Mountain Memoir

Defiance led Lisa Thompson to the male-dominated world of mountain climbing. But after battling breast cancer, she needed to understand the motivations behind the risks she took while climbing. Finding Elevation is more than her climbing memoir. It is an examination of the human spirit and motivation.

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.

For 18 years Ed Viesturs pursued climbing's holy grail: to stand atop the world's 14 8,000-meter peaks, without the aid of bottled oxygen. But No Shortcuts to the Top is as much about the man who would become the first American to achieve that goal as it is about his stunning quest. As Viesturs recounts the stories of his most harrowing climbs, he reveals a man torn between the flat, safe world he and his loved ones share and the majestic and deadly places where only he can go.

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.

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.

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.

Suzie Fletcher is the warm and friendly face on TV's The Repair Shop that viewers look forward to watching every week as the resident leather expert - a craft she has honed over four decades and was born out of her love of horses. But while she tends to be the one repairing and offering a gentle kindness to others, Suzie has also been in a process of change, reflection, and healing.In her first book Suzie looks back over her life - which moves from England to Colorado and back again - and the places, people and experiences that have shaped the person she is today.

After a shocking diagnosis for a rare pituitary disease, and with her eighteen-year marriage in shambles, Risa's life has fallen far from picture-perfect. Recovering from brain surgery and desperate to get back to her former self, she signs up for the bike tour of a lifetime-six weeks from Canada to Mexico on the Pacific Coast Highway. The old Risa could have done the ride in her sleep, but for the new Risa, trapped in a body that no longer feels like her own and stuck in the company of her brain tumor, Bubba, the ride becomes a challenge unlike anything she's ever faced.

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.

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.

From Indigenous chef Nephi Craig, a searing personal and cultural reckoning about the power of food to heal intergenerational wounds When Nephi Craig enrolled in the culinary program at Scottsdale Community College, it was out of necessity after a felony arrest led to a judge’s ultimatum: work...

Rain in the Mountains brings together some of Ruskin Bond’s most beautiful works from his years spent in the foothills of the Himalayas in the town of Mussoorie. Through vivid images and lucid writing, Bond evokes the everyday sights and sounds, and captures the essence of mountain life. The musings on his natural habitat, in both prose and poetry, offer a view of that simple and affable world. Some of his writings featured in the book include: "Once Upon a Mountain Time", "Sounds I Like to Hear", "How Far Is the River" and "After the Monsoon".

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.

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.

On May 22, 2010, at the age of 13, American teenager Jordan Romero became the youngest person to climb to the summit of Mount Everest. At 15, he became the youngest person to reach the summits of the tallest mountains on each of the seven continents. In this energizing memoir for young adults, Jordan recounts his experience, which started as a spark of an idea at the age of nine and, many years of training and hard work later, turned into a dream come true.

Meet Me in the Mountains is an edgy, uplifting, and truthful memoir that is sure to bring hope and inspiration to those who listen to it. A stubborn and determined eight year old girl named Candy Cotten finds her own way of dealing with her parents’ divorce - along with a father who drinks too much. She moves through life facing fears and unexpected challenges with determination. Her faith in Jesus Christ was apparent in grade school, and continues to this day. She strives to find hope in all situations even when life is not fair.

In the quiet valleys of southern Utah, in 1857, over 120 men, women, and children from Arkansas were brutally murdered by Mormon settlers and their allies. It was one of the darkest chapters in American frontier history—an event that has long remained shrouded in silence, misdirection, and denial. The Mountain Meadows Massacre is more than a historical crime; it is a story of how fear, fanaticism, and blind allegiance to religious authority can lead to devastating consequences. And for far too long, it has been treated as an inconvenient footnote by those who should have faced it head-on.

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.

Only the lost can be found. On Cove Mountain is the true story of author Ian Duncan’s commitment to a mental institution in 2001 and his 16-year battle to escape the stigma, trauma, and legal consequences arising from his hospitalization. Here, in unflinching detail, he describes his passage from confinement in a padded cell to freedom on the peculiar mountain that became the setting for his spiritual sojourn.

This compelling memoir of one woman's journey of enchantment, tragedy, and romance unfolds against the backdrop of a stunning mountaintop in rural Virginia. Purchased on a lark for weekend camping by a clueless suburban couple, the mountain brings Marcia Mabee and her husband Tim surprising wildlife encounters, dramatic botanical discoveries, and a passion for conservation that leads to its dedication by the state as the Naked Mountain Natural Area Preserve.