Explorer Memoirs

On May 15, 2010, after 210 days at sea and more than 22,000 nautical miles, 16-year-old Jessica Watson sailed her 33-foot boat triumphantly back to land. She had done it. She was the youngest person to sail solo, unassisted, and nonstop around the world. Jessica spent years preparing for this moment, years focused on achieving her dream. Yet only eight months before, she collided with a 63,000-ton freighter. It seemed to many that she’d failed before she’d even begun, but Jessica brushed herself off, held her head high, and kept going.

In July 1973, Bob Tininenko, his wife Linda, and his brother in-law Jim Fisher set sail from Tacoma, Washington, on a 31-foot trimaran, down the West Coast to Costa Rica. The journey was expected to take a matter of weeks, but 10 days into the cruise, the party encountered a freak storm off the coast of Northern California. When gale-force winds and 50-foot waves capsized their boat, the voyage became a nightmare. For 72 days, the trio was lost at sea. Challenged by nature and compromised by a bitter rivalry, their courage and will to live was put to the ultimate test.

Reporter Diana Marcum is in crisis. A long-buried personal sadness is enfolding her - and her career is stalled - when she stumbles upon an unusual group of immigrants living in rural California. She follows them on their annual return to the remote Azores islands in the Atlantic Ocean, where bulls run down village streets, volcanoes are active, and the people celebrate festas to ease their saudade, a longing so deep that the Portuguese word for it can’t be fully translated.

Cincuenta años después de la tragedia de los Andes, los sobrevivientes narran cómo lograron superar lo insuperable. El 13 de octubre de 1972 un avión de la Fuerza Aérea Uruguaya se estrelló en la cordillera de los Andes. Iban a bordo cuarenta y cinco personas, dieciséis de las cuales fallecieron en el acto o pocas horas después. Con alrededor de veinte años, a cuatro mil metros de altura y treinta grados bajo cero, sin abrigo ni comida, la relación entre víctimas y sobrevivientes se invirtió y solo regresaron con vida dieciséis.

The William E. Boeing Story: A Gift of Flight is the first ever full-length biography of William E. Boeing, the father of commercial aviation. Boeing's story is an exciting one, complete with bootleggers, kidnappers, and disastrous run-ins with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and future Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black.

Veteran sailor and writer Christian Williams invites us along once again on a 5,000-mile voyage of discovery around the North Pacific. Equipped with a new boat, a well-stocked toolbox, and the entire history of philosophic thought, he takes us as crew through squalls and calms deep into a laboratory of the universe that exists only out of sight of land. Funny, erudite, and at times deeply personal, Philosophy of Sailing explores who we are and how encounters with the unknown can be a path to revelation and joy.

The most accomplished mountain runner of all time contemplates his record-breaking climbs of Mount Everest in this profound memoir - an intellectual and spiritual journey that moves from the earth’s highest peak to the soul’s deepest reaches.

In 1977, at the age of 17, Conway left his family's comfortable suburban home to move to the Appalachian Mountains. For more than two decades he has lived there, making fire with sticks, wearing skins from animals he has trapped, and trying to convince Americans to give up their materialistic lifestyles and return with him back to nature.

The North Pole looms large in our collective psyche—the ultimate Otherland in a world mapped and traversed. It is the center of our planet’s rotation, one of the places that is most vulnerable in an epoch of global climate change. Its sub-zero temperatures and strange year of one sunset and one sunrise make it an eerie, utterly disorienting place that challenges human endurance and understanding.

Explorer, naturalist and president of Britain's Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks was a larger-than-life character best known for his promotion of science. In 1768 Banks joined Captain James Cook's expedition to the South Pacific. The 30,000 specimens he brought back generated enormous interest, as did the sometimes racy written account of the journey, which chronicled his frequent amorous exploits.

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the Moon, a moment forever ingrained in history. Perhaps the world's greatest technological achievement - and a triumph of American spirit and ingenuity - the Apollo 11 mission, and the entire Apollo program, was a mammoth undertaking involving more than 410,000 men and women dedicated to putting a man on the Moon and winning the Space Race against the Soviets.

La aventura marítima que cambió la historia del mundo. La historia de Magallanes y su viaje a los confines del mundo en el año 1520 hasta encontrar la Patagonia y el estrecho que une el océano Atlántico con el Pacífico, a fin de llegar a la especiería en Indonesia.

Crimson Arrows: A Bowhunting Odyssey is narrated from the heart and soul of a bowhunter. Spanning three decades of his adventures, Eyad Yehyawi takes you through the emotions, heartbreaks, and successes from his earliest years in Iowa, to physically and psychologically challenging backcountry hunts in Alaska and Canada, to a breathtaking African safari. Every setback and missed opportunity is revealed, along with the rewards earned through hard work and perseverance.

The epic, never-before-told story of Columbus's final, and perhaps greatest, journey to the New World. The final voyage of Christopher Columbus was by far his most dangerous, unexpected, exhilarating, and consequential. It was, as Pulitzer Prize-winner Samuel Eliot Morison put it, "a story of adventure which imagination could hardly invent; a struggle between man and the elements, in which the most splendid manifestations of devotion, loyalty and courage are mingled with the vilest human passions."

Pedaling a bicycle around the world was a lifelong dream, but everyone told him it could not be done. Dismissing the skeptics, disinterested sponsors, and a woefully inadequate bank account, Scott Zamek resolved to try. Some 25,000 miles and six million pedal revolutions later, Zamek had encountered Bengal tigers, angry mobs, prison and sandstorms, fed on yak, dog meat, and gobs of cow intestines. He had been taken prisoner by the Syrian Secret Police, left for dead in the Sahara Desert, and beset by hypothermia and heatstroke, using up two bicycles, 1,000 tire patches, and countless ...

The time of the American mountain man was not to reach its peak until the mid-19th century, but the man who served as the prototype for the cultural genre hailed from an earlier age in which the new United States had scarcely established its most basic structural tenets. A member of the original Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery commissioned by Thomas Jefferson, John Colter’s multiple journeys to the northwest country of present-day Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho were first-time events in the development of the continent.

In the best-selling tradition of Hampton Sides’ In the Kingdom of Ice, a “gripping adventure tale” (The Boston Globe) recounting Dutch polar explorer William Barents’ three harrowing Arctic expeditions - the last of which resulted in a relentlessly challenging year-long fight for survival.

In January 1959, 10 experienced young skiers set out to travel to a mountain named Mount Otorten in the far north of Russia. During the trip, one of the skiers fell ill and returned. The remaining nine lost their way and ended up on another mountain slope known as Kholat Syakhl, or "Mountain of the Dead".

Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, home to only a handful of people, is a harsh and lonely place. So when James Campbell's cousin Heimo Korth asked him to spend a summer building a cabin in the rugged Interior, Campbell hesitated about inviting his 15-year-old daughter, Aidan, to join him. Would she be able to withstand clouds of mosquitoes, the threat of grizzlies, bathing in an ice-cold river, and hours of grueling labor peeling and hauling logs? But once there, Aidan embraced the wild.

Der gefeierte Schauspieler und Marvel-Superheld Jeremy Renner über den brutalen Unfall, der ihn fast das Leben kostete – und die beeindruckende Geschichte, wie er sich zurück ins Leben kämpft: "Ich hoffe, dass ich mit meiner Geschichte allen helfen kann, die gerade das Gefühl haben, dass die Chancen gegen sie stehen." Jeremy Renner, zweimal für den Oscar nominiert, war die am zweithäufigsten gegoogelte Person 2023 – allerdings nicht nur wegen seiner eindrucksvollen Filmografie.