Book picks similar to
The Altitude Journals: A Seven-Year Journey from the Lowest Point in My Life to the Highest Point on Earth by David J. Mauro
memoir
non-fiction
hiking-outdoors
inspirational
Setting the Hook: A Diver's Return to the Andrea Doria
Peter M. Hunt - 2011
From the moment the Andrea Doria settled on the sea floor in 240 feet of water, skilled sport divers have risked their lives to simply touch the "Mount Everest of wreck diving." Not all returned alive. Peter Hunt crewed on five Andrea Doria expeditions during the early 1980s before becoming a Navy pilot and settling in Washington State. Nearly twenty years after first exploring the Andrea Doria - and following twelve months of training in the sport's amazing advances in equipment and techniques - Hunt hugged his wife and children goodbye and returned to New York to dive the Andrea Doria once again. The experience transformed him forever. Setting the Hook explores the Andrea Doria through an introspective odyssey of memory, heart-pounding adventure, and history as thirty years of extreme diving and enduring friendships merge in a personal tale of learning to accept life's oldest challenge.
God and Mr. Gomez
Jack Clifford Smith - 1974
The joys and travails of building a home in Baja California.
We Don't Die: A Skeptic's Discovery of Life After Death
Sandra Champlain - 2012
The goal of “We Don’t Die” is to have people believe that their deceased loved ones are still near them, help them navigate through the grieving process and educate that we are ‘eternal souls having a human experience. It is unique because it teaches people about the grieving process, keeping relationships whole, gives awe inspiring exercises that the reader experiences that we must be ‘more than our bodies.’ It gets readers in touch with the purpose of their lives and gets them on the path to producing results. Readers will no longer fear death, their pain of losing someone will be lessened, they will have hope, faith, and powerful access to live a successful life.
Lonely Planet Trekking in the Nepal Himalaya
Bradley Mayhew - 2015
Tour through the hidden backstreet courtyards and temples of Kathmandu, explore the base of the world's highest mountain and learn everything you need to know to trek through this incredible region; all with your trusted travel companion. Get to the heart of the Nepal Himalaya and begin your journey now! Inside Lonely Planet Trekking in the Nepal Himalaya Travel Guide: Colour maps and images throughout Highlights and itineraries help you tailor your trip to your personal needs and interests Insider tips to save time and money and get around like a local, avoiding crowds and trouble spots Essential info at your fingertips - hours of operation, phone numbers, websites, transit tips, prices Honest reviews for all budgets - eating, sleeping, sight-seeing, going out, shopping, hidden gems that most guidebooks miss Cultural insights give you a richer, more rewarding travel experience - customs, history, environment Over 60 maps Covers Kathmandu, Everest Region, Annapurna Region, Langtang, Helambu, Eastern Nepal, Western Nepal and more eBook Features: (Best viewed on tablet devices and smartphones) Downloadable PDF and offline maps prevent roaming and data charges Effortlessly navigate and jump between maps and reviews Add notes to personalise your guidebook experience Seamlessly flip between pages Bookmarks and speedy search capabilities get you to key pages in a flash Embedded links to recommendations' websites Zoom-in maps and images Inbuilt dictionary for quick referencing The Perfect Choice: Lonely Planet Trekking in the Nepal Himalaya offers a comprehensive look at all you need to know to have a safe and rewarding trek. Looking for a guide focused on Nepal? Check out our Lonely Planet Nepal guide for a comprehensive look at all the country has to offer. Authors: Written and researched by Lonely Planet,. About Lonely Planet: Since 1973, Lonely Planet has become the world's leading travel media company with guidebooks to every destination, an award-winning website, mobile and digital travel products, and a dedicated traveller community. Lonely Planet covers must-see spots but also enables curious travellers to get off beaten paths to understand more of the culture of the places in which they find themselves.
Anything But a Wasted Life
Sita Kaylin - 2018
You're often treated like a living blow-up doll and a therapist simultaneously. It's a life that many judge easily ... until you know more. Sita Kaylin, a California-based veteran in the sex industry, has lived the pitfalls of being naked in front of strangers and the absurdities that arise when you fake intimacy for a living. She left home when she was sixteen, worked hard at several jobs and eventually started college after dropping out of high school. There, a roommate turned her on to stripping, revealing a way out of the crushing financial pressures she felt and her struggles as a pre-law student with very little time or energy to study. She had no idea how wild her journey would become and what a large part of her life it would be. Sita's stories take shape through an often altered, occasionally sarcastic, sometimes illegal and frequently funny magnifying glass she holds up to not just the sex industry, but also to human needs and desires, modern relationships, mental health, personal independence. Anything But a Wasted Life is the memoir of an unorthodox life about a woman who has rarely said 'no' to life.
Second Person Rural
Noel Perrin - 1980
Perrin, a transplanted New Yorker and now a "real" Vermonter, candidly admits his early mistakes while giving concrete advice on matters such as what to do with maple syrup (other than put it on your pancakes), how to use a peavey, and how to replace your rototiller with a garden animal.
Cycling's Greatest Misadventures
Erich Schweikher - 2007
In these pages both everyday riders and pros tell their stories of freak accidents, animal attacks, sabotage, idiotic decisions, eerie or unexplained incidents, and other jaw dropping, adrenalin-pumping calamities. These stories bring to life the strange things possibilities that await, once we step on the pedals of our road, mountain, or commuter bikes. A sampling of misadventures in this collection includes the stories of: the mountain biker who follows a bull and then gets gored by it; the twenty African Americans who pioneered cycle touring by completing a Transamerica ride in 1897, but wait - this story gets strange...; the large rat that leapt on top of a woman's bike and slapped her repeatedly with its tail; an inside-the-head narration by a professional racer as he rides a brutal race, and then gets humiliated in changing room afterwards; the recreational cyclist who accidentally rides deep into a prison yard; the computer programmer who crashes a stationary bike during his first spin class; the bike messenger who can't call it quits even after getting hit by eight cars; and, the man who carefully spreads out tacks on the route of an all female race in an attempt to get a date. These stories will make you wonder, drop you to the floor laughing and leave you shaking your head with disbelief.
The Way, My Way
Bill Bennett - 2013
I was not a hiker and I wasn’t a Catholic. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I was a Christian. On the last government census when I had to state my religion, I said I was a Buddhist, mainly because they’ve had such a hard time in Tibet and I felt they needed my statistical support.”And so Bill Bennett, an Australian based film director, set off on an 800 kilometer walk across Spain to Santiago de Compostela, not sure why he was doing it, particularly when his knee gave out and the rest of the walk became a “pain management pilgrimage.” He kept his sense of humour though, and The Way, My Way takes you on a transformative spiritual journey that's both enlightening and also very funny.
Life Lived Wild: Adventures at the Edge of the Map
Rick Ridgeway - 2021
Whether at elevation or raising a family back at sea level, those years taught him, he writes, “to distinguish matters of consequence from matters of inconsequence.” He leaves it to his readers, though, to do the final sort of which is which.Some of his travels made, and remain, news: the first American ascent of K2; the first direct coast-to-coast traverse of Borneo; the first crossing on foot of a 300-mile corner of Tibet so remote no outsider had ever seen it. Big as these trips were, Rick keeps an eye out for the quiet surprises, like the butterflies he encounters at 23,000 feet on K2 or the furtive silhouettes of wild-eared pheasants in Tibet.What really comes through best in Life Lived Wild, though, are his fellow travelers. There’s Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, and Doug Tompkins, best known for cofounding The North Face but better remembered for his conservation throughout South America. Some companions don’t make the return journey. Rick treats them all with candor and straightforward tenderness. And through their commitments to protecting the wild places they shared, he discovers his own.A master storyteller, this long-awaited memoir is the book end to Ridgeway’s impressive list of publications, including Seven Summits (Grand Central Publishing, 1988), The Shadow of Kilmanjaro (Holt, 1999), and The Big Open (National Geographic, 2005).
The Push: A Climber's Journey of Endurance, Risk, and Going Beyond Limits
Tommy Caldwell - 2017
Caldwell's odds-defying feat was the culmination of an entire lifetime of pushing himself to his limits as an athlete.This engrossing memoir chronicles the journey of a boy with a fanatical mountain-guide father who was determined to instill toughness in his son to a teen whose obsessive nature drove him to the top of the sport-climbing circuit. Caldwell's affinity for adventure then led him to the vertigo-inducing and little understood world of big wall free climbing. But his evolution as a climber was not without challenges; in his early twenties, he was held hostage by militants in a harrowing ordeal in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan. Soon after, he lost his left index finger in an accident. Later his wife, and main climbing partner, left him. Caldwell emerged from these hardships with a renewed sense of purpose and determination. He set his sights on free climbing El Capitan's biggest, steepest, blankest face--the Dawn Wall. This epic assault took more than seven years, during which time Caldwell redefined the sport, found love again, and became a father.The Push is an arresting story of focus, drive, motivation, endurance, and transformation, a book that will appeal to anyone seeking to overcome fear and doubt, cultivate perseverance, turn failure into growth, and find connection with family and with the natural world.
Ascent
Chris Bonington - 2017
He has undertaken nineteen Himalayan expeditions, including four to Mount Everest which he climbed in 1985 at the age of fifty, and has made many first ascents in the Alps and greater ranges of the world. Along the way we will be fascinated by his many daring climbs, near-death adventures, and the many luminaries of the mountain fraternity he has climbed with, and in some cases - witness their deaths on the rock. The mercurial Dougal Haston; the legendary-tough Don Whillans, the philosopher of the rock Stephen Venables, and the enigmatic Doug Scott, plus many more – this will be an expert’s opinion on the past sixty years of British/ world mountaineering.In Ascent Chris also discusses his first wife (Wendy) who tragically passed away after a long battle with motor neuron disease - his many years of caring for her, and then in his twilight years deciding to return to an iconic climb from his past - The Old Man of Hoy - to summit at the age of 80 years of age. He has now also found love again amidst the sadness and grief. It is a truly inspirational tale.
Ascent
will be a memoir like no other. Not only a cerebral narrative on what it takes to conquer fear, and learn/ develop the technical skills necessary to climb the world’s greatest peaks; what it is like to survive in places no human being can ultimately reside in for longer than a few months at very high altitude, but also how one overcomes emotional obstacles, too, and rediscover what drives us on to happiness.
K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain
Ed Viesturs - 2009
Climbers regard it as the ultimate achievement in mountaineering, with good reason. Four times as deadly as Everest, K2 has claimed the lives of seventy-seven climbers since 1954. In August 2008 eleven climbers died in a single thirty-six-hour period on K2–the worst single-event tragedy in the mountain's history and the second-worst in the long chronicle of mountaineering in the Himalaya and Karakoram ranges. Yet summiting K2 remains a cherished goal for climbers from all over the globe. Before he faced the challenge of K2 himself, Ed Viesturs, one of the world's premier high-altitude mountaineers, thought of it as "the holy grail of mountaineering."In K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain, Viesturs explores the remarkable history of the mountain and of those who have attempted to conquer it. At the same time he probes K2's most memorable sagas in an attempt to illustrate the lessons learned by confronting the fundamental questions raised by mountaineering–questions of risk, ambition, loyalty to one's teammates, self-sacrifice, and the price of glory. Viesturs knows the mountain firsthand. He and renowned alpinist Scott Fischer climbed it in 1992 and were nearly killed in an avalanche that sent them sliding to almost certain death. Fortunately, Ed managed to get into a self-arrest position with his ice ax and stop both his fall and Scott' s.Focusing on seven of the mountain's most dramatic campaigns, from his own troubled ascent to the 2008 tragedy, Viesturs and Roberts crafts an edge-of-your-seat narrative that climbers and armchair travelers alike will find unforgettably compelling. With photographs from Viesturs's personal collection and from historical sources, this is the definitive account of the world's ultimate mountain, and of the lessons that can be gleaned from struggling toward its elusive summit.
Thieves, Liars and Mountaineers: On the 8,000m peak circus in Pakistan
Mark Horrell - 2011
The mountaineer Joe Simpson famously crawled for three days with a broken leg, but did he ever have to read Angels and Demons by Dan Brown while waiting for a weather window?But that’s enough about Mark’s attempt; there were some talented climbers on the mountain as well, and this story is also about them. How did they get on? Heroes, villains, oddballs and madmen – 8,000m peaks attract them all, and drama, intrigue and cock-ups aplenty were inevitable.
Strong, Brave, Loved: Empowering Reminders of Who You Really Are
Holley Gerth - 2019
She understands that you want to be a woman who looks life in the face and says, "You can't beat me." A woman who knows love is a risk and reaches out anyway. A woman who understands kindness takes real courage. Who doesn't fake it or try to hide her scars. Who fights to believe she is who God says she is and helps others do the same.Strong, Brave, Loved offers 60 short devotions to empower you to be that kind of woman. It's simple, personal, and practical, with room for you to journal your own responses and reflections. With these concise and compassionate devotions, Holley leads you on a journey of discovery as you learn to live in freedom, hope, and holy courage.