Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in Travel Writing & Commentary

Matt and Karen experienced the trip of a lifetime with 14 friends and a crew of 10 while traveling in wooden dories down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Dories, Ho! is a story of their adventure and discovery. While not intended to be a traditional guidebook, anyone contemplating a river trip through the Grand Canyon will benefit from this firsthand account. Listeners will feel as if they've traveled with the authors on their journey to and through Grand Canyon National Park.

The North Pole, originally published in 1910, makes available Robert E. Peary's own account of his expedition in the Arctic. It provides hotly contested evidence that remains an indispensable key in deciding who deserved the coveted title "Discoverer of the North Pole". It is also a gripping adventure story that is impossible to put down.

While he is probably best known as a novelist and short-story writer, Lawrence Block has produced a rich trove of nonfiction over the course of a 60-year career. Over the years, Block has written extensively for magazines and periodicals. Generally Speaking collects his philatelic columns from Linn's Stamp News, while his extensive observations of crime fiction, along with personal glimpses of some of its foremost practitioners, have won wide acclaim in book form as The Crime of Our Lives. Hunting Buffalo with Bent Nails is what he's got left over.

Unrelenting winds, carnivorous polar bears, snake nests, sweltering heat, and constant hunger. Paddling from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay, following the 2,000-mile route made famous by Eric Sevareid in his 1935 classic Canoeing with the Cree, Natalie Warren and Ann Raiho faced unexpected trials, some harrowing, some simply odd. Warren's spellbinding account retraces the women's journey from inspiration to Arctic waters, giving listeners an insider view of planning a three-month canoe expedition to the successful accomplishment of the adventure of a lifetime.

A product of beige California suburbs, Pam Mandel was overlooked and unexceptional. When her father ships her off on a youth group tour of Israel, he inadvertently catapults his 17-year-old daughter into a world of angry European backpackers, seize-the-day Israelis, and the fall out of Cold War-era politics. With no guidance and no particular plan, Mandel says yes to everything and everyone, embarking on an adventure across three continents and thousands of miles.

Before he grew up and became one of Washington's most respected reporters and editors, Andrew Ferguson was, of all things, a Lincoln buff, with the photos hung on his bedroom wall to prove it. Decades later, Ferguson's latent buffdom is reignited. In Land of Lincoln, he embarks on a curiosity-fueled coast-to-coast journey through contemporary Lincoln Nation, encountering everything from hatred to adoration to opportunism and all manner of reaction in between.

Newlywed Lisa Niver was on the adventure of a lifetime. She had quit her job, rented out her condo, and was traveling around Asia. To the outside world, Niver was a woman living out her dreams of exploring ancient ruins in Cambodia and seeing orangutans in Borneo. In private, she was keeping a dark secret. But, when she found herself lying on a sidewalk in Thailand, looking up at the sky in severe pain, she knew things had to change. At age forty-seven, Niver found the courage to set course on a new life.

A year into his marriage and having never driven an RV, Frank and his wife Laurel set out from New York City in a Winnebago to drive the nation's first transcontinental route, the Lincoln Highway, which zigzags through small towns and big cities from Times Square to San Francisco. Using the spirit of Abraham Lincoln to guide them across the land, they hope to see more clearly what holds the country together-and how we can keep it together, even amidst political divisions that have grown increasingly rancorous, bitter, and exhausting.

When American writer Stephanie Saldana finds herself in an empty house at the beginning of Nablus Road, the dividing line between East and West Jerusalem, she is a new wife trying to navigate a fragile terrain, both within her marriage and throughout the country in which she has chosen to live. Pregnant with her first child, Stephanie struggles to protect her family, their faith, and herself from the cracks of Middle Eastern conflict that threaten to shatter the world around her.

Marty Ohlhaut loved the great outdoors, and he loved his family, but this time, the combination proved disastrous. Cooped up inside due to long work hours, Marty was excited about taking off with his wife and five children for the beautiful Canadian Rockies. Aware that this could be their last camping trip together, he wanted to make it extra memorable.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of young people pack their bags to study or volunteer abroad. Well-intentioned and curious Westerners travel to low-income countries to learn about people and cultures different from their own. In Beyond Guilt Trips: Mindful Travel in an Unequal World, storyteller Anu Taranath unpacks our baggage about who we are, where we come from, and how much we have. She takes us on a journey through personal travel stories and thought-provoking questions, providing us with tools to grapple with our discomfort and navigate differences with accountability and connection.

In 66 BC, young, ambitious Julius Caesar, seeking recognition and authority, became the curator of the Via Appia. He borrowed significant sums to restore the ancient highway. It was a way to curry favor from Roman citizens in villages along the route, built from Rome to Brindisi between 312-191 BC. After achieving greatness in Rome and the far reaches of Gaul, he led armies along this road to battle enemies in Roman civil wars.

With a folksy style, an eye for the absurd, and a passion for the history and environment of his home state, Pittman describes some of Florida's oddest wildlife as well as its quirkiest people. The State You're In includes a love story involving the most tattooed woman in the world, a deep dive into the state's professional mermaid industry, and an investigation of a battle between residents of a nudist resort and the US Postal Service.

In the 1970s, Madeleine Blais's in-laws purchased a vacation house on Martha's Vineyard for the exorbitant sum of $80,000. Two-point-two miles down a poorly marked, one lane dirt road, the house was better termed a shack - it had no electricity, no modern plumbing, the roof leaked, and mice had invaded the walls. It was perfect. Sitting on Tisbury Great Pond - well-stocked with oysters and crab for foraged dinners - the house faced the ocean and the sky, and though it was eventually replaced by a sturdier structure, the ethos remained the same.

This inspiring collection contains powerful narratives from women who swim, surf, kayak, study glaciers, advocate for water conservation, carry forward their ancestral fishing traditions, and more. Collected by the team at She Explores, a media company and community that celebrates women in the outdoors, these first-person stories explore themes of independence, strength, healing, and self-discovery in nature.

The only place in the United States that Hemingway could really call home after he started writing was the tropical island of Key West. During his decade here in the 1930s, he acquired his famed macho persona as Papa, the biggest Big Daddy of them all. This vivid portrait of Ernest Hemingway's Key West reveals both Hemingway, the writer, and Hemingway, the macho, hard-drinking sportsman. His Key West years turned out to be his most productive: he finished A Farewell to Arms, started For Whom the Bell Tolls, and wrote several other books, including Green Hills of Africa.

In 1784, Thomas Jefferson was a broken man. Reeling from the loss of his wife and stung from a political scandal during the Revolutionary war, he needed to remake himself. Wandering through Europe, Jefferson saw and learned as much as he could, ultimately bringing his knowledge home to a young America. There, he would rise to power and shape a nation. More than two hundred years later, Derek Baxter, a devotee of American history, stumbles on an obscure travel guide written by Jefferson—Hints for Americans Traveling Through Europe—as he's going through his own personal crisis.

Frustrated with an increasingly polarized social landscape, award-winning photographer John Noltner set out on a 40,000-mile road trip across the United States to rediscover the common humanity that connects us. He did so by asking people one simple question: "What does peace mean to you?" Through difficult conversations, gentle humor, and a keen eye for beauty, Noltner's Portraits of Peace captures a rich collage of who we are as a nation.

Roger Federer could live anywhere in the world, but he always returns to the place he loves most: Switzerland. Dave Seminara is a mad traveler and tennis lifer who has written about Federer for the New York Times and other publications. A pair of autoimmune diseases and a knee surgery kept Dave from playing tennis for years, but as he inched toward recovery, he had a bright idea: why not start his tennis comeback on hallowed ground - courts that his hero Roger Federer graced in Switzerland.

Dana Stabenow was born in Alaska before statehood, grew up on and around fishing boats, worked for an air taxi service, a cannery, and later, on the oilfields of the North Slope. Today, she's an Edgar Award-winning mystery writer with more than 25 Alaska-based novels to her credit. Stabenow knows Alaska. Writing for Alaska magazine, she revisits old haunts and explores new ones to capture the vital pioneering spirit of her home state.