A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnit's own life to explore the issues of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown. The result is a distinctive, stimulating, and poignant voyage of discovery.

    An account of the year Clara Parkes spent transforming a 676-pound bale of fleece into saleable yarn, and the people and vanishing industry she discovered along the way.

    Kodikian freely admitted that he had stabbed Coughlin twice in the heart. Had there been a darker motive than mercy? And how could anyone, under any circumstances, kill his best friend?Armed with the journal Kodikian and Coughlin carried into Rattle- snake Canyon, Jason Kersten re-creates in riveting detail those fateful days that led to the killing in an infamously unforgiving wilderness.

    There are, indeed, many higher; there are many of a nobler outline. It is no place of pilgrimage for the summary globe-trotter; but to one who lives upon its sides, Mount Saint Helena soon becomes a center of interest. It is the Mont Blanc of one section of the Californian Coast Range, none of its near neighbors rising to one-half its altitude. It looks down on much green, intricate country. It feeds in the spring-time many splashing brooks. From its summit you must have an excellent lesson of geography: seeing, to the south, San Francisco Bay, with Tamalpais on the one hand and Monte Diablo on the other; to the west and thirty miles away, the open ocean; eastward, across the corn-lands and thick tule swamps of Sacramento Valley, to where the Central Pacific railroad begins to climb the sides of the Sierras; and northward, for what I know, the white head of Shasta looking down on Oregon.The author's experiences at Silverado were recorded in a journal he called "Silverado Sketches," parts of which he incorporated into Silverado Squatters in 1883 while living in Bournemouth, England, with other tales appearing in "Essays of Travel" and "Across the Plains." Many of his notes on the scenery around him later provided much of the descriptive detail for Treasure Island (1883).

    Photographs.

    Michael Herr’s unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time.Dispatches is among the most blistering and compassionate accounts of war in our literature.

    At its helm, he would become the most hated and feared man in ports up and down the Union coast—and a Confederate legend. Now, with unparalleled authority and depth, and with a vivid sense of the excitement and danger of the time, Stephen Fox tells the story of Captain Semmes's remarkable wartime exploits. From vicious naval battles off the coast of France, to plundering the cargo of Union ships in the Caribbean, this is a thrilling tale of an often overlooked chapter of the Civil War.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    With characteristically calculated understatement, he attributed his enormous and varied successes to “my having learnt a little to scribble.”This Library of America collection of Franklin’s works begins with letters sent from London (1757–1775) describing the events and diplomacy preceding the Revolutionary War. The volume also contains political satires, bagatelles, pamphlets, and letters written in Paris (1776–1785), where he represented the revolutionary United States at the court of Louis XVI, as well as his speeches given in the Constitutional Convention and other works written in Philadelphia (1785–1790), including his last published article, a searing satire against slavery.Also included are the delightfully shrewd prefaces to Poor Richard’s Almanack (1733–1758) and their worldly, pungent maxims that have entered our American culture. Finally, the classic Autobiography, Franklin’s last word on his greatest literary creation—his own invented personality—is presented here in a new edition, completely faithful to Franklin’s manuscript.A companion volume includes the complete “Silence Dogood” series, “Busy-Body” essays, and a generous selection of his early writings, including letters to the press, satires, and pamphlets.

    McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, a party of moose hunters found his decomposed body. How McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild.Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir. In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash. He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and, unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw away the maps. Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild.

    And yet, until about ten minutes ago I had no conception of its magnitude, its permanent beauty and its importance." —Franklin Delano Roosevelt, upon first viewing Mount Rushmore, August 30, 1936Now in paperback, The Carving of Mount Rushmore tells the complete story of the largest and certainly the most spectacular sculpture in existence. More than 60 black-and-white photographs offer unique views of this gargantuan effort, and author Rex Alan Smith—a man born and raised within sight of Rushmore—recounts with the sensitivity of a native son the ongoing struggles of sculptor Gutzon Borglum and his workers.

    As violent gusts tossed the wooden ship, the crew fought to save their beloved Bounty—and finally to save themselves. When waves, wind, and encroaching water finally overtook the ship in an area known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic, the crew was suddenly tossed into the churning sea. The Bounty was gone, but their fate was still to be determined. The men and women of a Coast Guard station in North Carolina summoned the courage to fly into hundred-mile-per-hour winds while the residents of the Eastern Seaboard were fleeing or bracing for the hurricane’s impact. Through hours of white-knuckle flying, with crew members thrown about their aircraft and rescue swimmers jumping into thirty-foot seas, the Coast Guard accomplished one of its most memorable rescues ever. Based on interviews with Bounty survivors and unfettered access to Coast Guard rescue team members, The Gathering Wind offers not only the first but the most complete account of this heartbreaking, thrilling, and inspirational story.INCLUDES PHOTOS

    Within a week of setting sail, they were all caught up in the horrifying disaster of the Titanic’s sinking, one of the biggest news stories of the century. Today, we can see their stories and the Titanic’s voyage as the beginning of the end of the established hierarchy of the Edwardian era. Writing in his elegant signature prose and using previously unpublished sources, deck plans, journal entries, and surviving artifacts, Gareth Russell peers through the portholes of these first-class travelers to immerse us in a time of unprecedented change in British and American history. Through their intertwining lives, he examines social, technological, political, and economic forces such as the nuances of the British class system, the explosion of competition in the shipping trade, the birth of the movie industry, the Irish Home Rule Crisis, and the Jewish-American immigrant experience while also recounting their intimate stories of bravery, tragedy, and selflessness. Masterful in its superb grasp of the forces of history, gripping in its moment-by-moment account of the sinking, revelatory in discounting long-held myths, and lavishly illustrated with color and black and white photographs, this absorbing, accessible, and authoritative account of the Titanic’s life and death is destined to become the definitive book on the subject.

    "Bold and unhesitating".--Times Literary Supplement (London). 16 pages of photos.

    Hemingway's well-known interest in - and fascination with - big-game hunting is magnificently captured in this evocative account of his trip. It is an examination of the lure of the hunt and an impassioned portrait of the glory of the African landscape and of the beauty of a wilderness that was, even then, being threatened by the incursions of man.

    In the early eighteenth century, the Pirate Republic was home to some of the great pirate captains, including Blackbeard, "Black Sam" Bellamy, and Charles Vane. Along with their fellow pirates—former sailors, indentured servants, and runaway slaves—this "Flying Gang" established a crude but distinctive democracy in the Bahamas, carving out their own zone of freedom in which servants were free, blacks could be equal citizens, and leaders were chosen or deposed by a vote. They cut off trade routes, sacked slave ships, and severed Europe from its New World empires, and for a brief, glorious period the Republic was a success.