eye for the incongruous, convincing detail, and her Didion-like deftness in description."--Boston Sunday Globe "A swashbuckling piece of reporting that celebrates some virtues that made America great."--The Wall Street Journal
At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, The River of Doubt is the true story of Theodore Roosevelt's harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth.
The River of Doubt--it is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes through one of the most treacherous jungles in the world. Indians armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows; piranhas glide through its waters; boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling cauldron.
After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon. Together with his son Kermit and Brazil's most famous explorer, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it. In the process, he changed the map of the western hemisphere forever.
Along the way, Roosevelt and his men faced an unbelievable series of hardships, losing their canoes and supplies to punishing whitewater rapids, and enduring starvation, Indian attack, disease, drowning, and a murder within their own ranks. Three men died, and Roosevelt was brought to the brink of suicide. The River of Doubtbrings alive these extraordinary events in a powerful nonfiction narrative thriller that happens to feature one of the most famous Americans who ever lived.
From the soaring beauty of the Amazon rain forest to the darkest night of Theodore Roosevelt's life, here is Candice Millard's dazzling debut.
The River of Doubt : Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey, by Candice Millard
Did you know that Theodore Roosevelt ran for a third term, this time with the Progressive Party, a new, independent third party? That when he lost, he decided to join an expedition of The River of Doubt, a tributary of the Amazon River? He did, along with the Brazilian explorer Candido Rondon and Roosevelt’s son, Kermit. Of the nineteen men who attempted to map The River of Doubt, only sixteen survived.
Everything that could go wrong did. The explores contracted serious diseases, lost canoes and built new ones, encountered white water rapids and portaged around them, and faced starvation and rebellion. One man drowned, one was murdered, and one (the murderer) was left behind. Roosevelt himself, suffering from Malaria, was wounded in his leg and developed an almost fatal infection. He even considered suicide before they were found by native “rubber-trappers” who helped them traverse the river back to civilization.
The descriptions of these events and of the dense, dangerous Amazon forest are absolutely riveting. Written by Candice Millard, this book is a must for anyone interested in the tragedy and triumphs of historical exploration.
Sarah Willis
For its twenty-fifth anniversary, a new edition of Bruce Chatwin's classic work with a new introduction by Rory Stewart
Part adventure, part novel of ideas, part spiritual autobiography, The Songlines is one of Bruce Chatwin's most famous books. Set in the desolate lands of the Australian Outback, it tells the story of Chatwin's search for the source and meaning of the ancient "dreaming tracks" of the Aborigines--the labyrinth of invisible pathways by which their ancestors "sang" the world into existence. This singular book, which was a New York Times bestseller when it was published in 1987, engages all of Chatwin's lifelong passions, including his obsession with travel, his interest in the nomadic way of life, and his hunger to understand man's origins and nature.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
In 2009, after a crippling divorce that left her heartbroken and directionless, Kristin decided to accept an offer to live at a friend's cabin outside of Denali National Park in Alaska for a few months. In exchange for housing, she would take care of her friend's eight sled dogs.
That winter, she learned that she was tougher than she ever knew. She learned how to survive in one of the most remote places on earth and she learned she was strong enough to be alone. She fell in love twice: first with running sled dogs, and then with Andy, a gentle man who had himself moved to Alaska to heal a broken heart. Kristin and Andy married and started a sled dog kennel. While this work was enormously satisfying, Kristin became determined to complete the Iditarod -- the 1,000-mile dogsled race from Anchorage, in south central Alaska, to Nome on the western Bering Sea coast. THIS MUCH COUNTRY is the story of renewal and transformation. It's about journeying across a wild and unpredictable landscape and finding inner peace, courage and a true home. It's about pushing boundaries and overcoming paralyzing fears.
"THIS MUCH COUNTRY is the next best thing to stepping on the runners of your own dogsled. A gorgeous, intimate story of wildness and belonging."--Blair Braverman, author of Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER
At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State--and she would do it alone. Told with suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.