Travel Biography

Growing up in the Canadian Rockies, the mountains have always been home for Jenny Tough. Travelling the world, she's always discovered commonalities with mountains—and mountain people. Her major project is to run solo and unsupported across a mountain range on every continent where indigenous mountain people live isolated from the outside, urban world. Running solo and unsupported comes with obvious logistical as well as physical challenges, but running is also a common language.

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.

Heartfelt and awe inspiring, Leigh Ann Henion's Phenomenal is a moving tale of physical grandeur and emotional transformation, a journey around the world that ultimately explores the depths of the human heart. A journalist and young mother, Henion combines her own conflicted but joyful experiences as a parent with a panoramic tour of the world's most extraordinary natural wonders.

From the authors of the number-one best-selling The Sea Hunters comes more unforgettable true adventures with famous shipwrecks.

Stephen Alter was raised by American missionary parents in the hill station of Mussoorie, in the foothills of the Himalayas, where he and his wife Ameeta, now live. Their idyllic existence was brutally interrupted when four armed intruders invaded their house and viciously attacked them, leaving them for dead. The violent assault and the trauma of almost dying left him questioning assumptions he had lived by since childhood. For the first time, he encountered the face of evil and the terror of the unknown.

A language barrier is no match for love. Lauren Collins discovered this firsthand when, in her early 30s, she moved to London and fell for a Frenchman named Olivier - a surprising turn of events for someone who didn't have a passport until she was in college. But what does it mean to love someone in a second language? Collins wonders, as her relationship with Olivier continues to grow entirely in English. Are there things she doesn't understand about Olivier, having never spoken to him in his native tongue?

She Risked Everything to Become a Mother, Lover and Healer "....a brave adventurer who discovered her own life.” — Kirkus Reviews In her debut memoir, My Journey through War and Peace, Melissa Burch told the compelling story of how she braved a war zone as a young woman and found her voice as a filmmaker and feminist. Yearning for Magic continues Melissa’s adventures as she explores new horizons as a mother, lover and healer. She learned that while traveling with the Mujahadeen was hard, it took just as much courage to face down her fears on home soil, grapple with infertility and ...

The only place in the United States that Hemingway could really call home after he started writing was the tropical island of Key West. During his decade here in the 1930s, he acquired his famed macho persona as Papa, the biggest Big Daddy of them all. This vivid portrait of Ernest Hemingway's Key West reveals both Hemingway, the writer, and Hemingway, the macho, hard-drinking sportsman. His Key West years turned out to be his most productive: he finished A Farewell to Arms, started For Whom the Bell Tolls, and wrote several other books, including Green Hills of Africa.

In 1910, Olive MacLeod, a 30-year-old, redheaded Scottish aristocrat, received word that her fiancé, the famous naturalist Boyd Alexander, was missing in Africa. So she went to find him. Olive the Lionheart is the thrilling true story of her astonishing journey. In jungles, swamps, cities, and deserts, Olive and her two companions, the Talbots, come face-to-face with cobras and crocodiles, wise native chiefs, a murderous leopard cult, a haunted forest, and even two adorable lion cubs that she adopts as her own.

After years of watching Kenyan athletes win the world's biggest races, Adharanand Finn set out to discover just what it was that made them so fast - and to see if he could keep up. Packing up his life he moved from Devon to Iten, in Kenya, to eat with, interview, sleep beside and - most importantly – run with, some of the greatest runners in the world. In the distance rests his dream, to join the best of the Kenyan athletes in an epic first marathon across the Kenyan plains.

Keith Foskett was the definition of restless. Drifting aimlessly, he knew a piece was missing from his life. But when a stranger in a Greek bar tells him about a world-famous pilgrim’s trail, the chance encounter sets Foskett’s life in a new 1,000-mile direction. On El Camino de Santiago, the wanderer copes with extreme temperatures, fake faith healers, and insatiable kleptomaniacs. Threatened with arrest for "not sleeping" and suffering with excruciating blisters, Foskett pushes himself to new limits. Can he find what he’s looking for and make it to the other side?

When the struggle to save oil-soaked birds and restore blackened beaches left him feeling frustrated and helpless, John Francis decided to take a more fundamental and personal stand: He stopped using all forms of motorized transportation. Soon after embarking on this quest that would span two decades and two continents, the young man took a vow of silence that endured for 17 years.

As Hillaire Belloc explains it, one fine day while walking about the town in northern France where he was born, he suddenly decided to take a pilgrimage to Rome. Not just any pilgrimage, mind you. He not only decided to walk the whole way, but he decided to make a beeline for the Holy City, doing everything possible to avoid leaving the straight path.

Having grown up on their great-grandfather’s stories, Royd Tolkien and his brother, Mike, have always enjoyed adventures. So when Mike is diagnosed with motor neurone disease, also known as ALS, the brothers decide to use the time they have left to tick off as much as possible from Mike’s bucket list, from remote camping in Norway to travelling through Royd’s beloved New Zealand. Yet, when Royd loses Mike, he discovers his brother had been writing another kind of bucket list: 50 things he wanted Royd to do after his death.

Jeff Shaara, America's premier Civil War novelist, gives a remarkable guided tour of one of the Civil War battlefields every American should visit. He captures the true meaning and magnitude of the conflict.

Two Years Before the Mast is a book by the American author Richard Henry Dana, Jr., written after a two-year sea voyage starting in 1834 and published in 1840. While at Harvard College, Dana had an attack of the measles that affected his vision. Thinking it might help his sight, Dana, rather than going on a Grand Tour as most of his fellow classmates traditionally did (and unable to afford it anyway), and being something of a nonconformist, left Harvard to enlist as a common sailor.

Set in the remote arctic region of Northern Canada, this book takes listeners on a harrowing canoe voyage that results in tragedy, redemption, and, ultimately, transformation. George Grinnell was one of six young men who set off on the 1955 expedition led by experienced wilderness canoeist Art Moffatt. Poorly planned and executed, the journey seemed doomed from the start. Ignoring the approaching winter, the men became entranced with the peace and beauty of the arctic in autumn.

The Last Englishman is an extraordinary travel memoir by an experienced long-distance hiker. If you believe there’s more to life than work, yearn for new horizons and challenges, and believe in overcoming adversity, then you’ll love Keith Foskett’s tale of exploration.

To celebrate her 50th birthday and face the challenges of midlife, Jane Christmas joins 14 women to hike the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. Despite a psychic's warning of catfights, death, and a sexy, fair-haired man, Christmas soldiers on. After a week of squabbles, the group splinters, and the real adventure begins. In vivid, witty style, she recounts her battles with loneliness, hallucinations of being joined by Steve Martin, as well as picturesque villages and even the fair-haired man.

When Travels with Lizbeth was first published in 1993, it was proclaimed an instant classic. Lars Eighner's account of his descent into homelessness and his adventures on the streets has moved, charmed, and amused generations of readers and listeners. As Lars wrote, "When I began writing this account I was living under a shower curtain in a stand of bamboo in a public park. I did not undertake to write about homelessness, but wrote what I knew, as an artist paints a still life, not because he is especially fond of fruit, but because the subject is readily at hand."