Spanning an extraordinary range of subjects and locations, these articles take us from a horrifying avalanche on Mt. Everest to a volcano poised to obliterate a big chunk of greater Seattle at any moment; from a wilderness teen-therapy program run by apparent sadists to an otherworldly cave in New Mexico, studied by NASA to better understand Mars; from the notebook of one Fred Beckey, who catalogued the greatest unclimbed mountaineering routes on the planet, to the last days of legendary surfer Mark Foo. Rigorously researched and vividly written, marked by an unerring instinct for storytelling and scoop, the pieces in Classic Krakauer are unified by the author’s ambivalent love affair with unruly landscapes and his relentless search for truth.

    In “Plays With Cars,” the former Porsche manager covers some of his most ridiculous decisions, like buying an old Land Rover sight unseen, taking a Mercedes AMG station wagon to a rural Georgia dragstrip, and roadtripping across the United States in a Lotus Elise without air conditioning. He’s also reviewed his former cars, which range from a Mercedes G-wagen to a Nissan Cube. Most importantly, he wrote this entire description himself in the third person.

    He returned some 20 years later with a wife, four children and the internationally renowned tour company - Contiki Holidays.Written by the founder of Contiki, Only Two Seats Left is the incredible story of how a simple idea with a starting capital of just 25 pounds became a worldwide travel company with an internationally recognised iconic' brand name. To date over two million young people have had the Contiki Challenge.Only Two Seats Left is one of Australasia's great untold business success stories. A touching blend of autobiography, business insight and travel tale all rolled into one book readers won't want to put down.Discover the raw realities of John's journey of difficulties, failures and his most valuable secrets to successful entrepreneurship.In this altogether inspiring narrative, Only Two Seats Left encompasses entrepreneurship, leadership, risk taking, team work, branding, competition and surviving tough times John's personal journey creates a thoroughly entertaining read for anyone who's ever dreamt of taking a risk with that first bold step to venture into the unknown.

    It is proof that, 'if you go looking for trouble, you'll probably find it'. Over nearly 40 years as a journalist and foreign correspondent, Hugh Riminton has been shot at, blown up, threatened with deportation and thrown in jail. He has reported from nearly 50 countries, witnessed massacres in Africa, wars and conflicts on four continents, and every kind of natural disaster. It has been an extraordinary life. From a small-town teenager with a drinking problem, cleaning rat cages for a living, to a multi-award-winning international journalist reporting to an audience of 300 million people, Hugh has been a frontline witness to our times. From genocide in Africa to the Indian Ocean tsunami, from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to slave-trading in Sudan, Hugh has seen the best and worst of human behaviour. In Australia, he has covered political dramas, witnessed the Port Arthur Massacre and the Thredbo disaster and broke a major national scandal. His work helped force half-a-dozen government inquiries.Entertaining, deeply personal and quietly wise, MINEFIELDS is a compelling exploration of a foreign correspondent's life. 'His story is a triumph' SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

    Peter Stark offers a harrowing saga in which a band of explorers battled nature, starvation, and madness to establish the first American settlement in the Pacific Northwest and opened up what would become the Oregon trail, permanently altering the nation's landscape and its global standing.Six years after Lewis and Clark began their journey to the Pacific Northwest, two of the Eastern establishment's leading figures, John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson, turned their sights to founding a colony akin to Jamestown on the West Coast and transforming the nation into a Pacific trading power. Author and correspondent for Outside magazine Peter Stark recreates this pivotal moment in American history for the first time for modern readers, drawing on original source material to tell the amazing true story of the Astor Expedition.Unfolding over the course of three years, from 1810 to 1813, Astoria is a tale of high adventure and incredible hardship in the wilderness and at sea. Of the more than one hundred-forty members of the two advance parties that reached the West Coast—one crossing the Rockies, the other rounding Cape Horn—nearly half perished by violence. Others went mad. Within one year, the expedition successfully established Fort Astoria, a trading post on the Columbia River. Though the colony would be short-lived, it opened provincial American eyes to the potential of the Western coast and its founders helped blaze the Oregon Trail.

    And Alaska’s mesmeric wilderness has permeated Keenan’s life ever since. A short visit to Fairbanks several years ago was enough to seal his connection with the place, and he resolved to return. He eventually did so with a head full of questions about its inspiring landscape and a heart informed with his own love of the desolate places of the world. In a journey that takes him through four geographical quarters from snowmelt in May to snowfall in September, he discovers a land as fantastical as a fairy tale but whose vastness has a very peculiar type of allure. From dog-mushing on a frozen lake beneath the colors of the aurora borealis to camping in a two-dollar tent in the tundra of the Arctic Circle, from skinning hides with an aging shaman and his wife to boating in the stormy Bering Sea, and along frozen inlets to a remote Eskimo fishing camp, Keenan seeks out the ultimate wilderness experience and connects with a spectrum of wildlife, including his own “spirit bear,” all of them roamers in “The Big Lonely.” En route, he encounters hard-core survivalists who know what struggle and endurance mean from their daily battle for existence. And finally, he discovers that true wilderness is as much a state of mind as it is a place and that ultimately, to make Alaska home, one must surrender to the land.

    Chronicles of a Cruise Ship Crew Member goes below the waterline to explore the cramped, dirty, and dimly lit crew areas on a revealing tour of the ship's underworld. Go where no passenger has gone before and learn what the crew eats, where they sleep, how they party, and finally understand why all of the officers on a cruise ship are Italian.Climb aboard an adventure on the high seas and witness the wonderful side of ship life where crew members have whirlwind escapades while traveling the world aboard a massive sailing city.Drawing from his experiences working as a musician aboard cruise ships for more than five years, Joshua tells the laugh-out-loud funny and also beautifully poignant story of what cruise ship crew members experience from the minute they first step onto a ship to the day they walk down that gangway for the last time.

    Gillet, at the age of 36 an accomplished sailor and paddler, navigated by sextant and always knew his position within a few miles. Still, Gillet underestimated the abuse his body would take from the relentless, pounding, swells of the Pacific, and early into his voyage he was covered with salt water sores and found that he could find no comfortable position for sitting or sleeping. Along the way he endured a broken rudder, among other calamities, but at last reached Maui on his 63rd day at sea, four days after his food had run out. Dave Shively brings Gillet's remarkable story to life in this gripping narrative, based on exclusive access to Gillet's logs as well as interviews with the legendary paddler himself.

     In 2012, Gruff Rhys set out on an 'investigative concert tour' in the footsteps of John Evans, with concerts in New Orleans, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, St Louis, North Dakota and more. American Interior is the story of these journeys. It is also an exploration of how wild fantasies interact with hard history and how myth-making can inspire humans to partake in crazy, vain pursuits of glory, including exploration, war and the creative arts. Gruff Rhys is known around the world for his work as a solo artist as well as singer and songwriter with Super Furry Animals and Neon Neon, and for his collaborations with Gorillaz, Dangermouse, Sparklehorse, Mogwai and Simian Mobile Disco amongst others. The latest album by Neon Neon, Praxis Makes Perfect, based on the life of radical Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, was recently performed as an immersive live concert with National Theatre Wales.

    There was no specific destination in mind except to visit countries, not the airports and luxury hotels but the country itself, to experience local culture and ways of life. This entailed sleeping in tribesmen's huts and cheap hostels and using local transportation whenever possible: traversing jungle roads packed eighteen souls to a single Peugeot station wagon in Guinea-Bissau, boating the length of the Amazon snacking on roasted piranha, and hitchhiking across Iraq during the war. I've floated on dilapidated ferries across surging estuaries, ridden horseback or in military trucks across deserts and plains, followed the course of rivers, crossed wastelands, bused and trekked through deep jungle, traversed mountain ranges and lounged on the remotest beaches. I adopted local customs and ate local food: roasted goat's eye as the guest of honour at a Mongolian tribal feast, alligator nuggets, mystery kabobs, ‘bush meat' ubiquitous to certain regions of Africa ... but drew the line at wheelbarrows brimming over with smoked monkey corpses. A man's got to know his limitations." --Mike Spencer BownIn 1990, Calgary-raised Mike Spencer Bown packed a backpack and began a journey that would eventually take him through each of the world's 195 countries and span more than two decades. From relaxing on the white sand beaches of Bali to waiting out blizzards in Tibetan caves, Bown trekked from country to country, driven by a desire to see the world in the most authentic way possible, not to just collect stamps on his passport. Eventually, he began to earn international recognition for some of his more unconventional destinations--such as a memorable trip to war-torn Mogadishu.The World's Most Travelled Man is an eye-opening account of the universal human experience as seen from each corner of the changing world. Blending a romantic connection to nature through solitude and the social examination of culture, Bown fully immerses himself in each experience, however diverse, dangerous or dirty, veering way, way off the backpacker circuit to see the world through an unparalleled perspective. The World's Most Travelled Man is a journey of global proportions shared with the humility of a man who simply wants to satisfy his own curiosity and live life to the fullest.

    He had, therefore, full opportunities of seeing the country and its life from various points of view. He has utilized his observations in an entertaining book. It is not — and does not pretend lo be — a scientific work, or technical in any sense. It gives, however, an excellent idea of conditions and ways of living in the Klondike at all seasons, and of the hardships which the pioneers had to undergo. Nothing but gold — the prospect of wealth — could induce men to live in such a climate, and to combat the many difficulties which it entails. Mr. Lynch, a Californian of means and position, arrived at Dawson in the summer of 1898. As the first discoveries of gold in the Klondike valley were made in August of 1896, Mr. Lynch found a mining town not two years old, unpaved and insanitary, crowded with adventurers of every nation, in fact still a typical “ tough" mining-camp, except that lawlessness and crime were sternly repressed by the vigilant Mounted Police. He spent the following winter in the town, making expeditions to the gold-bearing creeks, examining mines and studying the methods of working them. Early in the spring of 1899 he bought a claim which he believed would repay him and set himself at once to develop it thoroughly. During his stay he had seen Dawson transformed into a paved, sewaged, well built, well lighted city, and the streets, no longer thronged with rough-mannered miners and adventurers, had become the promenade of well dressed business men and ladies (real ladies !) intent on shopping. As one of the earliest of the new species of Klondike miner, he is able to give an account of the transition that took place, largely owing to the enterprise of men of his own stamp, and the book is an interesting addition to Klondike literature. Mr. Lynch's narrative is plainly written, in a way which leads one to believe in its substantial truth. It reads well, and brings out many points which will interest the miner, as well as the casual reader. He had confidence in the future of the country, and believed that it would hold a large population for many years, in spite of the drawbacks of climate.

    Ideal for readers of Evan Mawdsley, Max Hastings and Iain Ballantyne.On the 8th June 1940, the Nazi battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau opened their guns on the aircraft-carrier HMS Glorious.Within minutes the Glorious was taking on water and the order was given to abandon ship.Hundreds of men leapt into the icy waters of the Norwegian Sea. They hoped and prayed that nearby ships would have heard their distress signal and send help.Yet, they did not come. Men were left to tread water, hold onto small inflatables or clamber onto overcrowded lifeboats. The situation looked bleak for the few who survived the first twenty-four hours; there was nothing to eat and men resorted to drinking saltwater and their own urine to slake their thirst, but the effects of hypothermia and delirium began to take their toll.Over 1,200 men lost their lives as a result of this tragedy.Only forty men survived this ordeal, one of which was Royal Marine Ronald “Tubby” Healiss, who served as a member of a 4.7 gun crew on the Glorious. His award-winning account is a true and terrible record of suffering, which uncovers one of the greatest undocumented naval stories of the Second World War.

    Then in the late 1970s came a surprise berth on an expedition that was to define his career as a high-altitude mountaineer and transform him personally. A chronicle of his apprenticeship, Thin Air established Child as one of the great mountaineering writers of our time.Thin Air is about the intensity of climbing on the edge day after day. It is about friendships and tragedies and the memories that linger for decades. Filled with humor, irony, and pathos, Thin Air touches us with the beauty of the Baltoro Glacier's landscape and encounters with the local people. It also paints portraits of legendary mountaineers Doug Scott, Don Whillans, Alan Rouse, and others.

    Intrigued by Polynesian folklore, biologist Thor Heyerdahl suspected that the South Sea Islands had been settled by an ancient race from thousands of miles to the east, led by a mythical hero, Kon-Tiki. He decided to prove his theory by duplicating the legendary voyage.On April 28, 1947, Heyerdahl and five other adventurers sailed from Peru on a balsa log raft. After three months on the open sea, encountering raging storms, whales, and sharks, they sighted land - the Polynesian island of Puka Puka.Translated into over sixty languages, Kon-Tiki is a classic, inspiring tale of daring and courage - a magnificent saga of men against the sea.

    Tome was born in 1782 near present-day Harrisburg and lived on the upper Susquehanna for much of his life. He tells colorful (and mostly true) tales about his hunting exploits in the Pennsylvania wilderness, as he tracked elk, wolves, bears, panthers, foxes, and other large animals through the state’s north-central mountains, earning wide renown among his contemporaries. His stories contain suspenseful chase scenes, accidents, and narrow escapes, inviting the reader to view a still-wild Pennsylvania through the eyes of one who “was never conquered by man or animal.” Pioneer Life, originally published in 1854, has since been reprinted several times. This classic hunting memoir includes the following chapters: I. Birth and Early Life II. Hunting the Elk III. Capturing a Live Elk IV. Face of the Country V. Face of the Country — Continued VI. Danger From Rattlesnakes VII. Wolf and Bear Hunting VIII. Another Elk Hunt IX. Elk-Hunting on the Susquehannah X. Elk-Hunting — Continued XI. Nature, Habits, and Manner of Hunting the Elk XII. Elk and Bear Hunting in Winter XIII. Hunting on the Clarion River XIV. Hunting and Trapping XV. The Bear, Its Nature and Habits XVI. Hunting Deer at Different Seasons XVII. Nature and Habits of the Panther, Wolf and Fox XVIII. Rattlesnakes and Their Habits XIX. Distinguished Lumbermen, Etc. XX.. Reminiscences of Cornplanter XXI. Indian Eloquence This book originally published in 1854 has been reformatted for the Kindle and may contain an occasional defect from the original publication or from the reformatting