The Broken Circle: A Memoir of Escaping Afghanistan


Enjeela Ahmadi-Miller - 2019
    But after her mother, unsettled by growing political unrest, leaves for medical treatment in India, the civil war intensifies, changing young Enjeela’s life forever. Amid the rumble of invading Soviet tanks, Enjeela and her family are thrust into chaos and fear when it becomes clear that her mother will not be coming home.Thus begins an epic, reckless, and terrifying five-year journey of escape for Enjeela, her siblings, and their father to reconnect with her mother. In navigating the dangers ahead of them, and in looking back at the wilderness of her homeland, Enjeela discovers the spiritual and physical strength to find hope in the most desperate of circumstances.A heart-stopping memoir of a girl shaken by the brutalities of war and empowered by the will to survive, The Broken Circle brilliantly illustrates that family is not defined by the borders of a country but by the bonds of the heart.

Medicine Men: Extreme Appalachian Doctoring


Carolyn Jourdan - 2012
    National bestseller "Medicine Men" follows the beloved #1 bestselling "Heart in the Right Place". This is a collection of the most memorable moments from more than a dozen rural physicians who each practiced medicine for more than 50 years in the Southern Appalachian Mountains from 1930-2012. Hilarious, heroic, true stories of miracle cures, ghost dogs, and much madcap medical mayhem. Unimaginably funny and touching situations where men with nerves of steel and hearts of gold get stuck between a rock and a hard place in the Smoky Mountains. These men are saints who walk among us and Jourdan's father is one of them. Jourdan's work is often compared to James Herriot and Bill Bryson. This story collection is like "All Creatures Great and Small" but with people instead of animals or vingnettes from country doctors who took "A Walk in the Woods".Jourdan's first book is on hundreds of lists of best books of the year, best book club books, and funniest books. "Heart in the Right Place" was chosen as Family Circle magazine's first ever Book of the Month, won the Elle magazine Reader's Prize, named a Wall Street Journal Nonfiction Bestseller and ranked #1 on Amazon in Biography, Memoir, Science, and Medicine.

Amelia's Story: A Childhood Lost


D.G. Torrens - 2011
    This is a powerful true story of one young girls struggle to survive the state care system in the 70's and 80's. Amelia has just one wish, to make it to adulthood, to hold her destiny in her own hands. This is a harrowing true story, one of survival and human strength. Amelia has been separated from all her siblings never to see them again for many years, she is moved from one children's home to another, until finally it's just too much for her to bear. Amelia starts to wonder about the peace and finality of her own death.

Endurance


Frank A. Worsley - 1931
    "What the ice gets," replied Sir Ernest Shackleton, the expedition's unflappable leader, "the ice keeps." It did not, however, get the ship's twenty-five crew members, all of whom survived an eight-hundred-mile voyage across sea, land, and ice to South Georgia, the nearest inhabited island. First published in 1931, Endurance tells the full story of that doomed 1914-16 expedition and incredible rescue, as well as relating Worsley's further adventures fighting U-boats in the Great War, sailing the equally treacherous waters of the Arctic, and making one final (and successful) assault on the South Pole with Shackleton. It is a tale of unrelenting high adventure and a tribute to one of the most inspiring and courageous leaders of men in the history of exploration.

The Worst Journey in the World


Apsley Cherry-Garrard - 1922
    Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the youngest member of Scott's team and one of three men to make and survive the notorious Winter Journey, draws on his firsthand experiences as well as the diaries of his compatriots to create a stirring and detailed account of Scott's legendary expedition. Cherry himself would be among the search party that discovered the corpses of Scott and his men, who had long since perished from starvation and brutal cold. It is through Cherry's insightful narrative and keen descriptions that Scott and the other members of the expedition are fully memorialized.

The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores


Diana Marcum - 2018
    A long-buried personal sadness is enfolding her—and her career is stalled—when she stumbles upon an unusual group of immigrants living in rural California. She follows them on their annual return to the remote Azorean islands in the Atlantic Ocean, where bulls run down village streets, volcanoes are active, and the people celebrate festas to ease their saudade, a longing so deep that the Portuguese word for it can’t be fully translated.Years later, California is in a terrible drought, the wildfires seem to never end, and Diana finds herself still dreaming of those islands and the chuva—a rain so soft you don’t notice when it begins or ends.With her troublesome Labrador retriever, Murphy, in tow, Diana returns to the islands of her dreams only to discover that there are still things she longs for—and one of them may be a most unexpected love.

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage


Alfred Lansing - 1959
    Thus began the legendary ordeal of Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven men. When their ship was finally crushed between two ice floes, they attempted a near-impossible journey over 850 miles of the South Atlantic's heaviest seas to the closest outpost of civilization.In Endurance, the definitive account of Ernest Shackleton's fateful trip, Alfred Lansing brilliantly narrates the harrowing and miraculous voyage that has defined heroism for the modern age.

Out of the Silence: After the Crash


Eduardo Strauch Urioste - 2012
    It was a harrowing test of endurance on a snowbound cordillera that ended in a miraculous rescue. Now comes the unflinching and emotional true story by one of the men who found his way home.Four decades after the tragedy, a climber discovered survivor Eduardo Strauch’s wallet near the memorialized crash site and returned it to him. It was a gesture that compelled Strauch to finally “break the silence of the mountains.”In this revelatory and rewarding memoir, Strauch withholds nothing as he reveals the truth behind the life-changing events that challenged him physically and tested him spiritually, but would never destroy him. In revisiting the horror story we thought we knew, Strauch shares the lessons gleaned from far outside the realm of rational learning: how surviving on the mountain, in the face of its fierce, unforgiving power and desolate beauty, forever altered his perception of love, friendship, death, fear, loss, and hope.

Mud, Sweat and Tears


Bear Grylls - 2011
    After leaving school, he spent months hiking in the Himalayas as he considered joining the Indian Army. Upon his return to England after a change of heart, he passed SAS selection and served with 21 SAS for three years. During this time, he broke his back in several places in a free-fall parachuting accident and it was questionable whether he would ever walk again. However, after months of rehabilitation, focusing always on his childhood dream of climbing Everest, he slowly became strong enough to attempt the ultimate ascent of the world's highest peak. At 7.22 a.m. on 26 May 1998, Bear entered the Guinness Book of Records as the youngest Briton to have successfully climbed Everest and returned alive. He was only twenty-three years old and this was only the beginning of his extreme adventures...Known and admired by millions - whether from his prime-time TV adventures, as a bestselling author or as a world-class motivational speaker - Bear has been there and done it all. Now, for the first time and in his own words, this is the story of his action-packed life

We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance


David Howarth - 1954
    But respected historian David A. Howarth confirmed the details of Jan Baalsrud's riveting tale. It begins in the spring of '43, with Norway occupied by the Nazis and the Allies desperate to open the northern sea lanes to Russia. Baalsrud and three compatriots plan to smuggle themselves into their homeland by boat, spend the summer recruiting and training resistance fighters, and launch a surprise attack on a German airbase. But he's betrayed shortly after landfall. A quick fight leaves Baalsrud alone and trapped on a freezing island above the Arctic Circle. He's poorly clothed (one foot entirely bare), has a head start of only a few hundred yards on his Nazi pursuers and leaves a trail of blood as he crosses the snow. How he avoids capture and ultimately escapes—revealing that much spoils nothing in this white-knuckle narrative—is astonishing stuff. Baalsrud's feats make the travails in Jon Krakauer's Mount Everest classic Into Thin Air look like child's play. This amazing book will disappoint no one. —John J. Miller (edited)

The Last Season


Eric Blehm - 2006
    Blehm narrates this true account of the disappearance and search for Randy Morgenson, a National Park Service ranger who, one morning after 28 seasons on the job, failed to answer his radio call.The introverted Morgenson was more comfortable with the natural world than with people. A gifted photographer and a lyrical writer, he dropped out of college to begin a career that would send him into the remote parts of California's Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. Passionate about the mountains, he excelled at his responsibilities, which ranged from clearing away garbage left by careless campers to rescuing injured hikers. Dedicated to keeping the wilderness undisturbed, he was proud of his ability to leave no trace of himself wherever he camped.That skill would prove costly when, at age 54, he went missing. Blehm seamlessly combines a detective story with a celebration of nature that calls to mind the works of classic American writers like Thoreau and Emerson. His gripping narrative will cause readers' hearts to ache at the disappearance of this undervalued soul. But their spirits will soar at the grandeur and mysticism of nature expertly captured in its most primal state.

Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man's Miraculous Survival


Joe Simpson - 1988
    He and his climbing partner, Simon, reached the summit of the remote Siula Grande in June 1985. A few days later, Simon staggered into Base Camp, exhausted and frost-bitten, with news that that Joe was dead.What happened to Joe, and how the pair dealt with the psychological traumas that resulted when Simon was forced into the appalling decision to cut the rope, makes not only an epic of survival but a compelling testament of friendship.

South: The Story of Shackleton's Last Expedition 1914-1917


Ernest Shackleton - 1919
    Their initial optimism is short-lived, however, as the ice field slowly thickens, encasing the ship Endurance in a death-grip, crushing their craft, and marooning 28 men on a polar ice floe.In an epic struggle of man versus the elements, Shackleton leads his team on a harrowing quest for survival over some of the most unforgiving terrain in the world. Icy, tempestuous seas full of gargantuan waves, mountainous glaciers and icebergs, unending brutal cold, and ever-looming starvation are their mortal foes as Shackleton and his men struggle to stay alive.What happened to those brave men forever stands as a testament to their strength of will and the power of human endurance.This is their story, as told by the man who led them.

Jungle: A Harrowing True Story of Survival


Yossi Ghinsberg - 1985
    But when a terrible rafting accident separates him from his partner, Yossi is forced to survive for weeks alone against one of the wildest backdrops on the planet. Stranded without a knife, map, or survival training, he must improvise shelter and forage for wild fruit to survive. As his feet begin to rot during raging storms, as he loses all sense of direction, and as he begins to lose all hope, he wonders whether he will make it out of the jungle alive.The basis of an upcoming motion picture, Jungle is the story of friendship and the teachings of nature, and a terrifying true account that you won’t be able to put down.

The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America


Mike McIntyre - 1996
    So one day he hit the road to trek from one end of the country to the other with little more than the clothes on his back and without a single penny in his pocket.Through his travels, he found varying degrees of kindness in strangers from all walks of life--and discovered more about people and values and life on the road in America than he'd ever thought possible.The gifts of food and shelter he received along the way were outweighed only by the touching gifts of the heart--the willingness of many he met to welcome a lonely stranger into their homes...and the discovery that sometimes those who give the most are the ones with the least to spare."A truly heartening book, one that restores one's faith not just in the road, but in the openness and humanity of the people of this country."--Salon"A superb writer...Something about McIntyre and his quest makes people want to feed him, pray for him, reveal their innermost torments to him."--Los Angeles Times"Captivating."--San Jose Mercury News"An incredible journey."--CBS News