Showing titles in Adventurers, Explorers & Survival

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.

World-renowned adventurer and broadcaster, Bear Grylls, presents some of the most incredible near-death experiences, told by those who lived to tell the tale. These extraordinary and diverse accounts of human bravery, mental and physical strength - and sometimes sheer luck - range from being stranded for more than 50 days at sea, to surviving world-changing acts of terrorism.

Meet Doctor Ben MacFarlane - a very modern flying doctor. His job is get on a plane and bring patients home after holiday disasters, gap year crises, embarrassing incidents on business trips and all the other things that can go wrong when we head overseas. Holiday SOS is his extraordinary story. It’s a unique medical memoir of the people he helps - and a year in the life of one of the world’s most frequent flyers! 

Auckland Island is a godforsaken place in the middle of the Southern Ocean, 285 miles south of New Zealand. With year-round freezing rain and howling winds, it is one of the most forbidding places in the world. To be shipwrecked there means almost certain death. In 1864, Captain Thomas Musgrave and his crew of four aboard the schooner Grafton wreck on the southern end of the island. Utterly alone in a dense coastal forest, plagued by stinging blowflies and relentless rain, Captain Musgrave inspires his men to take action.

Sir Hubert Wilkins is one of the most remarkable Australians who ever lived. The son of pioneer pastoralists in South Australia, Hubert studied engineering before moving on to photography, then sailing for England and a job producing films with the Gaumont Film Co. Brave and bold, he became a polar expeditioner, a brilliant war photographer, a spy in the Soviet Union, a pioneering aviator-navigator, a death-defying submariner - all while being an explorer and chronicler of the planet and its life forms that would do Vasco da Gama and Sir David Attenborough proud.

Australia's best-selling nonfiction author of all time. Douglas Mawson, born in 1882 and knighted in 1914, was Australia's greatest Antarctic explorer. On 2 December 1911, he led an expedition from Hobart to explore the virgin frozen coastline below, 2000 miles of which had never felt the tread of a human foot. After setting up Main Base at Cape Denision and Western Base on Queen Mary Land, he headed east on an extraordinary sledging trek with his companions, Belgrave Ninnis and Dr Xavier Mertz.

For years, Emma Carey was a regular young adult who would wake up and go about their day on autopilot, someone who would look at a sunset and feel unaffected, someone who was living, but not really alive. That is, until something happened that enabled her to really see life for the gift it is. Emma was in a skydiving accident that made her a paraplegic. This book is not just about Emma's fall from the sky and how she learned to walk without ever regaining feeling in her legs but also about the beliefs and ideas that helped her survive.

The iconic Australian exploration story - brought to life by Peter FitzSimons, Australia's storyteller. 'They have left here today!' he calls to the others. When King puts his hand down above the ashes of the fire, it is to find it still hot. There is even a tiny flame flickering from the end of one log. They must have left just hours ago. Melbourne, 20 August 1860. In an ambitious quest to be the first Europeans to cross the harsh Australian continent, the Victorian Exploring Expedition sets off, with 15,000 well-wishers cheering them on.

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.

His career as a naturalist and broadcaster has spanned nearly five decades and there are very few places on the globe that he has not visited. In this volume of memoirs David tells stories of the people and animals he has met and the places that he has visited. Over the last 25 years he has established himself as the world's leading Natural History programme maker with several landmark BBC series.

In July 1973, Bob Tininenko, his wife Linda, and his brother in-law Jim Fisher set sail from Tacoma, Washington, on a 31-foot trimaran, down the West Coast to Costa Rica. The journey was expected to take a matter of weeks, but 10 days into the cruise, the party encountered a freak storm off the coast of Northern California. When gale-force winds and 50-foot waves capsized their boat, the voyage became a nightmare. For 72 days, the trio was lost at sea. Challenged by nature and compromised by a bitter rivalry, their courage and will to live was put to the ultimate test. 

Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, home to only a handful of people, is a harsh and lonely place. So when James Campbell's cousin Heimo Korth asked him to spend a summer building a cabin in the rugged Interior, Campbell hesitated about inviting his 15-year-old daughter, Aidan, to join him. Would she be able to withstand clouds of mosquitoes, the threat of grizzlies, bathing in an ice-cold river, and hours of grueling labor peeling and hauling logs? But once there, Aidan embraced the wild.

For 46 years, Carol Minto has quietly gone about her life, carrying with her the most extraordinary and heartbreaking secrets. In The Asylum, Carol tells the full story of how she overcame unimaginable suffering, to find the happiness and solace she has today as a mother and grandmother.

On 17th November, 2012, Salvador Alvarenga left the coast of Mexico for a two-day fishing trip. A vicious storm killed his engine and the current dragged his boat out to sea. The storm picked up and carried him West, deeper into the heart of the Pacific Ocean. Alvarenga would not touch solid ground again for fourteen months. When he was washed ashore on January 30th, 2014, he had drifted over 9,000 miles.

It takes a tough mind-set to be a successful sniper, to be able to dig in for days on your own as you wait for your target, to stay calm on a battlefield when you yourself have become the target the enemy most wants to take out. Craig Harrison has what it takes, and in November 2009 in Afghanistan, under intense pressure, he saved the lives of his comrades with the longest confirmed sniper kill - 2,475 metres, the length of 25 football pitches.

She was 17 years old on a Christmas Eve flight 40 years ago to join her father for Christmas when the unimaginable happened. The Lockheed L-188A Electra, on the way from Lima to Pucallpa, flew directly into a thunderstorm. A strike of lightning left the plane incinerated and Juliane Diller (Koepcke) still strapped to her plane seat falling through the night air two miles above the Earth. Her survival is unexplainable and considered a modern-day miracle. Her mother was among the 91 dead and Juliane the sole survivor.

In Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend, the historian Gary Roberts takes aim at the most complex, perplexing, and paradoxical gunfighter of the Old West, drawing on more than 20 years of research - including new primary sources - in his quest to separate the life from the legend. Doc Holliday was a study in contrasts: the legendary gunslinger who made his living as a dentist; the emaciated consumptive whose very name struck fear in the hearts of his enemies

Full Tilt is the inspiring true story of Dervla Murphy's 1963 journey from Ireland to India on an Armstrong Cadet bicycle, and the trials, landscapes, and cultures she encountered along the way. The route takes her through the valleys and snowy mountain passes of Europe and India to the scorching deserts of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the metal of her bicycle, Rozinante (named after Don Quixote's steed), becomes too hot to touch.

Veteran sailor and writer Christian Williams invites us along once again on a 5,000-mile voyage of discovery around the North Pacific. Equipped with a new boat, a well-stocked toolbox, and the entire history of philosophic thought, he takes us as crew through squalls and calms deep into a laboratory of the universe that exists only out of sight of land. Funny, erudite, and at times deeply personal, Philosophy of Sailing explores who we are and how encounters with the unknown can be a path to revelation and joy.

Anna McNuff had never run a mile without shoes on before. And yet, one British summer, she set off to run a (very) wiggly route from the Shetland Islands to London–on a mission to cover the distance of 100 marathons…in bare feet.