Travel Biography

They shouldn't have tear gassed best-selling (bald) author Adam Fletcher. It ruined his supposedly normal holiday in Istanbul, made him curious, and began a quest to visit places everyone else is trying to escape from, and tourists don't normally go to. In this hilarious travel memoir, he'll enter a blizzard in China armed with only biscuits; pose as a scientist to sneak into Chernobyl; be chased by Croatian police boats en route to Liberland (the world's newest country); become a reluctant diving board star in a North Korean water park, and much more.

A free spirit by nature, Marnie has always been too adventurous for a suburban life or middle-class marriage. After her divorce, a brief, unsuitable relationship produces her miracle child, Toby. When Toby is two, Marnie decides to take charge of his upbringing, rather than letting society, strangers, and daycares raise him. She believes travel is the best teacher - so the single mom swaps her car for an RV, and she and Toby set off to explore what is possible within their limited means.

Returning to the UK in September 2010 after serving in Iraq as the political adviser to the top American general, Emma Sky felt no sense of homecoming. She soon found herself back in the Middle East traveling through a region in revolt. In a Time of Monsters bears witness to the demands of young people for dignity and justice during the Arab Spring; the inability of sclerotic regimes to reform; the descent of Syria into civil war; the rise of the Islamic State; and the flight of refugees to Europe.

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...

Deborah Jacobs quit the job from hell, rented her house, and planned to Airbnb her way through France. This inspiring memoir chronicles her misadventures as she and her husband cook in quirky kitchens, struggle to speak French, and shop like locals in outdoor markets. With candor and optimism, Jacobs transports listeners from the grape harvest in the Loire Valley to an exuberant chile pepper festival in Basque Country and, ultimately, to Paris, where she witnesses history in the making.

When she was twenty-five, Ursula Pike boarded a plane to Bolivia and began her term of service in the Peace Corps. A member of the Karuk Tribe, Pike sought to make meaningful connections with Indigenous people halfway around the world. But she arrived in La Paz with trepidation as well as excitement, 'knowing I followed in the footsteps of Western colonizers and missionaries who had also claimed they were there to help.'

Triggered by his increasing wanderlust after finishing his A-levels, Dominik Trottier set off to walk the Way of Saint James in April 2012. In his literary debut, Ultreya on the Camino, the author documents his experiences and numerous encounters that he had along the 800-kilometer pilgrimage track through the north of Spain. Due to a shattered dream of his, he also found himself dealing with many unsettled questions that he hoped to seek out the right answers for.

Say the word Israel today and it sparks images of walls and rockets and a bloody conflict without end. Yet for decades the symbol of the Jewish State was the noble pioneer draining the swamps and making the deserts bloom: the legendary kibbutznik. So what ever happened to the pioneers' dream of founding a socialist utopia in the land called Palestine? Chasing Utopia: The Future of the Kibbutz in a Divided Israel draws listeners into the quest for answers to the defining political conflict of our era.

Lewis Juckes describes the many new experiences that lay ahead over the next two years, first while living in huts buried deep within the snow and then in the field with dog teams for transport and tents for accommodation. Thrills and rare sights were there, as well as scares and dangers—and tragedy within the close-knit group. This was Antarctica in the mid-1960s.

Travel Tales Collections, Food & Drink, No. 7, February 2015, is part of Michael Brein's Travel Tales Collections series. It contains some of the best stories from Michael's huge collection of travel tales that he has gathered in interviews with nearly 1,750 world travelers and adventurers during his four decades of travel to more than 125 countries throughout the world.

Toilet experiences are an unfortunate yet essential aspect of living that, like it or not, we all must come to terms with, whether on the home front or in strange exotic foreign lands. The necessity of dealing with toilets, where to find them; what to do about them; and how to use them even, elicits from many travelers nothing less than abject terror.

A wisdom-filled memoir that doubles as a sweeping travelogue reaching from Boston to Sardinia and back again. Gorgeously written and culturally astute. The Boston Globe. When a big-city journalist quits her dream job to move to a remote Italian island for love, she discovers a whole new life beyond the romantic fantasies of Italy spun by books and movies. Struggling to adapt to a different culture, she buys a quirky house in the Sardinian countryside, goes to art school and becomes obsessed with home improvement and renovation.

For decades, one especially daring traveler has set off into the wilderness with little more than a sense of adventure. Dick Griffith is an Alaska legend who made his name with a string of fearless feats: rafting down the Green and Colorado Rivers, skiing solo across the icy Northwest Passage, and being the first nonnative to drop into the treacherous Barranca Del Cobre in Mexico.

The first full biography of Griffith, Canyons and Ice offers a rare look at the man behind the soaring achievements and occasionally death-defying moments.

My Life in China details the author’s experiences as an expat navigating life, work, and culture in China. The book begins with the author’s arrival in China, describing the initial shock of an unfamiliar environment, language barriers, and the overwhelming attention received as a foreigner. This “celebrity” experience, while amusing at first, evolves into an understanding of cultural curiosity rather than personal fame.

The Joys of Travel is a nonfiction audiobook about a small-town-born-and-raised girl who finds a career that leads her on many humorous travel adventures. As her friends would say, "This could only happen to you, Julie."

The Path to Now is a history book dating back to the Mayflower, centered around the lives of Al's family, with stories told as he heard them around the dinner table. It includes personal memories of Alfred Geiger's 85 years, from his relief work in Poland after World War II to farming the family land. Al shares his triumphs, fears, and heartaches: crosses burned on his family's dairy farm during the Civil Rights Movement, a double-first cousin murdered his parents in their sleep, and his daughter overdosed after years of battling with drugs.

Fresh out of the Israeli Army, 20-year-old Iris Bahr decides to follow in the footsteps of many before her and backpack through Asia. Only unlike the average traveler, she has more in mind than just seeing the sights: She is on a desperate mission to lose her virginity. Dork Whore is a fresh and funny memoir about a young woman whose quirky personality and embarrassing neuroses always seem to get in the way of her getting what she wants.

Spread over fifteen of the country’s twenty-eight states, India’s Maoist movement is now one of the world’s biggest and most sophisticated extreme-left movements. Hardly a week passes without people dying in strikes and counter-strikes by the Maoists—interchangeably known as the...

With the writers of the Golden Age as her guides—Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gogol, and Turgenev, among others—Sara Wheeler searches for a Russia not in the news, traveling from rinsed northwestern beet fields and the Far Eastern Arctic tundra to the cauldron of nation­alities, religions, and...

A group of traders huddles around a pile of dried shark fins on a gleaming white floor in Hong Kong. A Papua New Guinean elder shoves off in his hand-carved canoe, ready to summon a shark with ancient magic. A scientist finds a rare shark in Indonesia and forges a deal with villagers so it and...