Adventure Writing

Like so many others, David Lebovitz dreamed about living in Paris ever since he first visited the city in the 1980s. Finally, after a nearly two-decade career as a pastry chef and cookbook author, he moved to Paris to start a new life. Having crammed all his worldly belongings into three suitcases, he arrived, hopes high, at his new apartment in the lively Bastille neighborhood.

In Ruth Reichl’s latest book—one that will delight her fans and convert those as yet uninitiated to her charming tales—the author brings to life her adventures in pursuit of good meals and good company. Picking up where Tender at the Bone leaves off, Comfort Me with Apples recounts Reichl’s transformation from chef to food writer, a process that led her through restaurants from Bangkok to Paris to Los Angeles and brought lessons in life, love, and food.

Michael Palin is off again, this time to the seemingly desolate Sahara Desert. There's no easy way across, as he and his team discover on their most challenging expedition yet.

Mount Kilimanjaro is sometimes called "Everyman's Everest" because it is possible for a novice climber to reach the summit. And every year, more than 30,000 adventure tourists try. But for each person who goes to the mountain, there are thousands more who chat about it at parties, making plans to go...someday. That's how Daniel Dorr got started: flirting with a beautiful brunette and spouting impressive plans. Six months later, he was lying on the gravel trail at 18,000 feet, panting and hacking in the darkness.

An honest look at some of the questions and myths about living overseas, using entertaining and informative real-life examples to illustrate what is true and what is not so true. The goal is to provide the listener with the good and the bad - not to persuade you to become an expat or not - but to provide enough insight to decide what might be best for you.

At 35, Leslie Buck made an impulsive decision to put her personal life on hold to pursue her passion. Leaving behind a full life of friends, love, and professional security, she became the first American woman to learn pruning from one of the most storied landscaping companies in Kyoto. Cutting Back recounts Buck's bold journey and the revelations she has along the way.

Stark narrates a series of outdoor adventure stories in which thrill can cross the line into mortal peril. Each death or brush with death is at once a suspense story, a cautionary tale, and a medical thriller. He describes what goes through the mind of a cross-country skier as his body temperature plummets - apathy at 91 degrees, stupor at 90 - and explores the physiology of a snowboarder trying not to panic as he consumes the tiny pocket of air trapped around his face under thousands of pounds of snow.

The following is a selection from three books that were published in 1894, 1910, and 1905 respectively by early pioneers who ventured into Tibet. They are Among the Tibetans, India and Tibet, To Lhassa at Last. Although as Westerners their perspectives are culturally bounded (and too often myopic), they each write vividly and occasionally with great insight about what they experienced in their travels. Sadly, however, two of the narratives are militaristic and we witness an unwanted invasion on behalf of the British to gain controlling interest in the region.

With their Andalusian guesthouse ready to welcome visitors, Robert and Sabina face new challenges. They battle through a snowy winter and face another year of drought. With few bookings, no water, and very little money left, they start looking back and doubt their decision to leave their cushy jobs in the Middle East for the harsh reality of life in the countryside. Was moving to Andalusia a big mistake?

For the first time in my life I felt that death was a possibility; a stupid, pointless, lonely death on the aptly named Mondulkiri Death Highway. The Ho Chi Minh Trail is one of the greatest feats of military engineering in history. But since the end of the Vietnam War much of this vast transport network has been reclaimed by jungle, while remaining sections are littered with a deadly legacy of unexploded bombs. For Antonia, the chance to explore the Trail before it was lost forever was a personal challenge she couldn’t ignore - yet at times it would be a terrifying journey.

An adventure to blow you away! That's what Jack and Annie get when the Magic Tree House whisks them back to the 1870s. They land on the prairie near a one-room schoolhouse, where they meet a teenaged schoolteacher, some cool kids, and one big, scary bully. But the biggest and scariest thing is yet to come.

A gonzo ride through war-torn Yemen as only Chas Smith, the award-winning author of Welcome to Paradise, Now Go to Hell and Cocaine + Surfing: A Sordid History of Surfing's Greatest Love Affair, could provide. Follow Smith and his misfit band of merrymakers as they search for the true origins of Al Qaeda and endeavor to ride the unsurfed waves of Yemen all while exploring the slim opportunities for fun in the margins of our global war on terror and at any cost - even if it means eventual kidnapping by Hezbollah.

Canoeing the Congo narrates the journey of Phil Harwood, who undertook an epic five-month solo attempt to canoe the Congo River in war-torn Central Africa. It was a historic 'first descent' from the true source in the highlands of Zambia. Just short of 3,000 miles long, the Congo River is the eighth longest in the world and the deepest river in the world, with a flow rate second only to the Amazon. Along the way, Phil encountered numerous waterfalls, huge rapids, man-eating crocodiles, hippos, aggressive snakes...

What secrets do the Las Vegas storm drains keep? What discoveries wait in the dark? What's beneath the neon? Armed with a flashlight, tape recorder, and expandable baton, Las Vegas CityLife writer-editor Matthew O'Brien explored the Las Vegas flood-control system for more than four years. Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas chronicles O'Brien's adventures in subterranean Vegas. He follows the footsteps of a psycho killer. He braces against a flood. He parties with naked crack-heads.

The desire to travel is instinctive; to see what's ahead of us, around the corner, or across the sea. We've been curious about the world since time began. So get out there, see the world, have an adventure, have fun, live! Vancouver Island is the largest island on the west coast, and it has not only some of the biggest trees in the world – as well as sea monsters, orca and fairly regular Bigfoot sightings – it also has the city of Victoria, recently voted the top city in North America. Once you're on the island, it'll be hard to think of a reason to leave.

No matter what was happening in Jennifer Weiner's life - whether good, bad, or very, very ugly - her mother, Fran, would say the same thing: It's all material. Now the number-one New York Times best-selling author and "one of the biggest names in popular fiction" ( USA Today), beloved on Twitter and hailed as "an unlikely feminist enforcer" ( The New Yorker), takes the raw stuff of her personal life and spins it into a collection of personal essays as uproariously funny and heartfelt as the best of Tina Fey and Nora Ephron.

When she first read of Victorian explorer Mary Kingsley’s travels in the French colony of Gabon, Alexander knew she had to experience the present-day nation for herself. Soon she is retracing Kingsley’s route - struggling through tangled vines in humid rain forests, chugging up the churning Ogooué River in a packed steamer, and fending off gigantic cockroaches. The country she discovers is a challenging mixture of Africa’s exotic past and its practical present

Whether your idea of travel at its finest is trekking through Europe with a backpack, a map and a foreign-language dictionary; road-tripping across America in a fully loaded RV; or cruising the Caribbean aboard a luxury liner, Chicken Soup for the Traveler’s Soul celebrates the people you’ll meet, the lands you’ll discover and the lessons you’ll learn. Like traveling itself, the stories in this book will take you on a journey of adventure, insight, and discovery. Through the real-life experiences of others, you’ll see that regardless of the destination, it is the journey that provides the fondest memories.

In this captivating book from one of the most influential geochemists in the field, Tamsin Mather takes us along on her globe-spanning excursions from Nicaragua to Hawaii, Santorini to Ethiopia and beyond. With warmth and lyricism, she explores the cultural roles volcanoes play throughout history, and the growing and evolving science behind their formation and eruptions.

In 2016, Nuseir Yassin quit his job to travel for 1,000 consecutive days. But instead of the usual tourist traps, Nas set out to meet real people, see the places they call home, and discover what unites all of us living on this beautiful planet - from villages in Africa and slums in India, to the high-rises of Singapore and the deserts of Australia. While he journeyed from country to country, Nas uploaded a single 60-second video per day for his Nas Daily Facebook following to highlight the amazing, terrifying, inspiring and downright surprising sh*t happening all over the world.