Showing results for "William" in Adventurers, Explorers & Survival

Bored and fed up with life, staring down a 50th birthday, Mike Tyler was looking for a change. Life had become routinized and unexciting. Maybe it was a mid-life crisis, or maybe just a yearning for one last big adventure. Mike decides to try hiking from Mexico to Canada on the Pacific Crest Trail, just to see what happens. Mike convinces his wife, Margo, to join him. Together, they embark on a five-month hike full of anticipation. They hike through some of the most stunning and remote places in the country on a trail full of unique, offbeat characters.

Sullivan's classic account of his 65 day, 1,361-mile solo backpacking trek across Oregon has been chosen by the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission as one of Oregon's "100 Books", the most significant literary works in state history. Sullivan recounts adventures with blizzards, bears, and poisonous mushrooms, but he also spices his journal with notes on history, geology, and the people he meets along the way.

The latest adventure from best-selling author Ben Fogle explores what we can learn from nature about living well and living wild. What can rowing across the Atlantic teach us about boredom and about patience? Can coming down from Everest take more resilience than climbing up in the first place? How can the isolation of the South Pole highlight what’s most important? And how can we tap into the same reflective state in our daily lives?

Aged just seven, Suzanne Heywood set sail with her family on a three-year voyage around the world. What followed turned instead into a decade-long way of life, through storms, shipwrecks, reefs and isolation, with little formal schooling. Suzanne fought her parents, longing to return to England and to education and stability. This memoir covers her astonishing upbringing, a survival story of a child in dire circumstances deprived of safety, friendships, schooling, occasionally drinking water...

Fergal Keane has spent his adult life witnessing war, travelling through dangerous or devastated places and reporting the atrocities back to the rest of the world. In the course of those decades, he has lost friends, sustained injuries and experienced countless near misses. He has patched up colleagues and seen the worst of humanity: mothers robbed of their children and bodies mutilated. Along the way, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet he could not stop going back to the wars.

In November 1922, a new door to the ancient past was opened. The discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun would be the most astonishing of the young century. Howard Carter was the lead archaeologist, but the years of excavations were funded and engineered by the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, George Herbert, whose country house Highclere Castle is today known as the set of Downton Abbey. In dramatic detail, calling on Highclere Castle’s archives to throw new light on the lustrous settings and striking characters, this book reveals the true story behind the thrilling discoveries made in Egypt.

Hailed as a masterpiece of American travel writing, Blue Highways is an unforgettable journey along our nation's backroads. William Least Heat-Moon set out with little more than the need to put home behind him and a sense of curiosity about "those little towns that get on the map-if they get on at all-only because some cartographer has a blank space to fill: Remote, Oregon; Simplicity, Virginia; New Freedom, Pennsylvania; New Hope, Tennessee; Why, Arizona; Whynot, Mississippi." His adventures, his discoveries, and his recollections of the extraordinary people he encountered along the way amount to a revelation of the true American experience.

In 1935 a young Englishman named Laurie Lee arrived in Spain. He had never been overseas. His idea was to walk through the country, earning money for food by playing his violin in bars and plazas. Nearly a century later, the book Laurie Lee wrote - As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning - inspired Alastair Humphreys. It made him fall in love with Spain - the landscapes and the spirit - and with Laurie's style of travel. Alastair dreamed of retracing Laurie Lee’s footsteps but could never get past the hurdle of being distinctly unmusical. This year, he decided to go anyway.

On his 44th birthday, Eric Newby sets out on an incredible journey: to travel the 1,200-mile length of India's holy river. In a misguided attempt to keep him out of trouble, Wanda, his lifelong travel companion and wife, is to be his fellow boatwoman. Their plan is to begin in the great plain of Hardwar and finish in the Bay of Bengal, but the journey almost immediately becomes markedly slower and more treacherous than either had imagined - running aground 63 times in the first six days.

This is the riveting true story of a young man’s solo bicycle odyssey: freezing in the Anatolian mountains of Turkey, confounded by butterflies in the empty Iranian desert, passing through the rubble of a coup in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and surviving dire illness in Pakistan's Indus valley. His journey ends in the heart of the subcontinent, having glimpsed true freedom. This is an account of humankind’s essential goodness, of trusting unseen hands that can steer us from disaster, and of learning that the way out is through.

The rags-to-riches story of one of America's wealthiest and least-known financial giants, self-made billionaire Kirk Kerkorian - the daring aviator, movie mogul, risk taker, and business tycoon who transformed Las Vegas and Hollywood to become one of the leading financiers in American business. Kerkorian combined the courage of a World War II pilot, the fortitude of a scrappy boxer, the cunning of an inscrutable poker player, and an unmatched genius for making deals.

Robert Falcon Scott and the men of his polar expedition were heroes of their age, enduring tremendous hardships to further the reputation of the empire they served. But they were also husbands, fathers, sons and brothers. Now for the first time, and with unprecedented access to family archives, Katherine MacInnes retells the story of the race for the South Pole from the perspective of the women whose lives would be forever changed by it, five women who offer a window into a lost age.

In 1839 rumors of extraordinary yet baffling stone ruins buried within the unmapped jungles of Central America reached two of the world's most intrepid travelers. Seized by the reports, American diplomat John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood sailed together out of New York Harbor on an expedition into the forbidding rainforests of present-day Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. What they found would rewrite the West's understanding of human history.

Debra Newell is nothing if not a survivor. By the time she met John Michael Meehan online, she lived through a near-fatal childhood illness, an attempted rape in her 20s, the traumatic death of her sister at the hands of her brother-in-law, four failed marriages, and a litany of dating disasters. But despite those tragedies, she seemed to have it all: adoring children, a successful business, a fabulous penthouse apartment.

Sailing on a boat by yourself out at sea and out of sight of land can be exhilarating or terrifying, compelling or tedious - sometimes it can be all of these things just in one morning. It is an adventure at odds with our normal, sociable lives, carried out floating on a medium wholly inimical to our existence. But the deep ocean is also a remarkable place on which to think. Richard King's enormously engaging and curious book is about the debt we owe to solo sailors: women and men, young and old, who have set out alone.

Rich with humor and natural history, this memoir describes 25 summers of back-to-the-earth adventure as author William L. Sullivan and his wife Janell build a log cabin by hand along a roadless river deep in the wilds of Oregon's Coast Range. Along the way they confront beaver in the refrigerator, raise a family, and puzzle out a murder mystery that had haunted their homestead site. Cabin Fever takes listeners to a warm world of kerosene lamplight, wood stoves, and ghost stories that may be true.

William Speirs Bruce was a Scottish nationalist and naturalist who led the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition (1902-04). He also participated in or led many other polar expeditions from 1892 through 1919, particularly to Spitsbergen. But he is now largely forgotten, compared to other explorers like Shackleton, Scott, and Amundsen.

Nina Siegal, an accomplished journalist and novelist, weaves together excerpts from the daily journals of collaborators, resistors, and the persecuted—a Dutch Nazi police detective, a Jewish journalist imprisoned at Westerbork transit camp, a grocery store owner who saved dozens of lives—into a braided nonfictional narrative of the Nazi occupation and the Dutch Holocaust, as individuals experienced it day by day.

Here is the story of the infamous 1910 race to the South Pole, as told by its fearless yet desperate leader, Robert Falcon Scott. The New York Times called Scott's Last Expedition "A splendid record of heroism not soon to be forgotten."

Featured on an enormously popular 20/20 segment and the real-life inspiration for the cinematic classic Fly Away Home, this heartwarming story tells of the late William Lishman, a reclusive sculptor, who adopted a gaggle of geese, flew with them in an ultralight glider, and actually taught them to migrate—earning himself the nickname "Father Goose".