Should I Not Return eBook: The Most Controversial Tragedy in the History of North American Mountaineering!


Jeffrey Babcock - 2012
    What set their climb apart from those before it, and even those afterward, was a disaster of such magnitude that it became know as North America's worst mountaineering tragedy. Prior to July of 1967 only four men had ever perished on Denali, and then, in one fell swoop, Denali--like Melville s, Great White Whale, Moby Dick--indiscriminately took the lives of seven men. The brothers survive one danger after another: a terrible train accident, a near drowning in the McKinley River, an encounter with a large grizzly, a 60 foot plunge into a gaping crevasse, swept away by a massive avalanche, and finally a climactic escape from the terror of 100 mph winds while descending from the summit. Should I Not Return is a one of a kind cliffhanger packed with danger, survival under the worst conditions, and heroism on the Last Frontier s most treasured trophy--the icy slopes of Denali, North America s tallest mountain--Mount McKinley.

Gone: Catastrophe in Paradise


O.J. Modjeska - 2017
    Within hours, hundreds are dead. What happened? The true story of one of history's most tragic and shocking disasters...in which aviation, terrorism, a sudden change in the weather and plain old bad luck made for a ruinous mix. This gripping novella length work unravels the mind-boggling facts of this catastrophe as a compelling, action-packed and haunting tale of the human condition that will have you turning the pages to the very end.

Rattlesnakes and Bald Eagles: Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail


Chris Townsend - 2014
    Of all his adventures, those he enjoyed on America’s Pacific Crest Trail in the Eighties are among his favourites. The PCT runs 2,600 miles from Mexico to Canada through desert, forest and mountain wildernesses. In Rattlesnakes and Bald Eagles Chris recounts not only his own six month w alk but also the longer story of the Trail, and shares his ideas on how it is developing and where it is all going with his many readers. Illustrated with Chris Townsend’s photographs from his long hike, and earlier, iconic images, Rattlesnakes and Bald Eagles will be the definitive Pacific Crest Trail account

Mud, Sweat and Tears - an Irish Woman's Journey of Self-Discovery


Moire O'Sullivan - 2011
    Though tempted to pull out and go home, she reluctantly runs.Little did she know the race up Corrig Mountain would inflict such physical blows: Her lungs catch fire, her legs explode, her heart hits record speeds. And though it’s a gentle summer’s evening back in Dublin, on top of Corrig Mountain the wind screeches and the mist swirls as she lurches and lunges over grass, rocks, and rutted bog. The next morning, everything hurts. But still she perseveres. Every week, she’s battling it out with the other mountain runners, adversaries on the hill. But by 9 pm, she’s joining her new found friends in the pub, discovering the wonderful healing powers of a proper pint. Over the next three years, Moire competes in every mountain race she can find, whatever its shape or form: everything from ten kilometre sprints up summits, to one hundred kilometre runs requiring map and compass. She even dabbles in adventure racing, doing multi-day multi-sport races in teams of four in the barren wastelands of Ireland and Scotland. But it is not until she sets her sights on the still unconquered Wicklow Round that she finally finds her nemesis. In July 2008, Moire made a solo attempt on the Wicklow Round, a gruelling endurance run spanning a hundred kilometres over twenty six of Ireland’s remotest mountain peaks. After twenty one and a half hours she collapsed, two summits from the end. Battered and bruised yet undeterred, she returned a year later to become the first person ever to complete the challenge.This is her story.

Avalanche Essentials: A Step by Step System For Safety and Survival


Bruce Tremper - 2013
    This new guide by renowned avalanche expert Bruce Tremper is simple, accessible, and offers just the basics — an Everyman’s guide to avalanche safety that won’t overtax your average ski bums, but will keep them safe when they’re going for 12 consecutive months of powder. Avalanche Essentials is for everyone who wants to learn the fundamentals of avalanche awareness, focusing on systems and checklists, step-by-step procedures, decision-making aids, visual terrain and weather cues, rescue techniques, gear, and more.Avalanche Essentials is intended for broader use by skiers, snowboarders, snowmobilers, hikers, climbers, and snowshoers. Because it steers clear of more complex topics (e.g., snow metamorphism), it’s perfect for generalists as well as anyone who has studied avalanche safety and likes to keep a pocket reference while in potentially dangerous terrain.

How to Sail Around the World: Advice and Ideas for Voyaging Under Sail


Hal Roth - 2003
    Since then, he's logged more than 200,000 sea miles. Along the way, Roth also has authored eight voyaging classics, including the 1978 bestseller After 50,000 Miles.Taking that book as its starting point, this handsome new volume incorporates the new technologies and discoveries of the last quarter century along with another 150,000 miles of experience.A compendium of mature, time-tested sea wisdom from one of the world's most respected sailing writers, How to Sail Around the World will tell the reader:How to choose and equip a sailboat for long-distance cruising, with an emphasis on simplicity and a modest budgetHow to plan and conduct a voyage anywhere in the worldHow to master the arts of navigation, anchoring, and daily life aboard in exotic placesHow to cope with storms at sea--the most complete and authoritative treatise on this critical topic ever published

Plunge – One Woman’s Pursuit of a Life Less Ordinary


Liesbet Collaert - 2020
    When she swaps life as she knows it for an uncertain future on a sailboat, she succumbs to seasickness and a growing desire to be alone.Guided by impulsiveness and the joys of an alternative lifestyle, she must navigate personal storms, trouble with US immigration, adverse weather conditions, and doubts about her newfound love.Does Liesbet find happiness? Will the dogs outlast the man? Or is this just another reality check on a dream to live at sea?

Only When I Step On It: One Man's Inspiring Journey to Hike The Appalachian Trail Alone


Peter Conti - 2021
    

On the Water: Discovering America in a Row Boat


Nathaniel Stone - 2002
    The hull glides in silence and with such perfect balance as to report no motion. I sit up for another stroke, now looking down as the blades ignite swirling pairs of white constellations of phosphorescent plankton. Two opposing heavens. ‘Remember this,’ I think to myself.”Few people have ever considered the eastern United States to be an island, but when Nat Stone began tracing waterways in his new atlas at the age of ten he discovered that if one had a boat it was possible to use a combination of waterways to travel up the Hudson River, west across the barge canals and the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, and back up the eastern seaboard. Years later, still fascinated by the idea of the island, Stone read a biography of Howard Blackburn, a nineteenth-century Gloucester fisherman who had attempted to sail the same route a century before. Stone decided he would row rather than sail, and in April 1999 he launched a scull beneath the Brooklyn Bridge to see how far he could get. After ten months and some six thousand miles he arrived back at the Brooklyn Bridge, and continued rowing on to Eastport, Maine. Retracing Stone’s extraordinary voyage, On the Water is a marvelous portrait of the vibrant cultures inhabiting American shores and the magic of a traveler’s chance encounters. From Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where a rower at the local boathouse bequeaths him a pair of fabled oars, to Vanceburg, Kentucky, where he spends a day fishing with Ed Taylor -- a man whose efficient simplicity recalls The Old Man and the Sea -- Stone makes his way, stroke by stroke, chatting with tugboat operators and sleeping in his boat under the stars. He listens to the live strains of Dwight Yoakum on the banks of the Ohio while the world’s largest Superman statue guards the nearby town square, and winds his way through the Louisiana bayous, where he befriends Scoober, an old man who reminds him that the happiest people are those who’ve “got nothin’.” He briefly adopts a rowing companion -- a kitten -- along the west coast of Florida, and finds himself stuck in the tidal mudflats of Georgia. Along the way, he flavors his narrative with local history and lore and records the evolution of what started out as an adventure but became a lifestyle. An extraordinary literary debut in the lyrical, timeless style of William Least Heat-Moon and Henry David Thoreau, On the Water is a mariner’s tribute to childhood dreams, solitary journeys, and the transformative powers of America’s rivers, lakes, and coastlines.From the Hardcover edition.

Things I've Learned from Watching the Browns


Terry Pluto - 2010
    In his latest tome, he bares his chest about why C-Town's football faithful can't give up on their hometown favorites. (P.S. Not to rub it in, but over the last seven seasons, the Brownies record has been 38-74. Now that's true fan love.)

927 Days of Summer: Around the World in a VW Van (Drive Nacho Drive)


Brad Van Orden - 2015
    This is where 927 Days of Summer picks up the trail. After shipping Nacho from Argentina to Malaysia on a container ship, Brad and Sheena resume their journey, this time with the ambitious goal of driving all the way around the world. When they roll out of the shipping container onto Malaysian soil, their odometer turns over 300,000 miles. Is Nacho really up for the brutal journey ahead?This hilarious, and often harrowing tale follows them through the sweltering jungles of Southeast Asia, the buzzing hornet's nest of India, into the remote Nepalese Himalayas, through the stony hills of Anatolia to the Sahara Desert in Africa, through Europe and beyond. Whether dodging rickshaws on crater-filled roads, defying Maoist rebels on cliff-hanging Himalayan tracks, getting hopelessly stuck in the desert on the Pakistani border, or becoming the subjects of an international missing persons case in the remote mountains of Laos, there is never a dull moment in 927 Days of Summer. Come along as a diverse cast of characters guides our subjects through a world of unfolding landscapes and cultures on the road trip to end all road trips, and then ask yourself: can you really just go home, unpack, and eat a sandwich?

Mosquito Point Road: Monroe County Murder & Mayhem


Michael Benson - 2020
    There’s Killer of the Cloth, The Baby in the Convent, Mosquito Point Road, Death of a First Baseman, The Blue Gardenia, and Pure/Evil. Three of the killers are female.

The Boy Who Outwitted Mengele


Michael Popik - 2018
    Miki grew up in the small town of Levice in Czechoslovakia. In 1944, his life changed forever. At the age of 13, Miki and his family were sent to the concentration camps at Auschwitz. Miki survived against all odds and ultimately triumphed to live a life of love. “Miki Popik shares an incredible tale of survival, courage and resilience. He speaks of his life as a child in Czechoslovakia at the dawn of World War II, of his imprisonment at two concentration camps, of his family’s struggles for survival, and his efforts after the war to locate his family. Though he was the only one from his extended family to survive, he felt very fortunate to have learned where in a mass grave in Mühldorf, Germany, his father and brother had been interred. Mühldorf was a sub-camp of the infamous Dachau, not far from Munich. Miki’s story moves like none other.” – Alan S. Blaustein, JD, MD “In 2012, my classmates and I from the Sherman Block Supervisory Leadership Institute were fortunate to hear you speak at the Museum of Tolerance. Your words were truly inspiring! I left the museum that day speechless and humbled. I realized that nothing in my life can be assimilated to what you have experienced in yours. It shed a new light on the human race and how we treat one another.” – Sergeant Robert O’Brine, San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Dept.

Better Late Than Never: From Barrow Boy to Ballroom


Len Goodman - 2009
    Len Goodman tells all about his new-found fame, his experiences on Strictly Come Dancing, and also on the no.1 US show Dancing with the Stars and his encounters with the likes of Heather Mills-McCartney and John Sergeant. But the real story is in his East End roots. And Len's early life couldn't be more East End. The son of a Bethnal Green costermonger he spent his formative years running the fruit and veg barrow and being bathed at night in the same water Nan used to cook the beetroot. There are echoes of Billy Elliot too. Though Len was a welder in the London Docks, he dreamt of being a professional footballer, and came close to making the grade had he not broken his foot on Hackney Marshes. The doctor recommended ballroom dancing as a light aid to his recovery. And Len, it turned out, was a natural. At first his family and work mates mocked, but soon he had made the final of a national competition and the welders descended en masse to the Albert Hall to cheer him on. With his dance partner, and then wife Cheryl, Len won the British Championships in his late twenties and ballroom dancing became his life. Funny and heart-warming, Len Goodman's autobiography has all the honest East End charm of Tommy Steele, Mike Read or Roberta Taylor.

Different Parts of Everywhere: Cycling the World, Part Three: Mori to Paris


Chris Pountney - 2021