Adventure & Exploration
One of the unique and most scenic treasures in the Midwest, the Shawnee National Forest spans more than 279,000 acres deep in southern Illinois. The natural beauty, stunning vistas, and diverse flora and fauna of this picturesque region invite exploration by all who love nature. This easy-to-use guidebook highlights 20 exciting day or weekend trips within and near the Shawnee National Forest, making it easy to take advantage of the forest's myriad opportunities for outdoor recreational activity.
Intended for those without extensive hiking or camping experience, the guide provides all of the information necessary to safely and proficiently explore all the forest has to offer. Entertaining narratives describe each journey in vivid detail, offering advice on needed supplies, pointing out shortcuts, and spotlighting not-to-miss views. Entries also include thorough directions, GPS coordinates, trail difficulty ratings, landform descriptions, exact distances between points, and a list of available facilities at each location.
From biking and bird watching to hiking, horseback riding, and rock climbing, the Shawnee National Forest is home to an abundance of possibilities for outdoor fun. With this practical guide in hand, adventure seekers and nature lovers alike can make the most of southern Illinois's own natural treasure.
Best Travel Guide of the Year by Booklist, 2013Tenzing Norgay (1914-1986) was the Tibetan mountaineer who led Sir Edmund Hilary to the top of Mount Everest in 1953. The two men became the first people to set foot on the summit of the world's highest peak. After Everest is Norgay's autobiography, as told to Malcom Barnes.
Vikas Publishing, New Delhi, India, 1977 first printing. Dust jacket in protective cover; head of spine torn and missing; bottom of spine chipped; top edges and corners creased and chipped; dark green cloth with yellow lettering on spine; area of fading at head of spine and top front cover; endpapers tanned; autographed signed letter laid in; inscribed on half-title; binding good; text clean. G+/G-
In 2015, 36-year-old Chicago resident David King finds himself at a personal and professional crossroads. Feeling bored and restless, he longs to strike out on a crazy journey in a quest for beauty, kindness, and inspiration as to where his life should go from here. Having taken up biking as a hobby, he consults a map of the United States and, in a spur-of-the-moment decision, vows to ride across the country - from San Diego to Miami.
Over the course of four months, "America on Two Wheels: Biking Coast to Coast in Search of Human Stories" follows David's journey as he pedals more than 3,000 miles across mountains, desert, bayou, and tropical flatlands, overcoming physical and mental challenges in pursuit of a destination he's not sure he'll even reach. Painting a tableau of adventure and a world of possibility in the vein of Jack Kerouac or Paul Theroux, he introduces readers to an unforgettable cast of characters and their unsung acts of kindness. David invites the reader to join him on a journey through fear, doubt, patience, and discovery - not just across a continent, but toward a profound lesson of gratitude. Part travelogue, part memoir, part spiritual journey, "America on Two Wheels" is an ode to pursuing the open road with an open heart.
In this travel memoir, the acclaimed novelist Jamaica Kincaid chronicles a three-week trek through Nepal, the spectacular and exotic Himalayan land, where she and her companions are gathering seeds for planting at home. The natural world and, in particular, plants and gardening are central to Kincaid's work; in addition to such novels as Annie John and Lucy, Kincaid is the author of My Garden (Book): a collection of essays about her love of cultivating plants and gardens throughout her life. Among Flowers intertwines meditations on nature and stunning descriptions of the Himalayan landscape with observations on the ironies, difficulties, and dangers of this magnificent journey.
For Kincaid and three botanist friends, Nepal is a paradise, a place where a single day's hike can traverse climate zones, from subtropical to alpine, encompassing flora suitable for growing at their homes, from Wales to Vermont. Yet as she makes clear, there is far more to this foreign world than rhododendrons that grow thirty feet high. Danger, too, is a constant companion--and the leeches are the least of the worries. Unpredictable Maoist guerillas live in these perilous mountains, and when they do appear--as they do more than once--their enigmatic presence lingers long after they have melted back into the landscape. And Kincaid, who writes of the looming, lasting effects of colonialism in her works, necessarily explores the irony of her status as memsahib with Sherpas and bearers. A wonderful blend of introspective insight and beautifully rendered description, Among Flowers is a vivid, engrossing, and characteristically frank memoir from one of our most striking voices.Written on the brink of World War II, Rebecca West's classic examination of the history, people, and politics of Yugoslavia illuminates a region that is still a focus of international concern. A magnificent blend of travel journal, cultural commentary, and historical insight, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon probes the troubled history of the Balkans and the uneasy relationships among its ethnic groups. The landscape and the people of Yugoslavia are brilliantly observed as West untangles the tensions that rule the country's history as well as its daily life. 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.
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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A harrowing tale of the perils of high-altitude climbing, a story of bad luck and worse judgment and of heartbreaking heroism. --PEOPLE A bank of clouds was assembling on the not-so-distant horizon, but journalist-mountaineer Jon Krakauer, standing on the summit of Mt. Everest, saw nothing that suggested that a murderous storm was bearing down. He was wrong. By writing Into Thin Air, Krakauer may have hoped to exorcise some of his own demons and lay to rest some of the painful questions that still surround the event. He takes great pains to provide a balanced picture of the people and events he witnessed and gives due credit to the tireless and dedicated Sherpas. He also avoids blasting easy targets such as Sandy Pittman, the wealthy socialite who brought an espresso maker along on the expedition. Krakauer's highly personal inquiry into the catastrophe provides a great deal of insight into what went wrong. But for Krakauer himself, further interviews and investigations only lead him to the conclusion that his perceived failures were directly responsible for a fellow climber's death. Clearly, Krakauer remains haunted by the disaster, and although he relates a number of incidents in which he acted selflessly and even heroically, he seems unable to view those instances objectively. In the end, despite his evenhanded and even generous assessment of others' actions, he reserves a full measure of vitriol for himself. This updated trade paperback edition of Into Thin Air includes an extensive new postscript that sheds fascinating light on the acrimonious debate that flared between Krakauer and Everest guide Anatoli Boukreev in the wake of the tragedy. I have no doubt that Boukreev's intentions were good on summit day, writes Krakauer in the postscript, dated August 1999. What disturbs me, though, was Boukreev's refusal to acknowledge the possibility that he made even a single poor decision. Never did he indicate that perhaps it wasn't the best choice to climb without gas or go down ahead of his clients. As usual, Krakauer supports his points with dogged research and a good dose of humility. But rather than continue the heated discourse that has raged since Into Thin Air's denouncement of guide Boukreev, Krakauer's tone is conciliatory; he points most of his criticism at G. Weston De Walt, who coauthored The Climb, Boukreev's version of events. And in a touching conclusion, Krakauer recounts his last conversation with the late Boukreev, in which the two weathered climbers agreed to disagree about certain points. Krakauer had great hopes to patch things up with Boukreev, but the Russian later died in an avalanche on another Himalayan peak, Annapurna I. In 1999, Krakauer received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters--a prestigious prize intended to honor writers of exceptional accomplishment. According to the Academy's citation, Krakauer combines the tenacity and courage of the finest tradition of investigative journalism with the stylish subtlety and profound insight of the born writer. His account of an ascent of Mount Everest has led to a general reevaluation of climbing and of the commercialization of what was once a romantic, solitary sport; while his account of the life and death of Christopher McCandless, who died of starvation after challenging the Alaskan wilderness, delves even more deeply and disturbingly into the fascination of nature and the devastating effects of its lure on a young and curious mind.