Showing results for "The Book" in Expeditions & Discoveries

The Viking Age - from 750 to 1050 saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples into the wider world. As traders and raiders, explorers and colonists, they ranged from eastern North America to the Asian steppe. But for centuries, the Vikings have been seen through the eyes of others, distorted to suit the tastes of medieval clerics and Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian imperialists, Nazis, and more. None of these appropriations capture the real Vikings, or the richness and sophistication of their culture.

The Girl Explorers is the inspirational and untold story of the founding of the Society of Women Geographers - an organization of adventurous female world explorers - and how key members served as early advocates for human rights and paved the way for today's women scientists by scaling mountains, exploring the high seas, flying across the Atlantic, and recording the world through film, sculpture, and literature.

Africa has long been considered the cradle of life - where life and humans evolved - but somewhere west of Munich, Germany, paleoclimatologist and paleontologist Madelaine Böhme and her team make a discovery that is beyond anything they ever imagined: the 12-million-year-old bones of an ancient ape - Danuvius guggenmos - which makes headlines around the world and defies prevailing theories of human history and where human life began.

Spain's position on Europe's southwestern corner has exposed it to cultural, political and actual winds blowing from all quadrants. Africa lies a mere nine miles to the south. The Mediterranean connects it to the civilisational currents of Phoenicians, Romans, Carthaginians and Byzantines as well as the Arabic lands of the Near East. Hordes from the Russian steppes were amongst the first to arrive. They would be followed by Visigoths, Arabs, Napoleonic armies and many more invaders and immigrants.

At the height of their power in the ninth and tenth centuries, the Vikings seemed invincible - conquering well-armed warriors whose ships were the ultimate in seafaring technology. From island bases near the deltas of major rivers, they used the waterways to scour the countryside, looting and burning towns, plundering merchant shipments, and stripping churches and monasteries of their gold, silver, and jeweled treasures.

The Plant Hunter's Atlas is a volume telling some of the most extraordinary tales of horticultural discovery and exploring the characters behind the stories. Taking in the world's inhabited continents and spanning the centuries, the stories range from tales of derring-do in the age of discovery to modern-day botanists working at the cutting-edge of science. The text explores how plant hunters have been inspired by everything from scientific curiosity to economic greed, and their own ingrained sense of adventure.

In Dreams of El Dorado, H. W. Brands tells the thrilling, panoramic story of the settling of the American West. He takes us from John Jacob Astor's fur trading outpost in Oregon to the Texas Revolution, from the California gold rush to the Oklahoma land rush. He shows how the migrants' dreams drove them to feats of courage and perseverance that put their stay-at-home cousins to shame - and how those same dreams also drove them to outrageous acts of violence against indigenous peoples and one another. El Dorado was at least as elusive in the West as it ever was in the East.

Everybody imagines the world's most interesting man to be a fictional, gray-haired lothario who drinks Mexican beer and boasts of his legendary exploits. But what if a man like this really lived? It turns out he did, and there were two of them--both Victorian explorers.

Looking out his porch window one spring morning, Adam Shoalts spotted a majestic peregrine falcon flying across the neighbouring fields near Lake Erie. Each spring, falcons migrate from southernmost Canada to remote arctic mountains. Grabbing his backpack and canoe, Shoalts resolved to follow the falcon’s route north on an astonishing 3,400-kilometre journey to the Arctic.

What does it mean to explore and confront the unknown? Beyond the Trees recounts Adam Shoalts's epic, never-before-attempted solo crossing of Canada's mainland Arctic in a single season. It's also a multilayered story that weaves the narrative of Shoalts's journey into accounts of other adventurers, explorers, First Nations, fur traders, dreamers, eccentrics, and bush pilots to create an unforgettable tale of adventure and exploration.

They’re widely known as raiders, pirates, invaders, and savages, but despite their fearsome reputation (or perhaps because of it), Vikings continue to fascinate us today. And it’s not hard to see why. They were brave, rebellious, and fierce fighters—plus, based on Hollywood’s portrayals, they were quite good-looking. While media highlights their violence and toughness, there’s more to the Viking culture than just conquering lands. The Vikings were not just warriors but also traders, explorers, and lawmakers....

In a male-driven world, Bell managed to become one of the greatest policymakers the world has ever known; without her, the Middle East might very well be a much different place, and her influence in the territory gave her the nickname "Queen of the Desert". This biography tells the extraordinary story of one of the most adventurous and fascinating women you will ever encounter.

Blind Descent explores both the brightest and darkest aspects of the timeless human urge to discover - to be first. It is also a thrilling epic about a pursuit that makes even extreme mountaineering and ocean exploration pale by comparison.

Amelia Earhart was a legend - but perhaps an unlikely one at that. You see, Amelia Earhart was not always the dashing heroine that most of us associate with her name. She began life as a rather shy girl, who often found herself having to hide from her troubled upbringing. As her family life spiraled out of control, Amelia Earhart was forced to move from state to state, town to town, never getting the chance to put down roots. The high school she graduated from was one of many she attended, and a caption by her photo for that semester’s yearbook seems to have said it all.

What do you do when someone tells you, “It can’t be done”? Here is the extraordinary story of three people - an explorer, an engineer, and a statesman - who repeatedly proved critics and naysayers wrong. Roald Amundsen - the Norwegian explorer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel - the greatest engineer the world has ever seen, and Teddy Roosevelt - the cowboy turned statesman. Audacious Goals, Remarkable Results reveals the outsized risks and setbacks each faced in their quest to change the world.

A gripping and wholly original account of the epic human tragedy that was the great Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-98. One hundred thousand men and women rushed heedlessly north to make their fortunes; very few did, but many thousands of them died in the attempt. The unvarnished tale of this mass migration is always striking, revealing the amazing truth of what people will do for a chance to be rich.

Celebrated historian Diana Preston presents betrayals, escapes, and survival at sea in her account of the mutiny of the Bounty and the flight of convicts from the Australian penal colony. The story of the mutiny of the Bounty and William Bligh and his men's survival on the open ocean for 48 days and 3,618 miles has become the stuff of legend. But few realize that Bligh's escape across the seas was not the only open-boat journey in that era of British exploration and colonization.

What makes a good explorer? Adaptability, ambition, stamina, self-confidence, curiosity, optimism, authority—and fundraising ability. Though few of us will ever have to face a charging elephant, or survive solely on penguin stew, when it comes to project management, crisis aversion, or any number of everyday problems, there is much we can learn from the larger-than-life tales of the world's most famous adventurers.

An exciting new audiobook on the greatest explorers in history and how their discoveries shaped the modern world. Whether it is Rabban Bar Sauma, the 13th-century Chinese monk commissioned by the Mongols to travel West form a military alliance against the Islam; Marco Polo, who opened a window to the East for Europe; or Captain James Cook, whose maritime voyages of discovery created the global economy of the 21st century, each of these explorers had an indelible impact on the modern world. This audiobook will look at the 11 greatest explorers in history.

Cândido Rondon is by any measure the greatest tropical explorer in history. Between 1890 and 1930, he navigated scores of previously unmapped rivers, traversed untrodden mountain ranges, and hacked his way through jungles so inhospitable that even native peoples had avoided them—and led Theodore Roosevelt and his son, Kermit, on their celebrated "River of Doubt" journey in 1913-14. Originally published in Brazil, Into the Amazon is the first comprehensive biography of the Indigenous Brazilian explorer, scientist, stateseman, and conservationist.