Showing titles in Adventurers, Explorers & Survival

Frederick Russell Burnham's amazing story resembles a newsreel fused with a Saturday matinee thriller. One of the few people who could turn his garrulous friend Theodore Roosevelt into a listener, Burnham was once world famous as "the American scout". His expertise in woodcraft, learned from frontiersmen and Indians, helped inspire another friend, Robert Baden-Powell, to found the Boy Scouts. His adventures encompassed Apache wars and range feuds and death-defying military feats that brought him renown and high honors.

From the outside looking in, the young life of Mia Döring seemed unremarkable, as she pursued her studies at a prominent Dublin art college. Unbeknownst to those around her, however, Mia's life was anything but ordinary. At age 16, she had been sexually exploited by an older man, which carved a direct path into the Irish sex trade, where she remained for several years until finally leaving it behind over a decade ago, at age 24. In her literary memoir, Mia excavates her difficult history as she sets about integrating her past with her present-day life.

The first thing you will notice when you meet Kechi Okwuchi is her scars. One of just two survivors of a devastating plane crash that killed more than 100 people, 16-year-old Kechi was left with third-degree burns over 65 percent of her body. More than My Scars is her incredible story. A story of not just surviving impossible odds but thriving in a world that is too often caught up with how we look on the outside rather than seeing that our true value is within. Now in her early 30s, Kechi has spent the last 16 years refusing to be defined by her trauma.

Lidia was just three years old when she arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau with her mother, grandparents and foster brother. They were from Belarus, their ‘crime’ that they supported the partisan resistance to Nazi occupation. Lidia was picked by Dr Josef Mengele for his experiments and sent to the children’s block where she survived eighteen months of hell. Injected with infectious diseases, desperately malnourished, she came close to death. Her mother - who risked her life to secretly visit Lidia - was her only tie to humanity.

Danny Baker is a national treasure with a well-documented and colourful life. For over a quarter of a century, he has amused and entertained audiences on both radio and television. Beginning his career at the age of 15 in a small record shop in London's West End, Danny went on to become an acclaimed music journalist and started his radio career on BBC GLR in 1989. With a unique take on life and a lot to say, Danny's latest book is full of his trademark warmth, wit and insight.

The Color of Everything is a thrilling tale of risk and adventure, written by a man who has done it all: he’s stood at the top of the world, climbed imposing mountain faces alone in the dark and become the only American to summit an 8,000-meter peak in winter. But it is also the story of a tumultuous life--a stirring, lyrical memoir that captures the profound musings of a brilliant and unquiet mind grappling with the meaning of success, the cost of fame, addiction, and whether it is possible to outrun your demons.

In the spring of 1804, at the behest of President oThomas Jefferson, a party of explorers called the Corps of Discovery crossed the Mississippi River and started up the Missouri, heading west into the newly acquired Louisiana Territory.

Erik Weihenmayer was born with retinoscheses, a degenerative eye disorder that would leave him blind by the age of 13. But Erik was determined to rise above this devastating disability and lead a fulfilling and exciting life. In this poignant and inspiring memoir, he shares his struggle to push past the limits imposed on him by his visual impairment - and by a seeing world.

Poland, 1944. The train slowed and halted with a squeal of the brakes. It felt like we waited in the carriage for an eternity, but eventually, the heavy doors opened, directly into the chaos outside. Sara Leibovits, a 16-year-old Jewish girl, was a passenger on the train, together with her family. Within minutes, their horrific fate was sealed. The little family spent their final minutes together on the platform at Auschwitz before they were ordered in all directions and each left to their own fate.

Homer Hickam's memoir Rocket Boys and the movie adaptation October Sky have become one of the most popular stories in the world. But what happened to Homer after he was a West Virginia rocket boy? In his latest memoir, Homer recounts how he fought through some of the worst battles in Vietnam, discovered sunken U-boats, befriended Tom Clancy, and more. Although told with humor and wit, Hickam does not shy away from the hardship endured and the mistakes he made during the tumultuous decades since his life in the town he made famous—Coalwood, West Virginia.

Operation Babylift: Mission Accomplished tells the inspiring story of two survivors and the relationship they forged from the tragic events of April 4, 1975. During the final days before the fall of Saigon, Gerald Ford initiated Operation Babylift. This humanitarian mission was a mass evacuation of orphans from South Vietnam. Approximately 3,000 children were evacuated during this mission. In a horrible twist of fate, the inaugural flight ended in tragedy as the Galaxy C5A experienced a rapid decompression and crash landed in the rice fields just outside of Tan Son Nhut airport.

Near the end of her life, Mary Mann Hamilton (1866-c.1936) was encouraged to record her experiences as a female pioneer. The result is the only known firsthand account of a remarkable woman thrust into the center of taming the American South - surviving floods, tornadoes, and fires; facing bears, panthers, and snakes; managing a boardinghouse in Arkansas that was home to an eccentric group of settlers; and running a logging camp in Mississippi that blazed a trail for development in the Mississippi Delta.

Twelve Years a Slave (Originally published in 1853 with the sub-title: "Narrative of Solomon Northup, a citizen of New-York, kidnapped in Washington city in 1841, and rescued in 1853, from a cotton plantation near the Red River in Louisiana") is the written work of Solomon Northup; a man who was born free, but was bound into slavery later in life. Northup's account describes the daily life of slaves in Bayou Beof, their diet, the relationship between the master and slave, the means that slave catchers used to recapture them and the ugly realities that slaves suffered.

For centuries, Ferdinand Magellan has been celebrated as a hero: a noble adventurer who circumnavigated the globe in an extraordinary feat of human bravery, a paragon of daring and chivalry. Now, renowned historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto draws on extensive and meticulous research to conduct a dazzling investigation into Magellan's life, his character and his ill-fated voyage. He shows that Magellan did not attempt—much less accomplish—a journey around the globe, and that in his own lifetime, the explorer was abhorred as a traitor, reviled as a tyrant and dismissed as a failure.

When Hamed Amiri was 10 years old, he watched his mother give a speech in his home town of Herat, Afghanistan, speaking out for women’s rights and education and against the ruling Taliban. That night, an order was given for her execution. The family packed up their most precious belongings and escaped in darkness, starting what would be a long and dangerous journey. But his mother's was not the only life in danger. Hamed’s older brother suffered from a rare heart condition, and this escape offered a chance of life-saving treatment in the West.

Short daily reflections from one of the world's favourite adventurers. Best-selling author Bear Grylls has survived a free-fall parachute accident that left him with a broken back, possibly unable to walk again; falling down a mountain in the Rockies, severing a finger in the Vietnam jungle, a broken shoulder in Antarctica. He passed the gruelling training to join the SAS, crossed the North Atlantic in an open inflatable boat, and held the highest ever open-air formal dinner party, in a balloon at 25,000 feet.

In 1911, Captain Robert Falcon Scott went back to the huge frozen wasteland of the Antarctic with the intention of reaching the South Pole, by a long and terribly arduous trek across the ice. On finally reaching the pole, Scott and his comrades were devastated to find that they had been beaten by the Norwegian explorer Amundsen. With temperatures of minus 30, they began their slow journey back to their base.

Deadly cold, famine, grizzly bears, and one unruly sled dog with a grudge kept Stan on the knife's edge between survival and death. Humbled by the power of nature, the Boston greaser who was destined for prison found a new life in the wild, where one mistake can prove fatal. This is the true story of Stan Zuray's incredible journey, the reformation of a man's heart and mind in the forbidding darkness of Alaska's endless winter.

One man and his home-built, two-wheeled machine competing in an illegal, outlaw chopper motorcycle road race across America known as The Stampede. His motorcycle is a true ugly, unpopular style of chopper with no frills, chrome, or shocks running hard from west to east as fast as possible - without stopping. Middle age is approaching. His life has taken a dramatic turn lately with his wife divorcing him, children scattering, a new younger girlfriend in the picture, and a mistress that fills his mind. Time in the saddle running on his own road is just what he needs.

Michael Fomenko is familiar with adversity. But when he gets shut out of the Commonwealth Games for financial and political reasons at the ripe age of 20, he questions everything. Setting a new course for himself, he dreams of a feat that will require unimaginable determination. With no companions or guides, he will paddle a dugout canoe over 1,000 nautical kilometers from Cairns, Australia, to Dutch, New Guinea.