Explorer Memoirs

In the early years of the 18th century, a band of French scientists set off on a daring, decade-long expedition to South America in a race to measure the precise shape of the earth. Like Lewis and Clark's exploration of the American West, their incredible mission revealed the mysteries of a little-known continent to a world hungry for discovery. Scaling 16,000-foot mountains in the Peruvian Andes, and braving jaguars, pumas, insects, and vampire bats in the jungle, the scientists barely completed their mission.

The time of the American mountain man was not to reach its peak until the mid-19th century, but the man who served as the prototype for the cultural genre hailed from an earlier age in which the new United States had scarcely established its most basic structural tenets. A member of the original Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery commissioned by Thomas Jefferson, John Colter’s multiple journeys to the northwest country of present-day Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho were first-time events in the development of the continent.

In his second memoir, a true crime story, David Alan Arnold takes us on a life and death adventure in his helicopter as an aerial cameraman for Ice Road Truckers and Deadliest Catch. He also gets into adventures at home, when he picks a fight with an organized crime ring that took over a school bus stop. David's town has so few residents that good people are afraid to speak about the crimes, for fear of reprisal.

Slave Girls, a new series by bestselling author Louise Allen, reveals a shocking modern-day scandal of County Lines–the single most dangerous form of systematic child abuse prevalent today.

Um der erblindenden Pauli die Welt zu zeigen, nimmt sich die fünfköpfige Familie von Josefine Gauck (Enkelin von Joachim Gauck) ein Sabbatical und geht auf eine einjährige Reise um die Welt. In Kanada, USA, Neuseeland, Australien und Bali tauchen sie so in das Leben anderer Menschen ein. Pauli und ihre Brüder erleben die Freiheit in den Baumwipfeln eines kanadischen Kletterwalds und entdecken, wie weich Ziegeneuter sich beim Melken anfühlen.

In 2024, a gay youth leader was jailed for 22 years. One of his victims tells why it took him two decades to call the police. In 1996, at the age of fourteen, Richard Hall met a man who changed his life. Two and half decades later, he called the police. As a result, the man was jailed for twenty-two years. This is the story of what came before the police: how a teenage boy who had been hounded at school because he was gay walked into a world where he thought he would be safe, but he was too inexperienced to navigate. In his naïvety, he thought what happened next was normal.

On June 13, 1999, a rumble began high on a sheer cliff wall, like faraway thunder, at Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park. 100 tons of rock rained down on three young climbers. Peter, a college student from Colorado, turned to a long-ago climbing lesson taught to him by his father. As a little boy first astride a mountain, he learned to always protect a partner at the end of the rope...to never let go. He was not anchored and could have easily slipped from his harness and run for cover, but he didn't.

From the hilarious, oft-irresponsible travel enthusiast Auguste Gravel comes the first installment of travel stories that will make you shoot milk out of your nose and then shock you back into your seat with the next paragraph. On the Lam is about leaving your comfort zone and stepping into a world of travel and the unknown. It's a funny audiobook that provides advice for new or experienced travelers of any age.

Seventy-Five Men, A Shipwreck and Me is the true story of a daring race to recover a treasure trove of silver from a torpedoed wreck lying one-and-a-half miles beneath the Indian Ocean. The quest unites seventy-five seasoned seafarers, each skilled in navigating the ocean’s mysteries. However, they face an unexpected challenge: adapting to Catherine, an English woman aboard their converted drill ship.

The Voyage #1 was a success–even though nothing happened. It turned out that listeners liked the easy style–the sideways view of a singlehanded ocean crossing in a small boat without long-range communications. No news, no weather forecasts. Just one man and his boat in the middle of nowhere. So here is The Voyage #2–and this time something did happen: A knockdown, a broken rudder, 1,500 miles with the steering held together with string...

Pocahontas was the daughter of Powhatan. When Captain John Smith was captured by these Indians in 1607, he was brought before Powhatan, who sentenced him to death. Sixteen-year-old Pocahontas convinced her father to spare Captain Smith's life, thus becoming a friend of the settlers and eventually influencing her father to be friendly, too.

Un aventurier surgi d'une jungle d'Amérique latine, Cizia Zykë. Un jeune poète famélique du pavé parisien, Thierry Poncet. Seul point commun entre ces deux hommes que tout oppose : leur désir d'être des écrivains. De leur rencontre va naître une incroyable odyssée autour du monde. Au bout, le...

My grandfather was the last person in the world I would have ever expected to hear a story about a personal encounter with Bigfoot. He was a serious man and for him to discuss this ancient & controversial knowledge so openly was astounding. He wasn't mean or abusive, but he had no time for silliness. He never wasted time on unexplained mysteries or folklore. He grew up in an era and in circumstances where silliness was "for women, children, and the mentally insufficient".

In 1990, David Muller set sail to Mozambique with his wife and two young children, to fulfil a boyhood dream of sailing to the tropics on the yacht he had spent ten years building. The dream holiday came to a shocking end when the yacht ran aground on a beach near Bazaruto Islands. While waiting for high tide to refloat the yacht, a patrol of Renamo child soldiers, armed with AK47’s, arrive, along with two adult captives.

En 1972, partió de Montevideo, con destino a Santiago de Chile, un avión Fairchild Hiller FH-227 de las fuerzas aéreas uruguayas en el que viajaba el equipo de rugby Old Christians y sus acompañantes. Sin embargo, les aguardaba un destino muy distinto del que habían proyectado. Las infernales condiciones climatológicas determinaron la catástrofe y el aparato se estrelló con los Andes.

Steve Backshall was nine years old the first time he saw a shark, while on holiday with his family in Malaysia. It was the beginning of a life-long fascination with these 'lords of the sea', and the oceanic life around them. His career as one of the world's most popular naturalists and explorers has taken him to countless underwater places, many never before seen by others. And he's also been witness to the startling decline in fortune of our oceans' wild inhabitants over the past fifty years. Deep Blue takes us on an unforgettable tour of the many worlds of aquatic life.

His plan was to stay in Iowa, maybe get a job counting duck, or do a little farming. But events conspired to fling Carter Niemeyer westward and straight into the jaws of wolves. From his early years wrangling ornery federal trappers, eagles, and grizzlies, to winning a skinning contest that paved the way for wolf reintroduction in the Northern Rockies, Niemeyer reveals the wild and bumpy ride that turned a trapper - a killer - into a champion of wolves.

Shaken by the loss of her father, drained by her job at the United Nations, and conflicted over failed relationships, Natasha Scripture asked herself the question at the heart of her anxiety: What is my purpose? The answer was not about finding love; it was about recognizing its source. The result is Man Fast, a true and intimate spiritual detective story. With courage, honesty, and wit, Natasha shares the story of her awakening.

More than a memoir, A Single Desperate Prayer is a riveting account of one resilient girl’s life in a Crimean ghetto, replete with equal amounts of tragedy and triumph. Told through the eyes of a child, the listener witnesses Ludmila’s growth and maturation as she starts from practically nothing, learns how to beg in the streets, loses all of what little she had, is left to the wolves, and then saved by grace—all before her fifteenth birthday.

The image we have of Amelia Earhart today - a tousle-haired, androgynous flier clad in shirt, silk scarf, leather jacket, and goggles - is only one of her many personas, most of which have been lost to us through the years. Through years of research and interviews with many of the surviving people who knew Amelia, Susan Butler has recreated a remarkably vivid and multifaceted portrait of this enigmatic figure.