Showing titles in Adventurers, Explorers & Survival

In the early 13th century, a simple nomad chieftain managed to cobble together a powerful kingdom in the highlands of northern Asia, which was subsequently to challenge the greatest powers of the day. He was triumphant in all directions. This leader was Timujin, whose name meant "Iron Man". He became Genghis Khan, "Universal Ruler", the greatest conqueror ever known - a warrior feared from the British Isles to the tip of the Korean peninsula.

Unexpectedly denied a visa to remain in the United States, Qanta Ahmed, a young British Muslim doctor, becomes an outcast in motion. On a whim, she accepts an exciting position in Saudi Arabia. This is not just a new job; this is a chance at adventure in an exotic land she thinks she understands, a place she hopes she will belong. What she discovers is vastly different. The Kingdom is a world apart, a land of unparalleled contrast. She finds rejection and scorn in the places she believed would most embrace her.

In May of 1963, Seattle mountaineer Jim Whittaker stepped into world history by becoming the first American to summit Mount Everest. More than 50 years later, he is still regarded as a seminal figure in North American mountaineering, as well as an astute businessman who helped create the outdoor recreation industry. A Life on the Edge: Memoirs of Everest and Beyond is Jim's courageous, no-punches-pulled autobiography and a look at a peripatetic, sometimes difficult life.

Tova Friedman was one of the youngest people to emerge from Auschwitz. After surviving the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Central Poland where she lived as a toddler, Tova was four when she and her parents were sent to a Nazi labour camp, and almost six when she and her mother were forced into a packed cattle truck and sent to Auschwitz II, also known as the Birkenau extermination camp, while her father was transported to Dachau. During six months of incarceration in Birkenau, Tova witnessed atrocities that she could never forget.

A classic of Holocaust literature, Gerda Weissmann Klein's celebrated memoir tells the moving story of a young woman's 3 frightful years as a slave laborer of the Nazis and her miraculous liberation. All But My Life stands as the ultimate lesson in humanity, hope, and friendship.

In 1935, Fred A. Birchmore left the small American town of Athens, Georgia, to continue his college studies in Europe. In his spare time, Birchmore toured the continent on a one-speed bike he called Bucephalus (after the name of Alexander the Great's horse). A born wanderer, Birchmore broadened his travels to include the British Isles and even the Mediterranean. After a lengthy, unplanned detour in Egypt, Birchmore put his studies on hold, pointed Bucephalus eastward, and just kept going.

I heard the rustle again, too close and too real to ignore. I clutched the flashlight, stuck my head out of the mosquito net...and found myself face-to-face with a jaguar. Four travelers meet in Bolivia and set off into the Amazon rainforest on an expedition to find a hidden tribe and explore places tourists only dream of seeing. But what begins as the adventure of a lifetime quickly becomes a struggle for survival when they get lost in the wilds of the jungle. The group splits up after disagreements, and Yossi and his friend try to find their own way back without a guide.

They shouldn't have tear gassed best-selling (bald) author Adam Fletcher. It ruined his supposedly normal holiday in Istanbul, made him curious, and began a quest to visit places everyone else is trying to escape from, and tourists don't normally go to. In this hilarious travel memoir, he'll enter a blizzard in China armed with only biscuits; pose as a scientist to sneak into Chernobyl; be chased by Croatian police boats en route to Liberland (the world's newest country); become a reluctant diving board star in a North Korean water park, and much more.

Anatoli Boukreev’s first-hand account of the worst human disaster in the history of Mt. Everest will hold listeners spellbound. A top-rated guide and high altitude climber, Boukreev dictated the raw and powerful details of this ill-fated trek from memories and notes recorded just five days after the catastrophe. In May of 1996, 33 people went up the mountain, but only 28 returned. As two commercial expeditions climbed the world’s highest peak, poor planning, miscommunication, and an unpredictable blizzard conspired to defeat them.

Captain James Cook is one of the greatest maritime explorers of all time. Over three remarkable voyages of discovery into the Pacific in the latter part of the 18th century, Cook unravelled the oldest mystery surrounding the existence of Terra Australis Incognita - the Great South Land. He became the first explorer to circumnavigate New Zealand and establish that it was two main islands; discover the Hawaiian Islands for the British Empire; and left an enduring legacy.

Wilbur Smith has lived an incredible life of adventure, and now he shares the extraordinary true stories that have inspired his fiction. From being attacked by lions to close encounters with deadly reef sharks, from getting lost in the African bush without water to crawling the precarious tunnels of gold mines, from marlin fishing with Lee Marvin to near death from crash-landing a Cessna airplane, from brutal school days to redemption through writing and falling in love, Wilbur Smith tells us the intimate stories of his life that have been the raw material for his fiction.

In 1915, Sir Ernest Shackleton's attempt to traverse the Antarctic was cut short when his ship, Endurance, became trapped in ice. The disaster left Shackleton and his men alone at the frozen South Pole, fighting for their lives. Their survival and escape is the most famous adventure in history.

This is a brilliant dual biography charting British Robert Scott's and Norwegian Roald Amundsen's race to the South Pole during 1911-12. Huntuford's is the accepted, definitive account of the race and a reassessment of the two men. Thoroughly researched, revealing the adventures and misfortunes that befell them both, he describes the driving ambitions of the era, and the complex, often deeply flawed individuals who were charged with carrying them out.

What is archaeology? The word may bring to mind images of golden pharaohs and lost civilizations or Neanderthal skulls and Ice Age cave art. Archaeology is all of these, but also far more: the only science to encompass the entire span of human history - more than three million years! This Little History tells the riveting stories of some of the great archaeologists and their amazing discoveries around the globe.

Born in Prague to a Jewish family in 1929, Dita Kraus has lived through the most turbulent decades of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Here, Dita writes with startling clarity on the horrors and joys of a life delayed by the Holocaust. From her earliest memories and childhood friendships in Prague before the war, to the Nazi occupation that saw her and her family sent to the Jewish ghetto at Terezín, to the unimaginable fear and bravery of her imprisonment in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and life after liberation.

Marilyn Johnson's Lives in Ruins is an absorbing and entertaining look at the lives of contemporary archaeologists as they sweat under the sun for clues to the puzzle of our past. Johnson digs and drinks alongside archaeologists, and chases them through the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and even Machu Picchu. Her subjects share stories about slaves and Ice Age hunters, ordinary soldiers of the American Revolution, Chinese woman warriors, sunken fleets, and mummies.

In July 2018, 12 boys and their football coach disappeared into Tham Luang Cave in Thailand. Trapped miles beneath the surface, not even the Thai Navy SEALs had the skills to bring them to safety. With the floodwater rising rapidly, time was running out. Any hope of survival rested on Rick Stanton, a retired Midlands firefighter with a living room full of homemade cave-diving equipment. In Aquanaut Rick reveals the real story of the cave rescue for the first time.

Boyhood in the 1960s and ‘70s was a time for exploration and mischief. Author Michael Tougias found more than his share of misadventures in the woods and on the water: some life-threatening, but others innocently hilarious. Over time - and after reading a multitude of adventure books - these experiences took shape in his quest to be a mountain man, owning a cabin in the forest and living off the land. Part of that dream would come true, but only after a family tragedy that shook his world and forced changes in his life.

In late September 2015, Hurricane Joaquin swept past the Bahamas and swallowed a pair of cargo vessels in its destructive path: El Faro, a 790-foot American behemoth with a crew of 33, and the Minouche, a 230-foot freighter with a dozen sailors aboard. From the parallel stories of these ships and their final journeys, Tristram Korten weaves a remarkable tale of two veteran sea captains from very different worlds, the harrowing ordeals of their desperate crews, and the Coast Guard’s extraordinary battle against a storm that defied prediction.

When expat blogger and mother of four Eva Melusine Thieme first harbors the idea of ringing out her three years in Africa on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, it sounds easy. In fact, it has all the trappings of a dream vacation: no cooking, no fighting kids, and an army of porters to lug everything up the mountain. What can go wrong? Tag along as Eva takes you on her journey up the slopes of Kilimanjaro together with her teenage son and a group of hilarious South African friends.