Travel Biography

Ever heard of a 'travel psychologist?' Michael Brein is the world's first and perhaps only travel psychologist who has created a unique travel book series on the psychology of travel as revealed through the fantastic travel stories of more than 1,600 world travelers and adventurers he has interviewed over the last three decades. Travel Tales of Michael Brein: My Best 100 contains more than 100 of Michael's own, best personal travel stories, resulting from his lifetime of travel.

Hangdog Days vividly chronicles the era when rock climbing exploded in popularity, attracting a new generation of talented climbers eager to reach new heights via harder routes and faster ascents. This contentious, often entertaining period gave rise to sport climbing, climbing gyms, and competitive climbing-indelibly transforming the sport. Jeff Smoot was one of those brash young climbers, and here he traces the development of traditional climbing "rules," enforced first through peer pressure, then later through intimidation and sabotage.

A veteran dog musher, Dave Olesen finished the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race eight times. After a 15-year career as a sled dog racer, Olesen set out to fulfill a lifelong dream. In four successive winters he steered his dogs and sled on long trips away from his remote Northwest Territories homestead, setting out in turn to the south, east, north and west, and home again to Hoarfrost River. His narrative ranges from the personal and poignant musings of a dogsled driver to loftier planes of introspection and contemplation.

“Italy is a beautiful but complicated place, not so much a country as a collection of cultures and cuisines. Matt Goulding expertly navigates it’s wonders and eccentricities with wisdom and great passion.” -Anthony Bourdain ""Goulding is pioneering a new type of writing about food.""...

Into the North Wind chronicles Jill Homer’s record-breaking bicycle ride across Alaska on the Iditarod Trail. Jill is one of those “accidental athletes” who stumbled into endurance racing shortly after she moved to Alaska in 2005. Ever since, she dreamed about the chiming of ice crystals at 30 below zero, black spruce shadows in the moonlight, the ethereal dance of the Northern Lights, and a journey that could take her deeper into this transcendental world - the 1,000-mile race to Nome.

The “astonishing and deeply poignant” (The Washington Post) memoir of one man’s search for a beloved family friend explores the depth of Iranian culture and the sweep of its history, and transcends today’s news headlines to remind us of the humanity that connects us all. Growing up in...

Faced with buying a car and getting a real job - or taking the money and blowing it on a six-month adventure around Asia...well, there really is no contest! Who wouldn't want to visit exotic places, like Borneo, Cambodia, and China? Who wouldn't want to tackle the world's most dangerous hiking path, tangle with the Vietnamese Mafia, and suffer days in the dreaded Mongolian saddle? And who wouldn't want to try five-organ soup? All he has to do is survive long enough to realize his dreams.

Standing above the dramatic arches underpinning the Basilica of Assisi and carried away by the beauty of the moment, Joan and Roger were determined to move to Italy. It took time, effort, grit, money, heavy doses of humor, and even stronger servings of Italian pazienza; but in the end, move they did. Launching a new career hosting vacationers, they persevered, renovating Le Vigne; an old farmhouse. This is their story of good fortune, at times matched in equal measure with frustration.

Inseguendo i propri sogni di bambino, Walter Bonatti è diventato un personaggio leggendario, il simbolo stesso dell'avventura. Perché nelle sue sfide si è spinto sempre un po' più in là, ed è andato tanto avanti da riuscire ancora oggi a dirci qualcosa di nuovo. Erano i sogni a guidarlo, e lui ha passato la vita a realizzarli.

The acclaimed, award-winning novelist takes us on some of his most memorable journeys in this revelatory collection of travel essays that spans the globe, from the Caribbean to Scotland to the Himalayas. Now in his mid-seventies, Russell Banks has indulged his wanderlust for more than half a...

Durante siglos, los europeos situaron la legendaria ciudad de El Dorado en la selva más grande y densa del mundo: la del Amazonas. La obsesión por encontrar ese paraíso dejó la jungla impenetrable sembrada de cadáveres, lo que no fue impedimento para el explorador británico Percy Fawcett. Después de emprender una expedición tras otra sin éxito, en 1925 desapareció sin dejar rastro. En 2005, David Grann se adentró en el «infierno verde» para averiguar qué había ocurrido allí. El resultado es una reconstrucción magistral dela aventura de Percy Fawcett.

Two Years Before the Mast, written by Richard Henry Dana, provides a vivid account of "the life of a common sailor at sea". Dana sails from Boston, around Cape Horn, stopping in several ports along the California coast including San Diego, San Pedro, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco. On the return trip around Cape Horn in the middle of the Antarctic winter Dana describes terrifying storms and incredible beauty, giving vivid descriptions of icebergs and the scurvy that afflicts members of the crew.

Eine faszinierendes Hörbuch voller Reisegeschichten und abenteuerlicher Begegnungen von einem der bekanntesten Journalisten Deutschlands. Als der Reporter Juan Moreno von einer seiner Auslandsreisen zurückkommt, sieht er nervös die Drogenspürhunde am Zoll - er ist sich sicher, nach Kokain geradezu zu stinken. Er hat bei kolumbianischen Rebellen im Dschungel auf Kokainplatten geschlafen, anders ging es nicht - aber wie erklärt man das einem deutschen Zollbeamten? Juan Morenos Geschichten von unterwegs sind eine großartige Lektüre, überraschend, dramatisch, packend.

Years ago, Steve Hannah’s chance detour through the Midwest cut short a planned cross-country trip. He found himself in Wisconsin, a distinctly different place from the East Coast, where he was born and raised. Charmingly beautiful and full of welcoming people, America’s dairyland would soon become his home. Dairylandia recounts Steve Hannah’s burgeoning love for his adopted state through the writings of his long-lived column, “State of Mind”.

This is the true story of a young, native Irish woman who embarked on a path of "most resistance" and danced/survived her way around seven different countries. Her very descriptive, dramatic, and often humorous Celtic Road Home takes you on a journey of constant life adventures. Despite her many up and down struggles along the way, she never gives up hope on the very next outcome becoming more successful than the one before.

In 1975, seven-year-old Doina Cornell left England with her father Jimmy Cornell, mother and brother to spend the next six years sailing around the world on a small yacht. The author has drawn on her memories, diaries and stories, to re-create the perfect life led by a sailing child: swimming, diving and playing the days away in deserted anchorages; visiting some of the most beautiful islands in the world; falling in love with the sea in all its ever-changing moods, from balmy trade wind ocean passages to the treacherous breakers that crash onto tropical reefs.

Travel across the US with David Reynolds as he explores Route 50, one of the few remaining two-lane highways running from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Driving as slowly as safety permits, stopping frequently and often going backwards to have a second look at something glimpsed in passing, Reynolds talks to people on the streets, in bars and cafes, motels and gas stations. They talk about everything from slavery and the traditional Indian sundance, to cannabis in Colorado and tornadoes in Kansas, and about everyone from George Washington and Aaron Burr to Marilyn Monroe and the Eagles.

In 1888, Nellie Bly, a feisty, investigative reporter for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World newspaper, pitched a story idea of traveling around the world in 75 days to beat the record achieved by Phileas Fogg, the character in Verne's book. While the editor thought it a great idea, he naturally thought the trip should be made by a man. The idea was shelved for over a year.

Naturalist Joe Hutto’s latest adventures in wildlife observation take him to Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains. Hutto is living in a tent at 12,000 feet, where blizzards occur in July and where human wants become irrelevant—and human needs can become a matter of life and death—to study the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep.

An old-fashioned quest by a modern-day adventurer. When A. J. Mackinnon quits his job in Australia, he knows only that he longs to travel to the well at the world’s end, a mysterious pool on a remote Scottish island whose waters, legend has it, hold the secret to eternal youth.