Nature Biography

In Material, Kary takes listeners along with him to visit some of the places where modern artisans are preserving, and in some cases passing on, the old craft skills. His vivid descriptions and eye for detail make this book a rich and delightful listen, and the natural and cultural history he imparts along the way provides an important context for understanding our own past and the roots of our industrial society. Personal, engaging, and filled with memorable people, landscapes, and scenes, Material is a rich celebration of what it means to imagine and create.

His cheeks are as tender as raw meat on a butcher's block. And those are just the cheeks of his face. As he slumps in the saddle, watching the road disappear into the distance, he aches in parts of his body that he's only just discovering he has. When Mark travels to Ecuador to go hiking and climbing, he discovers a land of dramatic volcanoes rising through the clouds and wide-open horizons rich in history.

Nick Bullock is a climber who lives in a small, green van, flitting between Llanberis, Wales, and Chamonix in the French Alps. Tides, Nick’s second work, is the much-anticipated follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut, Echoes. Tides is a gripping memoir that captures the very essence of what it means to dedicate one’s life to climbing.

In 2008, Lynn Barber's passion for birding led her to drive, fly, sail, walk, stalk, and sit in search of birds in 25 states and three provinces. Traveling more than 175,000 miles, she set a 21st century record at the time, second to only one other person in history. Over 272 days, Barber observed 723 species of birds in North America north of Mexico.

Leaving her garden to the mercy of the slugs, award-winning writer Alys Fowler set out in an inflatable kayak to explore Birmingham's canal network, full of little-used waterways where huge pike skulk and kingfishers dart. Her book is about noticing the wild everywhere and what it means to see beauty where you least expect it. What happens when someone who has learned to observe her external world in such detail decides to examine her internal world with the same care?

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.

Structured Chaos is Victor Saunders’ follow-up to Elusive Summits (winner of the Boardman Tasker Prize in 1990), No Place to Fall and Himalaya: The Tribulations of Vic & Mick. He reflects on his early childhood in Malaya and his first experiences of climbing as a student, and describes his progression from scaling canal-side walls in Camden to expeditions in the Himalaya and Karakoram.

L'histoire fascinante d'un "Mowgli" d'aujourd'hui. Amoureux de la nature, Geoffroy Delorme n'a pas vingt ans quand il aperçoit, dans la forêt de Louviers en Normandie, un chevreuil curieux et joueur. Le jeune homme et l'animal s'apprivoisent. Geoffroy lui donne un nom, Daguet, et le chevreuil lui ouvre les portes de la forêt et du monde fascinant de ses semblables. Geoffroy s'installe parmi eux et son expérience immersive va durer sept ans.

In the summer of 2012, a team of six climbers set out to attempt the first ascent of one of the great unclimbed lines of the Himalaya - the giant Mazeno Ridge on Nanga Parbat, the world's ninth highest mountain. At 10 kilometers in length, the Mazeno is the longest route to the summit of an 8,000-meter peak. Ten expeditions had tried and failed to climb this enormous ridge.

In 1914, Harry Colebourn, a veterinarian on his way to tend horses in World War I, followed his heart and rescued a baby bear. He named her Winnie, after his hometown of Winnipeg, and he took the bear to war. Harry Colebourn's real-life great-granddaughter tells the true story of a remarkable friendship and an even more remarkable journey - from the fields of Canada to a convoy across the ocean to an army base in England...and finally to the London Zoo, where Winnie made another new friend: a real boy named Christopher Robin.

Geoffroy Delorme does not fit in the human world. As he gets older, he disappears into the woods at night, drawn to animal life. One night, an encounter with a deer changes his life: from then on, he knows he wants to live among them. Delorme becomes a creature of the forest. He learns to live without a tent or sleeping bag and forage for food. He blends in with the deer and, slowly, they accept him. He witnesses their births and deaths, courtship and battles, ostracism and friendship over the cycles of their lives.

I am floating in the middle of the night, and nobody in the world even knows I am missing. Nobody is looking for me. You can't get more alone than that. You can't be more lost. I've got too many people who love me. There's no way I'm dying like this. In the dead of night on July 24, 2013, John Aldridge was thrown off the back of the Anna Mary while his fishing partner, Anthony Sosinski, slept below. As desperate hours ticked by, Sosinski, the families, the local fishing community, and the US Coast Guard in three states mobilized in an unprecedented search effort.

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.

From Finnish saunas and soppy otters to grief, grandparents and Kellogg's anti-masturbation pants, Slug is a book which holds a mirror lovingly up to the world, past and present, through Hollie's driving, funny, hopeful poetry and prose. Slug is about the human condition: of birth and death and how we manage the possibilities in between.

In an effort to make sense of the deaths in quick succession of several loved ones, Kathleen Dean Moore turned to the comfort of the wild, making a series of solitary excursions into ancient forests, wild rivers, remote deserts, and windswept islands to learn what the environment could teach her in her time of pain. This audiobook is the record of her experiences.

This amazing memoir follows the story of Reggie Williams - ex-NFL linebacker, former Disney executive, renaissance man, and the epitome of determination in the face of extreme challenges.

This gripping account of courage, achievement, and heartbreaking loss tells the story of Bonington's Boys, a band of climbers who reinvented mountaineering during the three decades after Everest's first ascent. The boyish, fanatically driven Chris Bonington's inner circle included a dozen of the most renowned climbers, who took increasingly terrible risks on now legendary expeditions to the world's most fearsome peaks, and paid an enormous price. Most of them died in the mountains, leaving behind the hardest question of all: Was it worth it?

Award-winning author Jim Murphy whisks you back in time to witness the disastrous 1871 Chicago fire. He depicts the tragedy so vividly, you can almost feel the scorching heat and hear the roar of the blaze as it reduces the bustling city to a smoldering wasteland.

Ernest Rutherford, who grew up in colonial New Zealand and came to Cambridge on a scholarship, made numerous revolutionary discoveries, among them the orbital structure of the atom and the concept of the “half-life” of radioactive materials, which led to a massive re-evaluation of the age of the Earth―previously judged just 100 million years old. Above all, perhaps, Rutherford and the young men working under him were the first to split the atom, unlocking tremendous forces―forces, as Rutherford himself predicted, that would bring us the atomic bomb.

A lyrical exploration of the world’s wildest, most forbiddingly remote places—and the humans who have always been there, by an award-winning and critically acclaimed writer From the blacksand beaches of Iceland, to river crossings deep in the Amazon jungle, to the barren beauty of Antarctica...