Travel Memoir

Journalist Jason Roberts has won critical praise for A Sense of the World. His biography of "the blind traveler" has been named a Best Book of the Year by numerous publications, including the Washington Post, and has been nominated for the Guardian First Book Award. Although blinded as a young Naval lieutenant, James Holman became one of the world's most prolific and observant travelers.

Emma Gatewood told her family she was going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than $200. The next anybody heard from her, this genteel, farm-reared, 67-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. And in September 1955, atop Maine's Mount Katahdin, she sang the first verse of "America, the Beautiful" and proclaimed, "I said I'll do it, and I've done it."

Francis Parkman's journal - written more than 150 years ago, in 1846 - provides an eye-witness account of one of the grandest adventures in American history. At age 23, the Harvard-educated Bostonian traveled the Rocky Mountains, living among the Dakota Sioux. In his journal, he captured the color, spirit, and perspective of his era, as well as the exuberant confidence that was the mark of his time. Frank Muller's dramatic reading brings this captivating record to life.

In Walking with Ghosts in Papua New Guinea, Antonson shares a journey of physical and mental endurance in his inimitable way, in the company of a mixed band of resolute adventurers, blending fascinating historical context with the tribulations of unexpected discoveries in faraway lands.

In the tradition of Into the Wild comes an instant classic of outdoor literature, a riveting work of uncommon depth. I’m planning on doing four days in the jungle.... It should be difficult to get lost forever: These were the haunting last words legendary adventurer Roman Dial received from his son, before the 27-year old disappeared into the jungles of Costa Rica. This is Dial's intensely gripping and deeply moving account of his two-year quest to unravel the mystery of his son's fate.

Ten Yoga Students. One yoga instructor. Too many venomous snakes to count. In this humorous and spirited account, Jen relates her experience at a yoga retreat in Costa Rica along with nine other students brave enough to enter the wilds of the Costa Rican Osa Peninsula rainforest. Drunk with heady Costa Rican coffee, decadently pure Costa Rican chocolate and somewhere around eight thousand backbends, life is never dull. You’ll find yourself amazed, amused, salivating and begging, “When can visit the rainforest?” You’ll even chime in, “I’ll perform headstands if I have to!”

A born naturalist and a fearless traveler, Vladimir Dinets wrote travel guides, conducted field research, and lived a couple of lives before he was accepted into the PhD program in zoology at the University of Miami. He thought crocodiles were a dead-end research topic - survivors from the age of the dinosaurs but not much else - until he witnessed groups of up to seventy alligators performing mating choruses that included infrasound vibrations - a form of communication extremely rare in nature.

Our village school was used for a military camp, and we ended up in a restaurant hall that our teachers used for our classroom. Our home was also full of German soldiers and Russian Cossacks who surrendered to the Germans on their way to Russia, running from communism. They cooked in our kitchen and offered us their food, because there was no room for us to cook our meals. So, mom and I decided to leave our home and move in with grandma... The year was 1945, and everybody felt the end was near... Instead of traveling two hours by train, it took us two days of hitchhiking to get to our ...

In a small Texas town, Brent comes out to his parents, and on that night his place in the world cracks wide open. Unmoored from his family but unwilling to give up on his dream, Brent enters the Peace Corps with the incredible task of navigating an unfamiliar land, a new language, and a new identity as a gay man in post-Soviet Armenia. As he grapples with a religious past and a queer future, Brent finds himself immersed in a culture he’d never imagined.

James Marsh's Four Years in the Rockies gives brilliant insight into the life of Isaac P. Rose, a man who forged his own path in the wilderness of the far west. This thrilling account of one mountain man's life at the height of the 19th-century fur industry follows Rose as he overcomes adversity, learns from those around him, and becomes one of the most successful trappers of the Rockies. Four Years in the Rockies is essential listening for anyone interested in the 19th-century fur trade and the adventurers who risked their lives to be part of it.

Voyage to the outcrops of the tropics, where dreamers and degenerates mingle in an exotic setting of mysterious jungle ruins, narcotic drinks, and secret un-surfed waves. In this encomium to his experience teaching English in Micronesia, S. Jacques Stratton offers a wry portrayal of the ex-pat life, conveyed through vignettes and characters that evoke a lost, limnal latitude. Both memoir and travelogue, augmented with photographs from the author's collection, Islands on the Fringe will spark the wanderlust of those who crave offbeat adventure beyond the main-traveled routes.

For centuries, works of art have been stolen in countless ways from all over the world, but no one has been quite as successful at it as the master thief Stéphane Breitwieser. Carrying out more than two hundred heists over nearly eight years—in museums and cathedrals all over Europe—Breitwieser, along with his girlfriend who worked as his lookout, stole more than three hundred objects, until it all fell apart in spectacular fashion.

In the powerful travel-writing tradition of Ryszard Kapuscinski and V. S. Naipaul, a haunting memoir of a dangerous and disorienting year of self-discovery in one of the world's unhappiest countries.

This is a book about ten women over the past three hundred years who have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers. Wanderers traces their footsteps, from eighteenth-century parson's daughter Elizabeth Carter—who desired nothing more than to be taken for a vagabond in the wilds of southern England—to modern walker-writers such as Nan Shepherd and Cheryl Strayed.

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.

Spiritual teacher Michael A. Singer explores the question of human identity and shows how the development of consciousness can enable us all to dwell in the present moment and achieve happiness and self-realization.

Season 2 is the follow-up to Dear Bob and Sue, a charming and sometimes irreverent chronicle of a middle-aged couple as they visit each of the country's 59 national parks, testing their mettle and stretching their endurance. In their second audiobook of the series, follow Matt and Karen as they work their way around the Western US discovering some of our most beautiful public lands, hidden gems, and revisiting a few of their favorite national parks.

The Climb is a true, gripping, and thought-provoking account of the worst disaster in the history of Mt. Everest: On May 10, 1996, two commercial expeditions headed by experienced leaders attempted to climb the highest mountain in the world, but things went terribly wrong...

Years ago, an overachieving and harried young mother accidentally flushed her gold watch down the toilet. Time passed, but the image of the lost watch continued to haunt her, a symbol of an overcommitted life. Two decades later, propelled by a series of curious coincidences, she leaves behind her busy professional life, her cell phone, and her family to escape the tyranny of time and walk 500 miles across Northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela.

Have you wondered what leaving a marriage looks like after spending years tied down to the wrong man, the wrong place, and the wrong life? What it feels like to break free and be released almost literally into the wild? Reaching For Driftwood is Bacinski's journey through navigating the land of a fresh divorce (accurately predicted by a psychic medium) and all that comes with it– from walking away from a reappearing high school sweetheart to taking solo, heartbroken hiking trips in swoon-worthy locations, to falling into a painfully gorgeous age-gap romance with a man she bumped shopping ...