Travel Writing Memoirs

Like Jack Kerouac’s intrepid little sister, Ariel Gore spins the spirited story of a vulnerable drifter who takes refuge in fate and the shadowy recesses of a string of glittering, broken relationships. With just a few pennies and her I Ching, a change of clothes and a one-way ticket to Hong Kong, a perceptive, searching 16-year-old Gore makes her way from the sterile suffocation of the Silicon Valley through the labyrinthine customs of Cold-War China, wanders through bustling, electric Kathmandu, and hunkers down in an icy London squat with a prostitute and a boyfriend on the dole.

Viaggiare è sempre stato per Tiziano Terzani un modo di vivere. Quando scopre di avere il cancro viaggiare alla ricerca di una soluzione è la sua risposta istintiva. Questo è un viaggio diverso da tutti gli altri, e anche il più difficile perché ogni passo, ogni scelta - a volte fra ragione e follia, fra scienza e magia - ha a che fare con la sua sopravvivenza. Strada facendo prende appunti. Da una lunga permanenza a New York e poi in un centro "alternativo" della California nasce un ritratto inquietante dell'America.

If you enjoy a fast-paced, true story, Five Weeks in the Amazon is the book for you. It's an honest story filled with peaks of humor and valleys of despair. Author Sean Michael Hayes has written a book that many would put on their shelf next to Cheryl Strayed's blockbuster success, Wild. His adventure took him into the middle of the jungle alone, but Hayes' unique writing style makes the listener feel as though they are right there with him.

Bowing to Elephants is a travel memoir with a twist—the story of an unloved rich girl from San Francisco who becomes a travel junkie, searching for herself in the world to avoid the tragic fate of her narcissistic, alcoholic mother. Haunted by images of childhood loneliness and the need to learn about her world, Dimond journeys to far-flung places—into the perfumed chaos of India; the nostalgic, damp streets of Paris; the gray, watery world of Venice in the winter; the reverent and silent mountains of Bhutan; and the gold temples of Burma.

After college getting her dream job in New York City, Kristen Van Nest thought she had everything a modern millennial was supposed to want: a sexy zip code, a boyfriend, and a corporate job. But instead of feeling content, she soon realized she had no idea who she was and what made her happy. Naturally, she did what any sane person would do: hopped on a plane and spent the rest of her twenties living abroad and traveling the world in search of love, adventure, and new and exciting places to eat bread.

I traveled more than 6,000 miles by plane, train, and bus to walk in unfamiliar country, but I left behind no process server, no posse, no bounty hunter. No one was looking for me, and no one, other than my wife, knew I had left home. I wanted to see an Italy I hadn't seen before. I wanted to get away from the cares of quotidian life. I wanted sustained, healthy exercise. And I looked for the novelty of the unknown and the unexpected. I found some of each and too much of some.

In 2012, facing the death of his father and impending fatherhood, Toby Ferris set off on a seemingly quixotic mission to track down and look at - in situ - every painting still in existence by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the most influential and important artist of Northern Renaissance painting. The result of that pursuit is a remarkable journey through major European cities and across continents. As Ferris takes a keen analytical eye to the paintings, each piece brings new revelations about Bruegel’s art, and gives way to meditations on mortality, fatherhood, and life.

Jean McNeil spent a year as writer-in-residence with the British Antarctic Survey, and four months on the world’s most enigmatic continent. Ice Diaries is the story of McNeil’s years spent in ice, not only in the Antarctic but her subsequent travels to Greenland, Iceland, and Svalbard, culminating in a strange event in Cape Town, South Africa, where she journeyed to make what was to be her final trip to the southernmost continent. In the spirit of the diaries of Antarctic explorers, McNeil mixes travelogue, popular science, and memoir to examine the history of our fascination with ice.

From award-winning author Tom Bissell comes a riveting book that offers a fresh perspective on the Vietnam War: that of veterans' adult children. In 2003 Tom and his veteran father, John, traveled to Vietnam, reliving John's experiences in the war while familiarizing themselves with a new and peaceful country.

Named one of Time Magazine International's 30 most important people of 2005, Maud Fontenoy presents us with a terrific, entertaining adventure story on the high seas as she challenges the Pacific Ocean - a feat no woman before her ever accomplished. Already the first woman to row alone across the North Atlantic, Maud raised the bar to defy the elements, the daunting solitude, and the circling sharks of the South Pacific on her second solo voyage.

"We are all travelers in the 'wilderness of the world' - travelers with a donkey." So Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to a friend on completing this enchanting account of a journey in rural France in 1878. Alone with his pack-donkey Modestine, and showing total disregard for discomfort, Stevenson relishes to the full his walking tour of the Cevennes.

Say the word Israel today and it sparks images of walls and rockets and a bloody conflict without end. Yet for decades the symbol of the Jewish State was the noble pioneer draining the swamps and making the deserts bloom: the legendary kibbutznik. So what ever happened to the pioneers' dream of founding a socialist utopia in the land called Palestine? Chasing Utopia: The Future of the Kibbutz in a Divided Israel draws listeners into the quest for answers to the defining political conflict of our era.

More than twenty years after teaching English to China's first boom generation at a small college in Sichuan Province, Peter Hessler returned to teach the next generation. At the same time, Hessler's twin daughters became the only Westerners in a student body of about two thousand in their local primary school. Through reconnecting with his previous students now in their forties—members of China's "Reform generation"—and teaching his current undergraduates, Hessler is able to tell an intimately unique story about China's incredible transformation over the past quarter-century.

When Laura Fraser's husband leaves her for his high school sweetheart, she takes off, on impulse, for Italy, hoping to leave some of her sadness behind. There, on the island of Ischia, she meets M., an aesthetics professor from Paris with an oversized love of life. What they both assume will be a casual vacation tryst turns into a passionate, transatlantic love affair, as they rendezvous in London, Marrakech, Milan, the Aeolian Islands, and San Francisco.

An eclectic mix of exciting stories every surfer will love. This eclectic mix has something for everyone, from classic tales of monster waves and epic battles to stories of when life among the breakers goes wrong. There are accounts of death and disaster, as well as bravery and triumph. The bizarre and the extreme rub shoulders with perfect breaks and beautiful beaches. Be thrilled by legendary surfers like Laird Hamilton and Shane Dorian as well as learning about local heroes who never made the headlines.

Have you ever dreamed of quitting your job, traveling the world, and falling in love in a foreign land? Narrated by the author, Black Gypsy is the true story of Shawna Sharee, a 30-something inner-city black girl that did just that...After quitting her entire life following an ultimate betrayal, she makes her way traveling across three continents and six countries spanning seven months. This sometimes funny, sometimes spiritual, sometimes gritty, but always inspiring memoir is an urban fairytale and worldwide adventure filled with real life characters around every corner.

Everyone wants to escape their boring, stagnant lives full of inertia and regret. But so few people actually have the bravery to run - run away from everything and selflessly seek out personal fulfillment on the other side of the world where they don’t understand anything and won’t be expected to. The world is full of cowards. Tim Anderson was pushing 30 and working a string of dead-end jobs when he made the spontaneous decision to pack his bags and move to Japan.

If you want to find an answer, where would you go? Google? Or maybe Quora? What if you were told that you could go on a life-changing journey to find the answers to some of the most important questions in life? Best-selling author Stuti Changle travels to 10 unique destinations across India and stumbles upon the answers to these questions that focus on finding purpose, health, work and relationships in life. Embark on this unique journey with Stuti in this audiobook. But while on this journey, you’d have to leave behind your phones and social media as she did to find the joy in missing out.

This collection offers two dozen essays and sketches about one of the passions of Salter’s life, travel, a subject beloved by writers across the centuries. Over twenty years of skiing, hiking, climbing from Colorado to Japan to the Tyrol, from Austria and Switzerland to Germany and France, Salter is an engaging companion sharing his great enthusiasm and adventures.

Rosemary Mahoney tells the story of Braille Without Borders, the first school for the blind in Tibet, and of Sabriye Tenberken, the remarkable blind woman who founded the school. Fascinated and impressed by what she learned from the blind children of Tibet, Mahoney was moved to investigate further the cultural history of blindness. As part of her research, she spent three months teaching at Tenberken's international training center for blind adults in Kerala, India, an experience that reveals both the shocking oppression endured by the world's blind, as well as their great resilience.