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This book is a biography of Sally Ride, America's first woman in space, with exclusive insights from her family and partner, and by the ABC reporter who covered NASA during its transformation from a test-pilot boys' club to a more inclusive elite. A member of the first astronaut class to include women, Ride broke through a quarter-century of white male fighter jocks when NASA chose her for the seventh shuttle mission, cracking the celestial ceiling...
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In March 2014, Eric Larsen and Ryan Waters set out to traverse nearly 500 miles across the melting Arctic Ocean, unsupported, from Northern Ellesmere Island to the geographic North Pole. Despite being one of the most cold and hostile environments on the planet, the Arctic Ocean has seen a steady and significant reduction of sea ice over the past seven years due to climate change. Because of this, Larsen’s and Waters’ trip—dubbed the “Last...
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"The Travels of Marco Polo" is unquestionably one of the world's greatest travel books and the memoir of the West's most famous traveler. Composed in 1298, the book describes Marco Polo's travels across the entire continent of Asia and provides the only comprehensive travelogue of a European traveler in the East in the Middle Ages. Polo guides his readers through the farthest reaches of Asia, a realm of pigmies, exotic plants and beasts, fine silks,...
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"Annie Smith Peck is one of the most accomplished women of the twentieth century that you have never heard of. Peck was a scholar, educator, writer, lecturer, mountain climber, suffragist, and political activist. She was a feminist and an independent thinker who refused to let gender stereotypes stand in her way. Peck gained fame in 1895 when she first climbed the Matterhorn at the age of forty-five – not for her daring alpine feat, but because...
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A travelogue detailing Charles Dickens's tour of North America. In January of 1842, Charles Dickens and his wife, Kate, traveled from Liverpool to Boston. At the time, Dickens had already attained a tremendous level of literary success and fame, and the author hoped his travels would help him gain insight into the New World that had captivated the English imagination. Over the ensuing 6 months, Dickens explored the East Coast and Great Lakes regions...
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In 1526 Carlos I of Spain granted Pánfilo de Narváez a license to claim what is now the Gulf Coast of the United States. Pánfilo de Narváez set sail in 1527 to conquer and settle present day Florida. Setting out with a crew of approximately 600 members ultimately only four members would survive the ill-fated expedition. The journey would take these four survivors from Spain to Hispaniola and Cuba and then onto Florida. Sailing through a hurricane...
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I hope you will learn through reading this that my decision-making skills sometimes need a bit of help, but, that it all works out fine in the end.
I feel I have been tremendously lucky and privileged to have had the lives (yes, it does feel like more than one) I've had. I've loved all of the 103 countries I have visited.
The people who have had walk-on or more starring roles in my story have helped shape me into the Buddha lookalike I've grown...
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Pub. Date
2015
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BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY: HISTORICAL, POLITICAL & MILITARY. Discover the amazing true story behind the inspiration for Herman Melville's Moby Dick and the new feature film Heart of the Sea. A tragic yet riveting narration of life and death and man against the elements, Beneath the Heart of the Sea is an extreme account of shipwreck survival. On the morning of November 20,1820, in the Pacific Ocean 2,000 miles from the coast of South America, an enraged...
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First published in 1926, "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" is the fascinating and brutal account of the Arab Revolt of 1916 to 1918 by T. E. Lawrence, more famously known as "Lawrence of Arabia". Written, rewritten, and edited over a period of several years from 1919 to 1926, Lawrence recounts his time serving in the British Forces in North Africa when he was based in Wadi Rum. He describes his role assisting in the organization and carrying out of attacks...
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The final letters and diary entries of Robert Falcon Scott – written in his last days, while hopelessly trapped in a tiny tent by a raging blizzard on the Great Ice Barrier – are among the most poignant and haunting passages ever penned. 'Had we lived,' he wrote, 'I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.' Scott's diaries, discovered with his...
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In Wild Men, Wild Alaska professional hunting and fishing guide and outfitter Rocky McElveen tells the stories of his own adventures as well as those of some of his well-known clients. The book takes readers directly into the Alaskan bush, and shares the intense challenges of a majestic wilderness that pushes a man to his limits.
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Billy Williams came to colonial Burma in 1920, fresh from service in World War I, to a job as a "forest man" for a British teak company. Mesmerized by the intelligence, character, and even humor of the great animals who hauled logs through the remote jungles, he became a gifted "elephant wallah." Increasingly skilled at treating their illnesses and injuries, he also championed more humane treatment for them, even establishing an elephant "school"...
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A Brown Man in Russia describes the fantastical travels of a young, colored American traveler as he backpacks across Russia in the middle of winter via the Trans-Siberian. The book is a hybrid between the curmudgeonly travelogues of Paul Theroux and the philosophical works of Robert Pirsig.
Styled in the vein of Hofstadter, the author lays out a series of absurd, but true stories followed by a deeper rumination on what they mean and why they matter....
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"Bound for Antarctica, where polar explorer Ernest Shackleton planned to cross on foot the last uncharted continent, the Endurance set sail from England in August 1914. In January 1915, after battling its way for six weeks through a thousand miles of pack ice and now only a day's sail short of its destination, the Endurance became locked in an island of ice. For ten months the ice-moored Endurance drifted northwest before it was finally crushed. But...
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Casanova was an Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice. His autobiography, is regarded as one of the most authentic sources of the customs and norms of European social life during the 18th century. He has become so famous for his often complicated and elaborate affairs with women that his name is now synonymous with "womanizer". He associated with European royalty, popes and cardinals, along with luminaries such as Voltaire, Goethe...
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"Un pueblo antiguo, el primero y legítimo dueño del continente americano, se deshace día a día como la nieve bajo los rayos del sol y, a la vista de todos, desaparece de la faz de la tierra. En sus propias tierras, y usurpando su lugar, otra raza se desarrolla con rapidez aun mayor; arrasa los bosques y seca los pantanos; lagos grandes como mares y ríos inmensos se oponen vanamente a su marcha triunfal."
Tocqueville relata en estas páginas...
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On John Franklin's 1820 expedition to find the Northwest Passage, Michel Teroahaute cannibalized two team members and was preparing a third when he was caught and killed. When Rene La Salle set off for the Mississippi Delta in 1684, he missed the target by five hundred miles, but on landing, immediately built a prison for those who fell asleep on watch. Consummate storyteller Fergus Fleming brings together these and forty-three other gripping stories...
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Pub. Date
2014
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A space enthusiast goes inside mission control with a motley crew of rocket scientists in this “fascinating journey of discovery peppered with humor” (Publishers Weekly).
The Phoenix Mars mission was the first man-made probe ever sent to the Martian arctic. Its purpose was to find out how climate change could turn a warm, wet planet (read: Earth) into a cold, barren desert (read: Mars). Along the way, Phoenix discovered...
The Phoenix Mars mission was the first man-made probe ever sent to the Martian arctic. Its purpose was to find out how climate change could turn a warm, wet planet (read: Earth) into a cold, barren desert (read: Mars). Along the way, Phoenix discovered...
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This sweeping biography is the story of early America--its ideals, its promise, its romance, and its destiny. Novelist Morgan transforms a mythic American hero--a legend in his own time--into a flesh-and-blood man, the man who was the largest spirit of his time. Hunter, explorer, settler, visionary, he was a trailblazer and a revolutionary--an American icon for more than two hundred years. Born in 1734, Boone served in the Virginia legislature, participated...
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