Adventure Biography

This is an enhanced edition of the author's original memoir published in 2021. It includes an updated Author's Note, as well as a glossary of ADHD and recovery related terms and a Resources guide designed to educate the listener and provide support. The memoir was inspired by the author's struggles with misdiagnosed and misunderstood attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), as much as it was fueled by her passion for adventure and escape through music and (later) alcohol and marijuana.

WHY WOULD A SAN FRANCISCO ENTREPRENEUR SELL HIS COMPANY, FLY TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH, INVEST MILLIONS RESTORING PARADISE, THEN FIGHT LIKE HELL TO GIVE IT ALL AWAY? In 1991, Doug Tompkins left his luxury life in San Francisco and flew 6,500 miles south to a shack in Patagonia that his friends...

Emma Gatewood told her family she was going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than $200. The next anybody heard from her, this genteel, farm-reared, 67-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. And in September 1955, atop Maine's Mount Katahdin, she sang the first verse of "America, the Beautiful" and proclaimed, "I said I'll do it, and I've done it."

A momentous look at the private companies building a revolutionary new economy in space, from the New York Times bestselling author of Elon Musk In When the Heavens Went on Sale, Ashlee Vance illuminates our future and unveils the next big technology story of our time: welcome to the Wild West...

In January of 1934, Admiral Richard E. Byrd began an Antarctic expedition that would change his life forever. Already a celebrated explorer, Byrd's expeditions were media sensations on radio and film. On this trip, Byrd had an audacious undertaking in mind: manning a weather station alone, miles from the American base along the coast, through the harsh Antarctic winter.

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER The masterful narration of a daughter's decades-long quest to understand her extraordinary mother, who was born in Lenin's Soviet Union, served as a combat soldier in the Red Army, and endured three years of Nazi captivity—but never revealed her darkest secrets. As...

In 1991, acting on a tip from a local fisherman, two scuba divers discovered a sunken German U-boat–complete with its crew of 60 men–not too far off the New Jersey coast. The divers, realizing the momentousness of their discovery, began probing the mystery. Over the next six years, they...

This is the remarkable story of the English language; from its beginnings as a minor guttural Germanic dialect to its position today as a truly established global language. The Adventure of English is not only an enthralling story of power, religion, and trade, but also the story of people, and how their lives continue to change the extraordinary language that is English.

Laura was in her early twenties and directionless when she quit her job to backpack in Bolivia. Fate landed her at a wildlife sanctuary on the edge of the Amazon jungle where she was assigned to a beautiful and complex puma named Wayra. Wide-eyed, inexperienced, and comically terrified, Laura made the scrappy, make-do camp her home. And in Wayra, she made a friend for life.

On June 6, 1924, two men set out from a camp perched at 23,000 feet on an ice ledge just below the lip of Mount Everest’s North Col. George Mallory, thirty-seven, was Britain’s finest climber. Sandy Irvine was a young Oxford scholar of twenty-two with little previous mountaineering...

Writer for the New York Times and GQ, Mark Adams is also the acclaimed author of Mr. America. In this fascinating travelogue, Adams follows in the controversial footsteps of Hiram Bingham III, who’s been both lionized and vilified for his discovery of the famed Lost City in 1911—but which reputation is justified?

In 1968, nine sailors set off on the most daring race ever held: to single-handedly circumnavigate the globe nonstop. It was a feat that had never been accomplished and one that would forever change the face of sailing. Ten months later, only one of the nine men would cross the finish line and earn fame, wealth, and glory. For the others, the reward was madness, failure, and death. In this extraordinary book, Peter Nichols chronicles a contest of the individual against the sea, waged at a time before cell phones and electronic positioning systems.

An expertly crafted work of reportage, memoir, and biography on the subject of loneliness told through the lives of six iconic artists, by the acclaimed author of The Trip to Echo Spring. You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavor to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by thousands of strangers. The Lonely City is a roving cultural history of urban loneliness, centered on the ultimate city: Manhattan, that teeming island of gneiss, concrete, and glass.

""Kilian Jornet is the most dominating endurance athlete of his generation.""—NEW YORK TIMES ""Inspiring and humbling""— ALEX HONNOLD The most accomplished mountain runner of all time contemplates his record-breaking climbs of Mount Everest in this profound memoir—an intellectual and...

The behind-the-scenes story of the action heroes who ruled 1980s and ’90s Hollywood and the beloved films that made them stars, including Die Hard, First Blood, The Terminator, and more. “Entertaining . . . This is a book that makes you ache for the days when the movie screen belonged not to...

The mesmerizing, larger-than-life tale of an eccentric adventurer who traversed some of the greatest frontiers of the twentieth century, from uncharted Arctic wastelands to the underground resistance networks of World War II. Deep in the Arctic wilderness, Peter Freuchen awoke to find himself...

READ BY THE AUTHOR AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Imagine if all the worn-out, untrue, painful chapters of our lives started to quiet, and the beautiful, unique pieces of who we are were to rise. Imagine if the stories we tell brought us back to our true selves, back to one another...

NAMED A NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER AND VOGUE The first biography of Peter Matthiessen, the novelist, naturalist, and Zen roshi, whose trailblazing work championed Native American rights and helped usher in the modern...

With the utterance of a single line—“Doctor Livingstone, I presume?”—a remote meeting in the heart of Africa was transformed into one of the most famous encounters in exploration history. But the true story behind Dr. David Livingstone and journalist Henry Morton Stanley is one that has...

Perfect Unfolding is a thought-provoking travel memoir about a woman who trades her dream home and fourteen-year firefighting career for the freedom and possibility of the open road.