Mountain Memoir

Elephant Mountain is the gripping tale of Debbie Ethell, a young woman whose fascination with an elephant skull in a bone museum leads her down an unexpected path. What begins as a curiosity about the tragic love story of Morgan Berry, the man who gave us Packy (the first baby elephant born in a U.S. zoo in forty-four years), and Eloise Berchtold, one of the world’s greatest animal trainers, soon becomes a chilling mystery.

Five million steps. 157 days. 2,200 miles. From the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Chesapeake Requiem comes a gripping rumination on life, nature, and tragedy as the author recounts his two through-hikes—33 years apart—of the Appalachian Trail and a haunting, life-changing...

Ever since embarking on his first expedition to Mt. Ararat, Bob Cornuke, a biblical investigator and real life Indiana Jones, has had a passion shared by only a select group of explorers. Follow Cornuke as he brings this adventure to life and tries to be the one who makes the greatest archaeological discovery in human history - finding the remains of Noah's Ark. This documentary uses the Bible as a road map for uncovering its ancient mysteries. Throughout the investigation, Cornuke discovers archaeological evidence to support God's word.

In 1781, the new United States was nearly bankrupt. As the American and French armies under Generals Washington and Rochambeau surrounded General Cornwallis and the British at Yorktown, James Lovell, Congressman, examined a captured, soiled letter. The numbers in General Cornwallis’s ciphered message might hold the key to the defeat of the British. Expert in encryption, James Lovell knew the answer to British loss could lie in his hands.

Trauma from abuse can crush your spirit unless you confront your enemies. After years of stuffing her emotions, putting on a happy face, and enduring hardship like a good airman, Jakia Lindley realized she needed to stand toe-to-toe against her foes. She needed to fight back.

When Neema Avashia tells people where she's from, their response is nearly always disbelief: "There are Indian people in West Virginia?" A queer Asian American teacher and writer, Avashia fits few Appalachian stereotypes. But the lessons she learned in childhood about race and class, gender and sexuality continue to inform the way she moves through the world today. Another Appalachia examines both the roots and the resonance of Avashia's identity, while encouraging listeners to envision more complex versions of both Appalachia and the nation as a whole.

After a catastrophic ski accident left him permanently paralyzed from the waist down, Jason not only had to relearn basic tasks like dressing and bathing but also had to wrestle with the harder questions: why do bad things happen? If God is good and powerful, why does he allow suffering? And how does one cope with suffering, which in one way or another visits us all?

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.

On a cold February night in 2007, a devoted father of four and a seventeen-year-old drunk driver both received life sentences. In one violent, devastating instant, both faced a drastically different - and uncertain - future. But as Chris Williams sat in his demolished vehicle, staring at the car that had just caused the death of his wife, his unborn baby, his nine-year-old daughter, and his eleven-year-old son, he committed to do something extraordinary: he would forgive.

A resonant and timely story about love, loss, and forging a path forward in the aftermath of grief. After tragedy upended the contours of her life, Lauren Kessler, an unflinching immersion journalist, felt compelled to move—to do something, to be somewhere else. So she set out alone on the...

Nuns with Shotguns, Vol II of THE WORLD IS MY ASHTRAY, picks up where Pepperoni, Jalapeños & LSD left off. Paul and Lonnie disappear into a Rocky Mountain ghost town to decompress from a manic year in Boulder, Colorado. The town of Eldora is spectacular, serene, virtually uninhabited. Perhaps a hundred hermits are scattered throughout the mountain valley, cleaning their guns and guarding their bongs. Now twenty years old and even more determined to write his way to financial freedom, Paul hunkers down at his typewriter in his new, idyllic setting and begins banging out his first novel.

Travel to the top of the world’s highest mountains with this this riveting and uplifting memoir that “is a rare mix of heart-stopping adventure and powerful self-reflection” (Johanna Garton, author of Edge of the Map) by Vanessa O’Brien, record-breaking American British explorer. Long...

As a teenager, in a fit of rage toward her father, Jan pits herself against a steep rock face near their cottage. At the top, fired up by the victory, she sets her sights on the improbable dream of climbing mountains. By age 20, she's a nomadic climber with a magnetic attraction to misadventures and the wrong men. Jan finally finds the love of her life, an affable Banff climber. When he is killed in an avalanche in Alaska, a grieving Jan finds comfort in the arms of another extreme alpinist. Before long they are married, with a baby on the way.

As a child in a small barrio in the Philippines, Deja Vu Prem faced neglect and physical abuse. At age seventeen, desperate to escape her situation and claim a better life for herself beyond the mountains of her town, she became a mail-order bride and moved to San Francisco. But the challenges of her childhood didn't go away—they merely evolved into the form of her emotionally abusive husband.

Mountain Notes: A Nature Diary is a captivating, poetic journal that celebrates the rugged beauty of the Dromara Hills in County Down, Northern Ireland where the author returned home to live on her family farm in 2020. Maggie Doyle grew up on this small dairy farm and feels a deep, emotional connection to this landscape and the rhythms of the natural world. Following a thirty-year career in radio production at BBC Northern Ireland, she took early retirement in 2019.

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.

In 1966, just as the American military buildup in Vietnam was going into overdrive, a working-class 22-year-old from Chicago was drafted into the army. Larry Heinemann served one year of combat duty, most of it in the vicinity of Cu Chi. It was the most horrific and consequential year of his life, and it served as the raw material for his two classic war novels. This memoir chronicles a 1992 railway journey Heinemann took from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City as the guest of the Vietnam Writers' Association.

This is a deeply personal story of a young woman’s journey through addiction; the loss of her child’s father through an overdose, her mother’s suicide, and the tragic consequences that those lifestyle choices bring. At 15, Shelley was submerged into the seedy world of the red-light district of Honolulu. As the warm-up act for the strippers, she became a topless dancer only to discover she was not emotionally prepared for the lewd attention. Pills and heroin helped her to cope with a lifestyle that was beyond her years.

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.

Being inspired to act can take many forms. For some, it's taking a weekend to volunteer, but for Shannon Galpin, it meant leaving her career, selling her house, launching a nonprofit, and committing her life to advancing education and opportunity for women and girls. Focusing on the war-torn country of Afghanistan, Galpin and her organization, Mountain2Mountain, have touched the lives of hundreds of men, women, and children.