A wonderful read.' - Kevin Hand, BBC London. You’re in Greece and are given a €20 note with an email address scribbled on it. What would you do:1. Spend it? 2. Slip the suspect counterfeit bill into an enemy’s birthday card?3. Send an email, hoping it will lead to you finding everlasting love? Brad, a hopeless romantic, chose the latter.Two years later, his love life remains a disaster and his career is misfiring. As he’s about to walk Spain’s fabled Camino de Santiago to ponder some profound life changes, Brad receives a reply. Incredibly, it’s from a woman who lives on the 1000-year-old pilgrim path, far away from where the money first crossed his palm. She invites him to sleep… ‘on her house’. Hiking nine hundred kilometres on the Road to Santiago to a blind date with the mystery €20 woman, he discovers the utopia of his fantasies, befriends a Hungarian who speaks English in song titles and has his raison d’être revealed to him by a barefoot Mayan mystic. Will he meet his happily-ever-after too? Buy this pacy, exuberant, laugh-out-loud travelogue laced with tips for fellow pilgrims to find out...

    Just days before they were to be married, his fiancée called off the wedding. Luckily, his large support network of family and friends wouldn't let him succumb to his misery. They decided Franz should have a wedding and a honeymoon anyway- there just wouldn't be a bride at the ceremony, and Franz' travel companion would be his brother, Kurt.During the "honeymoon," Franz reconnected with his brother and began to look at his life with newfound perspective. The brothers decided to leave their old lives behind them. They quit their jobs, sold all their possessions, and traveled around the world, visiting fifty-three countries for the next two years. In Honeymoon With My Brother, Franz recounts this remarkable journey, during which he turned his heartbreak into an opportunity to learn about himself, the world, and the brother he hardly knew.

    The lifers - as in "caddies for life" - that plied the loops were an ensemble of misfits and degenerates that made the caddy yard look more like an OTB parlor than anything near a country club.  But Dunn came of age in those yards and on those courses, and after an eye-opening experience caddying in Aspen during college the magnetism of the game and the lifestyle proved irresistible. One adventure after another kept him coming back summer after summer, until - out of college - he found himself migrating with the seasons, looping at some of the most exquisite and exclusive golf locations in the world; Sherwood, Augusta, Bandon Dunes, Shinnecock, and St. Andrews to name a few. Dunn criss-crossed the country on his own big loop; working inside the privet hedges while camping on the mountains; following the back roads and stumbling across unexpected moments of profound natural beauty; embracing the freedom of what he calls the last vagabond existence in America, all while trying to decide whether to quit the loop and get a real job. Maybe next season...

    From her small-town home in Ontario, it seemed as if Marco Polo, Magellan and their like had long ago mapped the whole earth. So she vowed to become a scientist and go to Mars. To pass the time before she could launch into outer space, Kate set off by bicycle down a short section of the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel Yule, then settled down to study at Oxford and MIT. Eventually the truth dawned on her: an explorer, in any day and age, is by definition the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines. And Harris had soared most fully out of bounds right here on Earth, travelling a bygone trading route on her bicycle. So she quit the laboratory and hit the Silk Road again with Mel, this time determined to bike it from the beginning to end. Like Rebecca Solnit and Pico Iyer before her, Kate Harris offers a travel narrative at once exuberant and meditative, wry and rapturous. Weaving adventure and deep reflection with the history of science and exploration, Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness of a world that, like the self and like the stars, can never be fully mapped.

    suburb. Instead, he humorously falls from one country to the next, striking out repeatedly with the local women, getting robbed, having dreams that became reality, self-diagnosing himself with a host of diseases, and suffering repeated bouts of stomach illness that made marathon bus rides superhuman feats of bodily strength. Along the journey he chronicles the friendships, the women, and the struggles, including one fateful night in Paraguay that he thought would lead to his end.(This book is intended for men, and will be almost universally disliked by women because of its sexist themes and occasional toilet humor.)

    His travels, and his bad dancing, have been viewed online nearly 75 million times. It started as a lark on a curbside in Hanoi, Vietnam. He did it for fun, but Matt 's irreverent spirit caught on, and soon thousands all over the world were joining him in a simple expression of what we all, as humans, have in common. In his first book, a full-color travelogue, Matt shares, with refreshing honesty and wit, the adventure of creating his videos. He tells of jumping into the ocean with a humpback whale, sledding down a hill in Antarctica, and hitchhiking across the Skeleton Coast desert with a spare tire under one arm. Matt also reveals the unlikely story of how his passion for travel led to Internet stardom, a corporate sponsor, and an odd little pop culture phenomenon that strikes a deep emotional chord. His book, like his videos, offers us a chance to share his unique experiences as he walks us through how he became the first person to dance with the world.

    Alone raising an infant in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Julie is surrounded by the rubble of her life - stripped bare by love and loss. Suddenly a single mother, Freed's prose captures the love and adoration for her daughter, the indomitable spirit of her New England family, and her father's unwavering devotion. Touching ties survive even the most powerful surge Mother Nature delivers. This debut memoir candidly reveals intimate details of one woman's shattered dreams as well as humanity's power, resilience, and goodness. Unflinchingly honest, Naked is a remarkable true story of hope, family, and love in a southern coastal Mississippi town.

    But this is not just a diary for theatre lovers, although his insider’s ear on the arts world is well-attuned and unmissable. Bennett’s life is broader. His accounts of theatre troubles and even more troublesome critics are combined with his memories of a writer’s tour of Russia, life in New York and Camden, filming in Egypt and tales of a Yorkshire village. He also covers the big events of his time: the Falklands War, Mrs Thatcher and the assassination of John Lennon. Taken from Alan Bennett’s bestselling book, Writing Home, this keenly viewed history of the decade confirms Bennett as one of life’s great observers – clear-eyed, compassionate and funny.2 CDs. 1 hr 59 mins.

    In this intimate true account of a promise kept, Alvarez takes us on a journey into experiences that challenge our way of thinking about history and how it can be reimagined when people from two countries traditional enemies and strangers become friends.

    Life as he knew it changed in that instant. With nothing to bargain with and everything to lose, for the next six years Steve became reluctantly engaged in what he refers to as, “the greatest chess game of my life”.Thousands of kilometres away in Johannesburg, the shock of his kidnapping hit his wife Cath and the rest of the McGown family. Working every option they could find – from established diplomatic protocols to the murky back channels of the kidnap game – they set to work on trying to free Steve.To this day he holds the unenviable record of Al Qaeda’s longest held prisoner.Six Years With Al Qaeda is not just an incredible story of mental strength, physical endurance and the resilience of the human spirit, but also a unique, nuanced perspective on one of the world’s most feared terrorist organisations. Not only did Steve survive his ordeal, but in many respects he came out of the desert both a changed man and a stronger, more positive human.

    Peter Allison gives us the guide’s-eye view of living in the bush, confronting the world’s fiercest terrain of wild animals and, most challenging of all, managing herds of gaping tourists. Passionate for the animals of the Kalahari, Allison works as a top safari guide in the wildlife-rich Okavango Delta. As he serves the whims of his wealthy clients, he often has to stop the impulse to run as far away from them as he can, as these tourists are sometimes more dangerous than a pride of lions. No one could make up these outrageous-but-true tales: the young woman who rejected the recommended safari-friendly khaki to wear a more “fashionable” hot pink ensemble; the lost tourist who happened to be drunk, half-naked, and a member of the British royal family; establishing a real friendship with the continent’s most vicious animal; the Japanese tourist who requested a repeat performance of Allison’s being charged by a lion so he could videotape it; and spending a crazy night in the wild after blowing a tire on a tour bus, revealing that Allison has as much good-natured scorn for himself. The author’s humor is exceeded only by his love and respect for the animals, and his goal is to limit any negative exposure to humans by planning trips that are minimally invasive—unfortunately it doesn’t always work out that way! Peter Allison is originally from Sydney, Australia. His safaris have been featured in National Geographic, Conde Nast Traveler, and on television programs such as Jack Hanna's Animal Adventures. He travels frequently to speaking appearances, and splits most of his time between Botswana, Sydney, and San Francisco.

    Dismissing concerns from family and friends that her safety and career were at risk, she arrived with no teaching experience whatsoever, to work at a high school in a town she'd never heard of, where the winters are frigid and plunge to sub-zero temperatures.During her childhood on an isolated cattle station in Central Australia, Tanya had always dreamed of adventure and romance in Europe but the Czech Republic was not the stuff of her dreams. On arrival, however, she falls headlong into misadventures that change her life forever.This land of castles, history and culture opened up to her and she to it. In love with Prague and her people, particularly with the charismatic Karel, who takes her into his home, his family and as far as he can into his heart, Tanya learns about lives very different to hers.Alice to Prague is a bittersweet story of a search for identity, belonging and love, set in a time, a place and with a man that fill Tanya's life with contradictions.

    Commissioned to write a guidebook about France (despite not speaking any French) he sets off with visions of relaxing chateaux and refined dining. Ten thousand miles later his family's been attacked by a donkey, had a run-in with a death-cult and, after a near drowning and a calamitous wedding experience involving a British spy, his own marriage is in jeopardy. A combination of obsessions about mosquitoes, French gravel and vegetable theme parks mean it's a bumpy ride as Ben takes a stand against tyrannical French pool attendants, finds himself running with the bulls in Pamplona and almost starring in a snuff movie after a near fatal decision to climb into a millionaire's Chevrolet Blazer.Funny and poignant, Road to Rouen asks important questions about life, marriage and whether it's ever acceptable to tape baguette to your children's legs to smuggle lunch into Disneyland Paris.

    The story takes us from Glenn's unexpected diagnosis of 'three months at best' just days before the birth of his only child, to his miraculous remission and the ironic death of his father. It is a journey that is by turns heartbreaking, painfully funny, misanthropic, loving and ultimately heroic. Rodeo In Joliet tramples the Hallmark cliches and platitudes of traditional cancer survival stories and presents in their place an experience that leaves the reader in awe and grateful for his or her every breath.

    Just a few years ago, however, Dhani thought his playing days were over. Cut by the Eagles and the Saints, he was at a professional crossroads. When the Bengals called, though, he was more than ready and in the best shape of his life. And for that, he credits his off-season.   The Sportsman follows Dhani’s discovery that the parts of his life that, to many, seemed to be distractions— including an off-season TV show that sent him around the world to learn and compete in other sports—actually served to cross-train him in ways he’d never imagined, enabling him to become more grounded, globally aware, and, most surprisingly, a much better football player. Part travelogue, part workout guide, part Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Sportsman is an invigorating account of Dhani’s global sporting adventures and the lessons he has learned along the way. From dragon boat racing in Singapore to carrying 300-pound rocks in Iceland to biking in Italy, Dhani’s adventures taught him to be tougher, smarter, and stronger than ever. The Sportsman is a reminder that by connecting to the world through its people and customs and the spirit of competition, we empower ourselves in ways that can surpass our craziest expectations.