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Stretching from Georgia to Maine, the Appalachian Trail offers some of America's most breathtaking scenery. It also offers an irresistible, amusingly ill-conceived adventure to Bryson & his out-of-shape walking companion, Stephen Katz. Mile by arduous mile, these unlikely pioneers walk the Appalachian Trail, along the way surviving the threat of bear attacks, cravings for hot showers & cream sodas, the loss of key provisions, & everything else this...
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In 1995, Iowa native Bill Bryson took a motoring trip around Britain to explore that green and pleasant land. The uproarious book that resulted, Notes from a Small Island, is one of the most acute portrayals of the United Kingdom ever written. Two decades later, Bryson--now a British citizen--set out again to rediscover his adopted country. In these pages, he follows a straight line through the island--from Bognor Regis to Cape Wrath--and shows us...
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Like many others, around the time Elizabeth Gilbert turned 30, she went through an early-onslaught midlife crisis. Although she had everything an educated, ambitious American woman was supposed to want, including a husband, a home, and a successful career as a magazine writer, she was consumed with panic, grief, and confusion. This is an account of her yearlong worldwide pursuit of pleasure, spiritual devotion, guidance, and what she really wanted...
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Despite the fact that Australia harbors more things that can kill you in extremely nasty ways than anywhere else, including sharks, crocodiles, snakes, even riptides and deserts, Bill Bryson adores the place, and he takes his readers on a rollicking ride far beyond that beaten tourist path. Wherever he goes he finds Australians who are cheerful, extroverted, and unfailingly obliging, and these beaming products of land with clean, safe cities, cold...
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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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In January 2002 Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan--surviving by his wits, his knowledge of Persian dialects and Muslim customs, and the kindness of strangers. By day he passed through mountains covered in nine feet of snow, hamlets burned and emptied by the Taliban, and communities thriving amid the remains of medieval civilizations. By night he slept on villagers' floors, shared their meals, and listened to their stories of the recent and ancient...
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First published more than thirty years ago, Paul Theroux's strange, unique, and hugely entertaining railway odyssey has become a modern classic of travel literature. Here Theroux recounts his early adventures on an unusual grand continental tour. Asia's fabled trains - the Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Frontier Mail, the Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, the Mandalay Express, the Trans-Siberian Express - are the stars of a journey that takes...
9) Cape Cod
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Robert Pinsky is Professor of English at Boston University and an editor of the weekly online magazine Slate. He is the author of many books of poetry and literary criticism. He served two terms as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, 1997-2000.
This new paperback edition of Henry D. Thoreau's compelling account of Cape Cod contains the complete, definitive text of the original. Introduced by American poet...
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Following the Equator (sometimes titled More Tramps Abroad) is a non-fiction social commentary in the form of a travelogue published by Mark Twain in 1897. Throughout the novel, Twain uses the opportunity of visiting the various locations on his tour to espouse "perceptive descriptions and discussions of people, climate, flora and fauna, indigenous cultures, religion, customs, politics, food, and many other topics". The novel contains a significant...
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Heat-Moon writes travel books like no one else. Quirky, discursive, endlessly curious, he embarks on American journeys off the beaten path. Sticking to the small places via the small roads, he uncovers a nation deep in character, story, and charm. "Quoz" refers to anything strange, incongruous, or peculiar. Quoz can be history and heredity; stories, retold or invented; strange characters with poignant dreams. It's places with names like Sublimity...
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In September 1960, at age fifty-eight, the author and his poodle, Charley, and riding in a three-quarter ton pickup truck named Rocinante, embarked on a journey across America. This chronicle of their trip through almost 40 states, meanders from small towns to growing cities to glorious wilderness oases. Providing an intimate look at one of America's most beloved writers in the later years of his life, this is a self-portrait of a man who never wrote...
13) The Maine woods
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Posthumously published in 1864, The Maine Woods depicts Henry David Thoreau's experiences in the forests of Maine, and expands on the author's transcendental theories on the relation of humanity to Nature. On Mount Katahdin, he faces a primal, untamed Nature. Katahdin is a place "not even scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world." In Maine he comes in contact with "rocks, trees, wind and solid earth" as though he...
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"Anthony Bourdain saw more of the world than nearly anyone. His travels took him from the hidden pockets of his hometown of New York to a tribal longhouse in Borneo, from cosmopolitan Buenos Aires, Paris, and Shanghai to Tanzania’s utter beauty and the stunning desert solitude of Oman’s Empty Quarter -- and many places beyond.
In World Travel, a life of experience is collected into an entertaining, practical, fun and frank travel guide that gives...
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"Following in the footsteps of famed explorers such as Lawrence of Arabia and Wilfred Thesiger, British explorer Levison Wood brings us along on his most complex expedition yet: a circumnavigation of the Arabian Peninsula. Starting in September 2017 in a city in Northern Syria, a stone's throw away from Turkey and amidst the deadliest war of the twenty-first century, Wood set forth on a 5,000-mile trek through the most contested region on the planet....
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John Muir first saw Alaska in 1879, only twelve years after it was purchased from Russia by the United States. Four more times, in 1880, 1881, 1890, and 1899, he was drawn back to this land of rivers and glaciers, sunsets and northern lights, campfires and Arctic stars. Few people have lived so many adventures, yet Muir was not a mere collector of adventure; the hazards he encountered - and many were spine-tingling - came as a result of his intense...
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"A modern-day Huck Finn, Rinker Buck casts off down the river on the flatboat Patience accompanied by an eccentric crew of daring shipmates. Over the course of his voyage, Buck steers his fragile wooden craft through narrow channels dominated by massive cargo barges, rescues his first mate gone overboard, sails blindly through fog, breaks his ribs not once but twice, and camps every night on sandbars, remote islands, and steep levees. As he charts...
20) The cat's table
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In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at the "cat's table"--as far from the Captain's Table as can be--with a ragtag group of "insignificant" adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys tumble from one adventure to another, bursting all over the place like freed...
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