Explorer Memoirs

By 1930, no place in the world was less well explored than Greenland. The native Inuit had occupied the relatively accessible west coast for centuries. The east coast, however, was another story. In August 1930, Henry George Watkins (nicknamed “Gino”), a twenty-three-year-old British explorer, led thirteen scientists and explorers on an ambitious expedition to the east coast of Greenland and into its vast and forbidding interior to set up a permanent meteorological base on the icecap, 8,200 feet above sea level.

Beryl Markham, the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west, describes her childhood on a farm in Kenya, her apprenticeship as a horse trainer, and her later career as a pioneer aviator who piloted passengers and supplies in a small plane to remote corners of Africa.

Fatal Forecast chronicles a dramatic fight for survival aboard two small fishing boats that were ambushed by a horrific surprise storm just southeast of Cape Cod. Soon after the Fair Wind and the Sea Fever reached the fishing ground at Georges Bank, they were hit with hurricane-force winds and massive 90-foot waves that battered the boats for hours. The direction of the wind made it impossible to turn back.

In May of 1963, Seattle mountaineer Jim Whittaker stepped into world history by becoming the first American to summit Mount Everest. More than 50 years later, he is still regarded as a seminal figure in North American mountaineering, as well as an astute businessman who helped create the outdoor recreation industry. A Life on the Edge: Memoirs of Everest and Beyond is Jim's courageous, no-punches-pulled autobiography and a look at a peripatetic, sometimes difficult life.

As a child growing up in the wild beauty of the Ozarks, Barbara often spent her days exploring outside and daydreaming of faraway places in order to escape a life of poverty. She longed to trade her homemade clothes and outdoor toilet for spectacular adventures around the world. That chance came in the form of a wild-eyed, long-haired Viking-like young man named Peter. After an exciting courtship and a wedding on a dime, the young couple departed on foot from New Orleans on July 5, 1976, heading toward the Pacific Coast.

Admiral of the Ocean Sea is Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison's classic biography of the greatest sailor of them all, Christopher Columbus. It is written with the insight, energy, and authority that only someone who had himself sailed in Columbus's path to the New World could muster. Morison undertook this expedition in a 147-foot schooner and a 47-foot ketch, the dimensions of these craft roughly matching those of Columbus's Santa Maria and Nina.

During the American Revolution and the border conflicts that followed, Simon Girty's name struck terror into the hearts of U.S. settlers in the Ohio Valley and the territory of Kentucky. Girty (1741-1818) had lived with the Natives most of his life. Scorned by his fellow white frontiersmen as an "Indian lover," Girty became an Indian agent for the British. He accompanied Native raids against Americans, spied deep into enemy territory, and was influential in convincing the tribes to fight for the British.

This anthology of survival stories covers the craziest and most enthralling wilderness encounters in American history. After mining our 126-year archive, we uncovered 10 tales of adventure and near tragedy that include close calls with aggressive grizzly bears, epic blizzards, hungry wolves, and much more. The thread that ties all of these narratives together is the authors’ grit and will to preserve — and then tell the tale.

Roald Amundsen was the most successful polar explorer of his era using sledges, dogs, skis, and ships. He is mainly remembered for being the first man to reach the South Pole on December 14, 1911. What is less often remembered is that he was also the first man to reach the North Pole on May 12, 1926, as the leader of the Amundsen-Ellsworth-Nobile expedition in the airship Norge.

The author was a cannoneer in the historic Rockbridge (Va.) Artillery, which made for itself, from Manassas to Appomattox, a reputation second to none in the Confederate service. No more vivid picture has been presented of the private soldier in camp, on the march, or in action. It was written evidently not with any commercial view, but was an undertaking from a conviction that its performance was a question of duty to his comrades.

When Dr. Sanjay Gupta travels the world for CNN to report on natural disasters, conflicts, and catastrophes, he illuminates the stories of the affected and the afflicted. But a few times in his career, while reporting abroad, he’s been asked to don his surgeon’s cap and gloves to intervene in high-stakes medical emergencies. Far from his controlled and highly regulated operating rooms, Gupta found himself trying to save lives in the most makeshift and trying conditions.

Charles Fletcher Lummis began his spectacular career in 1884 by walking from Ohio to start a new job at the three-year old Los Angeles Times. By the time of his death in 1928, the 3,500 mile "tramp across the continent" was just a footnote in his astonishingly varied career: crusading journalist, author of nearly two dozen books, editor of the influential political and literary magazine Out West, Los Angeles city librarian, preserver of Spanish missions, and Indian rights gadfly.

LT Dick Thompson, codename Dynamite, describes in heart-stopping detail that takes your breath away, brutal firefights and hand-to-hand combat against overwhelming odds as seen through his eyes. Follow Dynamite as he transitions from a hardcore Airborne Ranger Special Forces warrior into one of the most elite, tier-one special operators on the face of the planet. In the future, scholars will turn first to this book for historic and jarring SOG-related action.

On the edge of the remote salt flats of Australia, a young woman blows in from nowhere and disturbs the precarious equilibrium of a family farm. The boy is fascinated by her, his mother despises her, and the brutish farmhand wants to possess her. When the woman mysteriously disappears, the only trace of her a bloodied dress, the boy sets out in search of an Indian hawker who may or may not have the answers. As he journeys through the broken landscape, accompanied only by his horse and his dog, the boy becomes aware of another party converging murderously on his destination.

From 1792 to 1795, George Vancouver sailed the Pacific as the captain of his own expedition and as an agent of imperial ambition. To map a place is to control it, and Britain had its eyes on America's Pacific coast. And map it Vancouver did. His voyage was one of history's greatest feats of maritime daring, discovery, and diplomacy, and his marine survey of Hawaii and the Pacific coast was at its time the most comprehensive ever undertaken.

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.

In 1968, I was a sixteen-year-old girl with three passions: writing, my boyfriend, and sex. So… I started a diary, got married, and had a baby. Now, in 2025, I am a seventy-three-year-old woman with three passions: writing, my family, and, well… It's time to tell my story... As a teenager, Dawn had everything she wanted in suburban Toronto—good grades, proud parents, and a passionate romance with an ambitious young artist. But when her father's affair shattered her family and her mother warned "you can't trust men," her world turned upside down.

World-famous competitive skydiver and coach Dan Brodsky-Chenfeld presents proven tools and techniques for success and explains how they can be used in everyday life. Dan survived a plane crash from which 16 of the 22 people on board were killed. He was left critically injured and woke up from a six-week-long coma with a broken neck, broken skull, severe head trauma, a collapsed lung, and other serious internal injuries. Against all odds, Dan recovered and went on to become one of the greatest competitive skydiver in the world.

"I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla," writes Robert Sapolsky in this witty and riveting chronicle of a scientist's coming-of-age in remote Africa. An exhilarating account of Sapolsky's twenty-one-year study of a troop of rambunctious baboons in Kenya, A Primate's Memoir interweaves serious scientific observations with wry commentary about the challenges and pleasures of living in the wilds of the Serengeti-for man and beast alike.

Tom Crean was the farmer’s son from Kerry who sailed on three major expeditions to the unknown Antarctic over a century ago. He served with both Captain Robert Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton, spent longer on the ice than either and outlived them both. But Tom Crean returned to Ireland and never spoke about his exploits, taking his incredible story to the grave - until the publication of An Unsung Hero, which unearthed his story and saw him rightfully placed amongst the annals of the great explorers.