Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Adventurers, Explorers & Survival

Captain Robert Falcon Scott didn't start out life as a hero. In fact, as a boy he was considered small, frail and shy. So what was it that turned this ordinary man into a legend? Through his gripping account of how this modest naval officer became Scott of the Antarctic, Neil Oliver vividly relates the awe-inspiring tales of brave men that inspired Britain's greatest hero, including Nelson, Sir John Moore and the Demons of Camerone.

Brought to you by Penguin. In this collection of profiles, essays and travel stories, Chatwin takes us to Benin, where he is arrested as a mercenary during a coup; to Boston to meet an LSD guru who believes he is Christ; to India with Indira Ghandi when she attempted a political comeback in 1978; and to Nepal where he reminds us that 'Man's real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot'.

At only 16 years old, Josef Lewkowicz became a number, prisoner 85314. Following the Nazi invasion of Poland, he and his father were separated from their family and herded to the Kraków-Plaszów concentration camp. Forced to carry out hard labour in brutal conditions, and to live under the constant threat of extreme violence and sudden death, before the war was over Josef would witness the unique horrors of six of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Mauthausen and Ebensee.

In the summer of 1942, 22-year-old Franci Rabinek - designated a Jew by the Nazi racial laws - arrived at Terezin, a concentration camp and ghetto 40 miles north of her home in Prague. Franci, a spirited and glamorous young woman, was known among her fellow inmates as the Prague dress designer. During an Auschwitz selection, Franci would spontaneously lie to Nazi officer Dr Josef Mengele and claim to be an electrician. It was a split-second decision that would go on to endanger - and save - her life.

Born in Prague to a Jewish family in 1929, Dita Kraus has lived through the most turbulent decades of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Here, Dita writes with startling clarity on the horrors and joys of a life delayed by the Holocaust. From her earliest memories and childhood friendships in Prague before the war, to the Nazi occupation that saw her and her family sent to the Jewish ghetto at Terezín, to the unimaginable fear and bravery of her imprisonment in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and life after liberation.

Paris, 1940. A woman in a red hat and a black fur coat hurries down a side-street. She is Mathilde Carré, codenamed 'the cat', known as Agent Victoire. She is a charismatic spy; her story is one of resistance and survival. These are the darkest days for France, half occupied by Nazi Germany, half run by the collaborationist Vichy regime; and dark days for Britain - isolated and under threat of invasion.

Norwegian adventurer, philosopher and acclaimed author Erling Kagge ventured to the North Pole in 1990. Blending memoir from that intrepid journey, along with history, philosophy and a stark warning about melting ice, comes a profound meditation about nature and our place within it. The North Pole is for anyone who’s gazed out at the horizon – and wondered what happens if you keep walking.

In March 2020, Kate Garraway's husband, Derek Draper, contracted COVID-19 and was placed in a medically induced coma. Initially, Kate was told that he would not survive. Still in hospital and in a critical condition, he is thought to be the UK's longest-fighting COVID-19 patient. In this intimate book, Kate shares her deeply personal story.

Peter has motor neurone disease, a condition universally considered by doctors to be terminal. It will destroy his nerve cells, and he is told that within an average of two years, it will take his life, too. But, face to face with death, he decides there is another way. Using his background in science and technology, he navigates a new path, one that will enable him not just to survive but to thrive.

Straight from the harsh streets, American Cops is a first-person account of the days and nights of America's police force.

Surviving extreme conditions can teach us to lead a fulfilled life. No one knows this better than Erling Kagge, who was the first man in history to reach all of the Earth's poles by foot and the summit of Everest. In The Philosophy of an Explorer he brings together the wisdom and expertise he has gained from the expeditions that have taken him to the limits of the earth and of human endurance. In 16 meditative but practical lessons - from cultivating an optimistic outlook, to getting up at the right time, to learning to take pleasure in the small things and comfort in solitude.

Pen Hadow is an authentic British hero, one of the world's most experienced and successful living polar explorers. In spring 2003, fulfilling a deathbed vow to his father, he became the first man ever to complete a solo trek to the North Pole from the far more arduous and hazardous North American side. The nine days he then spent weatherbound at the Pole with dwindling supplies catapulted him to worldwide fame.

With rare detail and in consummate style, Steve Inskeep tells the story of a couple whose joint ambitions and talents intertwined with those of the nascent United States itself. Taking advantage of expanding news media, aided by an increasingly literate public, the two linked their names to the three great national movements of the time - westward settlement, women’s rights, and opposition to slavery. Together, John and Jessie Frémont took parts in events that defined the country and gave rise to a new, more global America.

Only a few hundred vessels have ever transited the Northwest Passage, stretching through Canada’s north from Maine to Alaska—and substantially fewer have completed the treacherous journey in a fiberglass-hulled boat like Polar Sun. But Mark Synnott was determined to add his name to the list, and in doing so, also investigate a 175-year-old mystery, that of what happened to the legendary captain Sir John Franklin and his crew aboard the legendary HMS Erebus and HMS Terror.