Mountain Memoir

Turf-roofed and wooden-built, offering fresh clean air, peace, isolation and the promise of a day's wood-chopping, hiking or snow-clearing amid landscapes of great beauty, the hytte - or wooden cabin home - is a crucial part of the national identity of every Norwegian. In 2016, Robert Ferguson and his wife bought a piece of land high up in the Hardangervidda, the plateau that dominates south-central Norway, and on it they built such a hytte. For Ferguson, the hytte represented the realisation of a dream that first brought him to Norway from England more than 30 years ago.

A friend's chance sighting of a hand-lettered "For Sale" sign sets Jan and Stu on a path that will change not only their domestic world, but their emotional one as well. Along the way, they find that the path ahead can be crooked, strewn with pitfalls just waiting to become pratfalls. Life at the university and in the theater never prepared accident-prone Stu for his new life as a would-be farmer, carpenter, and mountain man, nor Jan for some scary encounters with nature in the wild.

A journey back in time, The Golden Mountain is the gripping tale of four generations of Chinese women who live and die under the restrictions of their culture, except for one, the author. Her story tells of growing up in Hong Kong and of her transition to New York City where she struggled to meld the American dream with her ethnic background. Finally, at age 50, she dares to move into the present and understand the true nature of dreams and what it means to live.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist tells the story of the self-made billionaire who built the Kendall-Jackson empire from nothing into the biggest-selling brand of premium wines in the U.S. Jess Stonestreet Jackson was one of a small band of pioneering entrepreneurs who put California's wine country on the map. His life story is a compelling slice of history, daring, innovation, feuds, intrigue, talent, mystique, contrarianism, and luck, offering a unique window on the elegant, adventurous, and cut-throat worlds of Jackson's two passions: wine and horseracing.

When Apostle Justin Garner Jr. was seventeen, God showed him something that changed his life forever. One evening at his father's church, he experienced an out-of-body event that took him to the streets of heaven itself. "What I can tell you is that I saw, felt, and smelled everything--this was no dream or vision--I was there," Justin says in his revelation. After this experience, God began to teach him how to use the spiritual gift of sight that he has been blessed with all his life.

Ben and Helen Harrison set aside their comfortable life in San Francisco and headed to Costa Rica to build a 38-foot sailboat. They had never built a boat before...Then they had to get it down a mountainside to the water, and from there sail to Key West, where they now live. It was a dauntless task and a challenge that put their marriage, their sanity, and their very lives on the line. A real-life adventure that will make you feel like you’ve got a berth on La Dulce Mujer Pintada, the Sweet Painted Lady.

The Last Blue Mountain is the heart-rending true story of the 1957 expedition to Mount Haramosh in the Karakoram range in Pakistan. With the summit beyond reach, four young climbers are about to return to camp. Their brief pause to enjoy the view and take photographs is interrupted by an avalanche which sweeps Bernard Jillott and John Emery hundreds of feet down the mountain into a snow basin. Rae Culbert and Tony Streather risk their own lives to rescue their friends, only to become stranded alongside them.

Mountain Girl is an inspiring and poignant story that shows how grit and soul can take a person from barefoot in Appalachia to the boardrooms of industry without losing that special something or selling out. In her own words, Rockefeller writes about a fascinating life that has been well-lived and a hoot to boot.

In the winter of 1959, a group of nine young and experienced hikers embarked on a journey into the Ural Mountains of Russia. Although they had previously undertaken cold-weather trips, this particular expedition would tragically be their last. During their trek, the hikers encountered something unexpected in the supposedly desolate region, resulting in the demise of the entire group. The exact events of that fateful night remain unknown, but the incident has since become one of the world's most perplexing mysteries.

Climbing the Rough Side of the Mountain is the remarkable story of a couple who came together during the Civil Rights Movement and made fighting for equality and civil and workers’ rights their purpose for more than sixty years, overcoming adversity—with the strength of their love and commitment—to bring about meaningful change.

Because she refused to testify against her husband for actions she had already forgiven, Diana Weinberger, a former missionary, was incarcerated in an Idaho jail - a jail in which she had volunteered for a year in prison ministry! Diana's marriage was on the rocks. Years of wandering from her Christian roots had led this former YWAM missionary down paths she would later regret. She and her husband, both successful career professionals, divided their time between the world of work and the world of play - a world of bikers and wild parties.

Climbing over adversity. In her groundbreaking memoir, Another Step Up the Mountain, Dianette tells of her unique experiences climbing the Seven Summits, participating in adventure races (including four Eco-Challenges and ultra marathons around the world), as she raised three wonderful children. Trying to survive a tumultuous marriage, Dianette felt empty and unhappy. However, everything changed when she discovered adventure racing.

Many looked on Gladys Aylward's expedition to mainland China as foolhardy and dangerous. It was. On her own, as a single female, she carried her passport and other documents, along with the only money and belongings that she had, in a small briefcase with a teapot and a saucepan tied to the handle. After having purchased her one-way ticket to China, she left the UK with a single-minded determination to do what God had commanded her. She knew she was meant to go to China - even if no mission was prepared to support her.

With Mountain Madness, Clinton Crockett Peters chronicles his travels and personal transformation from a West Texas evangelical to mountain guide to humbled humanist after a near-fatal injury in Japan's Chichibu Mountains. From 2007 to 2010, Peters lived in Kosuge Village, nestled in central Japan's peaks, where he was the only foreigner in town. This essay collection profiles who he was before Japan, why he became obsessed with mountains, and his fallout from mountain obsession. Ultimately, the collection asks, how can landscape create and end identities?

On October 12, 2007, a young soldier is injured in Afghanistan. For the next two years, as he is moved from Bagram to Germany to Walter Reed to Palo Alto and finally home to Washington State, his family never leaves his side. And throughout those years, his father writes daily emails to family and friends, chronicling the journey from a dusty road in Afghanistan to the snowy summit of Mt. Rainier.

After decades as a long-haul trucker, Finn Murphy left the road and settled in Boulder County, Colorado. Before long he noticed that many of his neighbors were captivated by the prospect of vast riches in “the Hemp Space.” When hemp was legalized, after eighty years in federal exile, Colorado became the center of a hemp growing and processing boom. Figuring he’d harvest some of that easy money, Murphy bought a thirty-six-acre farm. What could go wrong? Well, pretty much everything…

Against all odds, just barely one month after Jessica Buchanan had been rescued by SEAL Team Six by order of President Obama, she found out she was pregnant. After spending ninety-three days at the hands of Somali pirates who had demanded a 45-million-dollar ransom in exchange for her freedom, Jessica could not imagine a reality in which her traumatized mind and malnourished body could grow, birth, and nurture this new life. But he grew, and as a result, so did she; in her capacity to trust her heart, her therapist, and the wise plan of the Universe.

Great-granddaughter’s creative historical non-fiction by narration interviews. An exploration of the life and true stories of Henrietta Cloud Brown and the Brown homestead of Telluride through the creative use of imagined interviews.

On October 7, 1780, American Patriot and Loyalist soldiers battled each other at Kings Mountain, near the border of North and South Carolina. With over one hundred eyewitness accounts, this collection of participant statements from men of both sides includes letters and statements in their original form—the soldiers' own words—unedited and unabridged.

Now in his late seventies, Sir Ranulph Fiennes looks back on a lifetime of exploration, and draws powerful, inspiring lessons that we can all use when faced by the tribulations of everyday life. Having crossed both Polar ice caps on foot, climbed Everest and the Eiger, served in the SAS and circumnavigated the world along its polar axis—a 53,000-mile odyssey that has never been repeated—'Ran' looks back from the summit of an incredible life.