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A Life Wild and Perilous: Mountain Men and the Paths to the Pacific
Par Robert M. Utley. 1822
Early in the nineteenth century, the mountain men emerged as a small but distinctive group whose knowledge and experience of…
the trans-Mississippi West extended the national consciousness to continental dimensions. Though Lewis and Clark blazed a narrow corridor of geographical reality, the West remained largely terra incognita until trappers and traders--Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Tom Fitzpatrick, Jedediah Smith--opened paths through the snow-choked mountain wilderness. They opened the way west to Fremont and played a major role in the pivotal years of 1845-1848 when Texas was annexed, the Oregon question was decided, and the Mexican War ended with the Southwest and California in American hands, the Pacific Ocean becoming our western boundary.Tales from the Edge: True Adventures in Alaska
Par Larry Kaniut. 2013
From the Klondike to the Bering Sea, from Alaska's bounty that brought fortunes to some to its wilderness that claimed…
the lives of others, Tales from the Edge explores the myth, beauty, and peril of the arctic landscape. Editor Larry Kaniut brings together some of the world's best outdoor adventure writers to celebrate the land and the people who have measured themselves against it.Tales from the Edge is a celebration of Alaska featuring such notable contributors as Peter Jenkins, Spike Walker, Jay Hammond, Nick Jans, Dana Stabenow, Larry Kaniut, and more. Tales from the Edge will stir the soul and imagination of every armchair adventurer.The Millionaire and the Mummies: Theodore Davis’s Gilded Age in the Valley of the Kings
Par John M. Adams. 2013
Egypt, The Valley of the Kings, 1905: An American robber baron peers through the hole he has cut in an…
ancient tomb wall and discovers the richest trove of golden treasure ever seen in Egypt. At the start of the twentieth century, Theodore Davis was the most famous archaeologist in the world; his career turned tomb-robbing and treasure-hunting into a science. Using six of Davis's most important discoveries—from the female Pharaoh Hatshepsut's sarcophagus to the exquisite shabti statuettes looted from the Egyptian Museum not too long ago—as a lens around which to focus his quintessentially American rags-to-riches tale, Adams chronicles the dizzying rise of a poor country preacher's son who, through corruption and fraud, amassed tremendous wealth in Gilded Age New York and then atoned for his ruthless career by inventing new standards for systematic excavation in the field of archaeology. Davis found a record eighteen tombs in the Valley and, breaking with custom, gave all the spoils of his discoveries to museums. A confederate of Boss Tweed, friend of Teddy Roosevelt, and rival of J. P. Morgan, the colorful "American Lord Carnarvon" shared his Newport mansion with his Rembrandts, his wife, and his mistress. The only reason Davis has been forgotten by history to a large extent is probably the fact that he stopped just short of King Tutankhamen's tomb, the discovery of which propelled Howard Carter (Davis's erstwhile employee) to worldwide fame just a few short years later. Drawing on rare and never-before-published archival material, The Millionaire and the Mummies, the first biography of Theodore Davis ever written rehabilitates a tarnished image through a thrilling tale of crime and adventure, filled with larger-than-life characters, unimaginable treasures, and exotic settings.Above the Clouds: The Diaries of a High-Altitude Mountaineer
Par Anatoli Boukreev. 1996
A breathtaking and lavishly illustrated autobiography in essays on Anatoli Boukreev, the late world-famous mountaineer and author of The Climb.When…
Anatoli Boukreev died on the slopes of Annapurna on Christmas day, 1997, the world lost one of the greatest adventurers of our time.In Above the Clouds, both the man and his incredible climbs on Mt. McKinley, K2, Makalu, Manaslu, and Everest-including his diary entries on the infamous 1996 disaster, written shortly after his return-are immortalized. There also are minute technical details about the skill of mountain climbing, as well as personal reflections on what life means to someone who risks it every day. Fully illustrated with gorgeous color photos, Above the Clouds is a unique and breathtaking look at the world from its most remote peaks.Peter Zheutlin's thoroughly researched account will make you wish you'd been around to catch a glimpse of the extraordinary woman…
as she went wheeling by. --Bill Littlefield, National Public Radio's Only A GameUntil 1894 there were no female sport stars, no product endorsement deals, and no young mothers with the chutzpah to circle the globe on a bicycle. Annie Londonderry changed all of that. When Annie left Boston in June of that year, she was a brash young lady with a 42-pound bicycle, a revolver, a change of underwear, and a dream of freedom. She was also a feisty mother of three who had become the center of what one newspaper called "one of the most novel wagers ever made": a high-stakes bet between two wealthy merchants that a woman could not ride around the world on a bicycle. The epic journey that followed took the connection between athletics and commercialism to dizzying new heights, and turned Annie Londonderry into a symbol of women's equality. A vastly entertaining blend of social history, high adventure, and maverick marketing, Around the World on Two Wheels is an unforgettable portrait of courage, imagination, and tenacity. "Annie was a remarkable woman and well worth getting to know." --Booklist"A wonderful telling of one of the most intriguing, offbeat, and until now, lost chapters in the history of cycling." --David Herlihy, author of Bicycle: The History "A pleasant, affectionate portrait of a free spirit who pedaled her way out of Victorian constraints." --Kirkus Reviews"[A] charming and informative book." --Cape Cod Times"[An] incredible story. . .[a] fascinating book." --NextReads "[A] stirring tale. . .not only a must read, but a must have." --Western Writers of America Roundup Magazine"[A] remarkable saga." --The Winston-Salem (NC) Journal"[R]ead[s]. . .like a novel." --The Columbia (SC) State"[M]eticulously researched. . .illuminat[es] the feeling of a bygone era." --The Portsmouth (NH) Wire Peter Zheutlin has been chasing the story of his great-grandaunt Annie Londonderry for more than four years. He is an avid cyclist and a freelance journalist whose work appears regularly in the Boston Globe and the Christian Science Monitor. He has also written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, AARP Magazine, Bicycling, the New England Quarterly, and other publications. He lives in Needham, Massachusetts.Samba Perdido
Par Richard Klein. 2018
Passado no colorido Rio de Janeiro, Samba Perdido é um livro instigante de memórias do Brasil. Situado nos anos 1960,…
1970 e 1980, o livro fornece um poderoso insight de um período em que o pais lutava para sair de uma ditadura e se descobria como uma sociedade livre e democrática. Em paralelo a esse drama, Samba Perdido narra o caminho do autor em obter sua própria identidade brasileira como filho de imigrantes ingleses imersos na complexidade do país. Richard Klein nasceu no Rio de Janeiro em 1962 – o mesmo ano em que os Rolling Stones e os Beatles gravaram seus primeiros singles e no mesmo ano em que o Brasil ganhou a sua segunda Copa do Mundo de futebol. Seu pais judaico-ingleses, haviam se mudado para um florescente Rio de Janeiro logo após a 2ª Guerra Mundial e prosperaram. Eles nunca, entretanto, se adaptaram totalmente à sua nova terra, – e certamente ao futebol ou ao rock and roll. Richard, no entanto, cresceria para amar ambos. Richard mostra, em primeira mão, a vida, a diversão e os excessos da elite de sua geração privilegiada pelo regime militar. Sob uma ótica ao mesmo tempo estrangeira e nacional, o autor surpreende o leitor com piadas, aventuras, reflexões e fatos, ao mesmo tempo que consegue fornecer uma imersão em uma época maravilhosamente conturbada da história brasileira.From Muscle Beach to Hollywood superstar to The Governator—Ian Halperin, investigative journalist and # 1 New York Times bestselling author,…
reveals the untold story about the outsized and often outrageous Arnold Schwarzenegger. The former Austrian bodybuilding icon turned movie action hero turned governor of California is portrayed in all his larger-than-life glory in The Governator, an intimate biography that masterfully chronicles the twists and turns of Schwartzenegger’s amazing true-life Horatio Alger story.Discover Florida’s unique places across time through writings from history How has Florida’s land changed across five centuries? What…
has stayed the same, and what remains only in memory? In Tracing Florida Journeys, Leslie Poole delves into the stories of well-known explorers and travelers who came to the peninsula and wrote about their experiences, looking at their words and the paths they took from the perspective of today. In these pages, John Muir and Harriet Beecher Stowe write about their visits to Florida, reflecting their expectations of a place that was touted to be “paradise.” John James Audubon finds riches of bird life in the Keys. Zora Neale Hurston travels to turpentine camps and sawmills documenting the stories and music of workers and residents. Jonathan Dickinson and Stephen Crane recount shipwrecks along a sparsely populated coastline. Members of Hernando de Soto’s violent 1539 expedition of conquest describe their struggles with dense swamps, forests, and rivers, and resistance from the Native people they exploited. Using journals and articles by these and other authors that date back to the early European exploration of the region, Poole retraces their steps. The land they write about is often hard to imagine in today’s Florida, a top destination for tourists filled with almost 22 million residents. These stories show the evolving history of the state and the richness of its natural resources. Poole’s comparisons also point to the people who have been displaced and the ecosystems that have been dramatically altered by exploration and development. Highlighting the Florida that was and the Florida that exists now, Poole brings together historical research, interviews with experts, and her personal experiences to tell a revealing story of the state’s natural history. Funding for this publication was provided through a grant from Florida Humanities with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent those of Florida Humanities or the National Endowment for the Humanities.Hashish
Par Henry De Monfreid. 2007
Nobleman, writer, adventurer and inspiration for the swashbuckling gun runner in the Adventures of Tintin, Henri de Monfried lived by…
his own account ‘a rich, restless, magnificent life’ as one of the great travellers of his or any age. Infamous as well as famous, his name is inextricably linked to the Red Sea and the raffish ports between Suez and Aden in the early years of the twentieth century. This is a compelling account of how de Monfried seeks his fortune by becoming a collector and merchant of the fabled Gulf pearls, then is drawn into the shadowy world of arms trading, slavery, smuggling and drugs. Hashish was the drug of choice, and de Monfried writes of sailing to Suez with illegal cargos, dodging blockades and pirates.Kingbird Highway: The Biggest Year in the Life of an Extreme Birder
Par Kenn Kaufman. 2006
An ornithologist&’s account of his youthful, year-long, cross-country birdwatching adventure: &“A fascinating memoir of an obsession.&” —Booklist At sixteen, Kenn…
Kaufman dropped out of the high school where he was student council president and hit the road, hitching back and forth across America, from Alaska to Florida, Maine to Mexico. Maybe not all that unusual a thing to do in the seventies, but what Kenn was searching for was a little different: not sex, drugs, God, or even self, but birds. A report of a rare bird would send him hitching nonstop from Pacific to Atlantic and back again. When he was broke he would pick fruit or do odd jobs to earn the fifty dollars or so that would last him for weeks. His goal was to set a record—most North American species seen in a year—but along the way he began to realize that at this breakneck pace he was only looking, not seeing. What had been a game became a quest for a deeper understanding of the natural world. Kingbird Highway is a unique coming-of-age story, combining a lyrical celebration of nature with wild, and sometimes dangerous, adventures, starring a colorful cast of characters.Winter Brothers: A Season at the Edge of America
Par Ivan Doig. 1982
A blend of modern-day travel memoir and nineteenth-century history, &“infused with the fresh air and spirit of the Northwest&” (The…
New York Times Book Review). The author of the acclaimed This House of Sky and Mountain Time provides a magnificent evocation of the Pacific Northwest through his exploration of the unpublished diaries of James Gilchrist Swan, an early settler of the region who was drawn there from Boston in the 1850s. Winter Brothers fuses excerpts from these diaries with author Ivan Doig&’s own journal entries, as he travels in Swan&’s footsteps one winter along the once-wild coastline of Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. What emerges is a remarkable interaction of two minds, a dialogue across time that links the present with the reality of the American frontier. &“Absorbing . . . A double portrait of striking clarity, yet with wonderfully subtle hues.&” —San Francisco ChronicleThe Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica
Par David G. Campbell. 1992
The acclaimed author and biologist shares “a superb personal account [of Antarctica] . . . a remarkable evocation of a land at the…
bottom of the world” (Boston Globe).During the 1980s, biologist David Campbell spent three summers in Antarctica, researching its surprisingly plentiful wildlife. In The Crystal Desert, he combines travelogue, nature writing and science history to tell the story of life's tenacity on the coldest of Earth's continents. Between scuba expeditions in Admiralty Bay, Campbell remembers the explorers who discovered Antarctica, the whalers and sealers who despoiled it, and the scientists who laid the groundwork to decipher its mysteries. Chronicling the desperately short summers in beautiful, lucid prose, he presents a fascinating portrait of the evolution of life in Antarctica and of the continent itself.Winner of the John Burroughs Medal for Natural History Writing and a Houghton Mifflin Literary FellowshipEverest, Inc.: The Renegades and Rogues Who Built an Industry at the Top of the World
Par Will Cockrell. 2024
Featuring original interviews with mountain guides and climbers—including Jimmy Chin and Conrad Anker—this vivid and authoritative adventure history chronicles one…
of the least likely industries on Earth: guided climbing on Mount Everest.Anyone who has read Jon Krakauer&’s Into Thin Air or has seen a recent photo of climbers standing in line to get to the top of Everest may think they have the mountain pretty well figured out. It&’s an extreme landscape where bad weather and incredible altitude can occasionally kill, but more so an overcrowded, trashed-out recreation destination where rich clients pad their egos—and social media feeds—while exploiting local Sherpas. There&’s some truth to these clichés, but they&’re a sliver of the story. Unlike any book to date, Everest, Inc. gets to the heart of the mountain through the definitive story of its greatest invention: the Himalayan guiding industry. It all began in the 1980s with a few boot-strapping entrepreneurs who paired raw courage and naked ambition with a new style of expedition planning. Many of them are still living and climbing today, and as a result of their astonishing success, ninety percent of the people now on Everest are clients or employees of guided expeditions. Studded with quotes from original interviews with more than a hundred western and Sherpa climbers, clients, writers, filmmakers, and even a Hollywood actor, Everest, Inc. foregrounds the voices of the people who have made the mountain what it is today. And while there is plenty of high-altitude drama in unpacking the last forty years of Everest tragedy and triumph, it ultimately transcends stereotypes and tells the uplifting counternarrative of the army of journeymen and women who have made people&’s dreams come true, and of the Nepalis who are pushing the industry into the future.Ghost Town Living: Mining for Purpose and Chasing Dreams at the Edge of Death Valley
Par Brent Underwood. 2024
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A long-abandoned silver mine for sale sounded like an adventure too great to pass up, but…
it turned into much more—a calling, a community of millions, and hard-earned lessons about chasing impractical dreams.&“Inspiring and meditative—the story of man vs nature and man vs himself.&”—Ryan Holiday, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Obstacle is the WayThe siren song of Cerro Gordo, a desolate ghost town perched high above Death Valley, has seduced thousands since the 1800s, but few fell harder for it than Brent Underwood, who moved there in March of 2020, only to be immediately snowed in and trapped for weeks.It had once been the largest silver mine in California. Over $500 million worth of ore was pulled from the miles of tunnels below the town. Butch Cassidy, Mark Twain, and other infamous characters of the American West were rumored to have stayed there. Newspapers reported a murder a week. But that was over 150 years ago.Underwood bet his life savings—and his life—on this majestic, hardscrabble town that had broken its fair share of ambitious men and women. What followed were fires, floods, earthquakes, and perhaps strangest, fame. Ghost Town Living tells the story of a man against the elements, a forgotten historic place against the modern world, and a dream against all odds—one that has captured millions of followers around the world.He came looking for a challenge different from the traditional 9-5 job but discovered something much more fulfilling—an undertaking that would call on all of himself and push him beyond what he knew he was capable of. In fact, to bring this abandoned town back to life, Brent had to learn a wealth of new self-sufficiency and problem-solving skills from many generous mentors.Ghost Town Living is a thrilling read, but it&’s also a call to action—to question our too-practical lives and instead seek adventure, build something original, redefine work, and embrace the unknown. It shows what it means to dedicate your life to something, to take a mighty swing at a crazy idea and, like the cardsharps who once haunted Cerro Gordo, go all in.The Mountain: My Time on Everest
Par Ed Viesturs, David Roberts. 2013
In national bestseller The Mountain, world-renowned climber and bestselling author Ed Viesturs and cowriter David Roberts paint a vivid portrait…
of obsession, dedication, and human achievement in a true love letter to the world’s highest peak.In The Mountain, veteran world-class climber and bestselling author Ed Viesturs—the only American to have climbed all fourteen of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks—trains his sights on Mount Everest in richly detailed accounts of expeditions that are by turns personal, harrowing, deadly, and inspiring.The highest mountain on earth, Everest remains the ultimate goal for serious high-altitude climbers. Viesturs has gone on eleven expeditions to Everest, spending more than two years of his life on the mountain and reaching the summit seven times. No climber today is better poised to survey Everest’s various ascents—both personal and historic. Viesturs sheds light on the fate of Mallory and Irvine, whose 1924 disappearance just 800 feet from the summit remains one of mountaineering’s greatest mysteries, as well as the multiply tragic last days of Rob Hall and Scott Fischer in 1996, the stuff of which Into Thin Air was made.Informed by the experience of one who has truly been there, The Mountain affords a rare glimpse into that place on earth where Heraclitus’s maxim—“Character is destiny”—is proved time and again.Running Against the Tide: True Tales from the Stud of the Sea
Par Captain Lee, Michael Shohl. 2018
From the star of Bravo&’s hit reality show Below Deck comes Running Against the Tide, the &“Stud of the Sea&’s&”…
first-ever memoir recounting his journey from landlocked Saginaw, Michigan to the high seas, where he has spent more than twenty-five years as a superyacht captain.The cast members of Below Deck are known for their catfights, scheming, personal attacks, and long-held grudges, but what keeps viewers coming back week after week is resident hero Captain Lee, the only cast member to appear in all five seasons.But you don&’t have to be one of Below Deck&’s 1.5 million weekly viewers to appreciate Captain Lee&’s story, which offers a glimpse behind-the-scenes at the luxury yachting industry and one of Bravo&’s biggest franchises. From having to reclaim his drunk captain's lost papers in the Dominican Republic to unwittingly crewing a drug boat out of Turks and Caicos to navigating the outrageous demands of the super-rich in New York City, Captain Lee's tales from the high seas run the gamut, proving time and time again why he&’s a fan favorite: he&’s occasionally profane, he&’s often surprising, but he&’s never dull and, for the first time, he&’s here to tell all.Ten Million Aliens: A Journey Through the Entire Animal Kingdom
Par Simon Barnes. 2015
For Discovery Channel enthusiasts, this scientific foray into life on planet earth examines how the world&’s creatures--both weird and wonderful--are…
inextricably linked.Life on planet earth is not weirder than we imagine. It’s weirder than we are capable of imagining. And we’re all in it together: humans, blue whales, rats, birds of paradise, ridiculous numbers of beetles, molluscs the size of a bus, the sexual gladiators of slugs, bdelloid rotifers who haven’t had sex for millions of years and creatures called water bears: you can boil them, freeze them and fire them off into space without killing them.We’re all part of the animal kingdom, appearing in what Darwin called “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful." In this breathtakingly audacious book, Simon Barnes has brought us all together, seeking not what separates us but what unites us. He takes us white-water rafting through the entire animal kingdom in a book that brings in deep layers of arcane knowledge, the works of Darwin and James Joyce, Barnes’s own don’t-try-this-at-home adventures in the wild, David Attenborough and Sherlock Holmes. Ten Million Aliens opens your eyes to the real marvels of the planet we live on.One of the greatest nineteenth-century scientist-explorers, Alexander von Humboldt traversed the tropical Spanish Americas between 1799 and 1804. By the…
time of his death in 1859, he had won international fame for his scientific discoveries, his observations of Native American peoples and his detailed descriptions of the flora and fauna of the 'new continent'. The first to draw and speculate on Aztec art, to observe reverse polarity in magnetism and to discover why America is called America, his writings profoundly influenced the course of Victorian culture, causing Darwin to reflect: 'He alone gives any notion of the feelings which are raised in the mind on first entering the Tropics'.A New Voyage Round the World
Par William Dampier. 2020
'A roaring tale ... remains as vivid and exciting today as it was on publication in 1697' GuardianThe pirate and…
adventurer William Dampier circumnavigated the globe three times, and took notes wherever he went. This is his frank, vivid account of his buccaneering sea voyages around the world, from the Caribbean to the Pacific and East Indies. Filled with accounts of raids, escapes, wrecks and storms, it also contains precise observations of people, places, animals and food (including the first English accounts of guacamole, mango chutney and chopsticks). A bestseller on publication, this unique record of the colonial age influenced Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels and consequently the whole of English literature.Edited with an Introduction by Nicholas ThomasTo the Greatest Heights: Facing Danger, Finding Humility, and Climbing a Mountain of Truth
Par Vanessa O'Brien. 2021
This riveting and uplifting memoir by Vanessa O&’Brien, record-breaking American-British explorer, takes you on an unexpected journey to the top…
of the world&’s highest mountains. Long before she became the first American woman to summit K2 and the first British woman to return from its summit alive, Vanessa O&’Brien was a feisty suburban Detroit teenager forced to reinvent her world in the wake of a devastating loss that destroyed her family.Making her own way in the world, Vanessa strove to reach her lofty ambitions. Soon, armed with an MBA and a wry sense of humor, she climbed the corporate ladder to great success, but after the 2009 economic meltdown, her career went into a tailspin. She searched for a new purpose and settled on an unlikely goal: climbing Mount Everest. When her first attempt ended in disaster, she trudged home, humbled but wiser. Two years later, she made it to the top of the world. And then she kept going.Grounded by a cadre of wise-cracking friends and an inimitable British spouse, Vanessa held her own in the intensely competitive world of mountaineering, summiting the highest peak on every continent, and skiing the last degree to the North and South Poles. She set new speed records for the Seven Summits, receiving a Guinness World Record and the Explorers Grand Slam, and finally made peace with her traumatic past. During her attempt on K2, she very nearly gave up. But on the &“savage mountain,&” which kills one out of every four climbers who summit, Vanessa evolved from an adventurer out to challenge herself to an explorer with a high-altitude perspective on a changing world—and a new call to share her knowledge and passion across the globe.Told with heart and humor, Vanessa&’s journey from suburban Detroit to Everest&’s Death Zone to the summit of K2 and beyond, is a transformative story of resilience, higher purpose, and the courage to overcome any obstacle.