He finally got his chance by recasting himself as a champion of the downsized "safety-bicycle" with inflatable tires, the forerunner of the modern road bike that was about to become wildly popular. In the spring of 1892 he quit his accounting job and gamely set out west to cover twenty thousand miles over three continents as a correspondent for "Outing" magazine. Two years later, after having survived countless near disasters and unimaginable hardships, he approached Europe for the final leg.He never made it. His mysterious disappearance in eastern Turkey sparked an international outcry and compelled "Outing" to send William Sachtleben, another larger-than-life cyclist, on Lenz's trail. Bringing to light a wealth of information, Herlihy's gripping narrative captures the soaring joys and constant dangers accompanying the bicycle adventurer in the days before paved roads and automobiles. This untold story culminates with Sachtleben's heroic effort to bring Lenz's accused murderers to justice, even as troubled Turkey teetered on the edge of collapse.

    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.

    It's about a husband and wife who escape civilization to build a small restaurant on an island paradise -- and discover that even paradise has its pitfalls. It's a story filled with calamities and comedy, culinary disasters and triumphs, and indelible portraits of people who live and work on a sliver of beauty set in the Caribbean Sea. It's about the maddening, exhausting, outlandish complications of trying to live the simple life -- and the joy that comes when you somehow pull it off.The story begins when Bob and Melinda Blanchard sell their successful Vermont food business and decide, perhaps impulsively, to get away from it all. Why not open a beach bar and grill on Anguilla, their favorite Caribbean island? One thing leads to another and the little grill turns into an enchanting restaurant that quickly draws four-star reviews and a celebrity-studded clientele eager for Melinda's delectable cooking. Amid the frenetic pace of the Christmas "high season," the Blanchards and their kitchen staff -- Clinton and Ozzie, the dancing sous-chefs; Shabby, the master lobster-wrangler; Bug, the dish-washing comedian -- come together like a crack drill team. And even in the midst of hilarious pandemonium, there are moments of bliss.As the Blanchards learn to adapt to island time, they become ever more deeply attached to the quirky rhythms and customs of their new home. Until disaster strikes: Hurricane Luis, a category-4 storm with two-hundred-mile-an-hour gusts, devastates Anguilla. Bob and Melinda survey the wreckage of their beloved restaurant and wonder whether leaving Anguilla, with its innumerable challenges, would be any easier than walking out on each other. Affectionate, seductive, and very funny, A Trip to the Beach is a love letter to a place that becomes both home and escape.

    Brooklyn, BBC.com, and Mental FlossAn intrepid journalist joins the planet’s largest group of nomads on an annual migration that, like them, has endured for centuries. Anna Badkhen has forged a career chronicling life in extremis around the world, from war-torn Afghanistan to the border regions of the American Southwest. In Walking with Abel, she embeds herself with a family of Fulani cowboys—nomadic herders in Mali’s Sahel grasslands—as they embark on their annual migration across the savanna. It’s a cycle that connects the Fulani to their past even as their present is increasingly under threat—from Islamic militants, climate change, and the ever-encroaching urbanization that lures away their young. The Fulani, though, are no strangers to uncertainty—brilliantly resourceful and resilient, they’ve contended with famines, droughts, and wars for centuries. Dubbed “Anna Ba” by the nomads, who embrace her as one of theirs, Badkhen narrates the Fulani’s journeys and her own with compassion and keen observation, transporting us from the Neolithic Sahara crisscrossed by rivers and abundant with wildlife to obelisk forests where the Fulani’s Stone Age ancestors painted tributes to cattle. As they cross the Sahel, the savanna belt that stretches from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, they accompany themselves with Fulani music they download to their cell phones and tales of herders and hustlers, griots and holy men, infused with the myths the Fulani tell themselves to ground their past, make sense of their identity, and safeguard their—our—future.

    A reporter with a beautiful wife and talented son, Richey couldn’t imagine how it could be any better....Then his marriage falls apart and he can’t imagine how it could be any worse.The divorce leaves Richey questioning everything, while struggling to find a way forward. To get his bearings, he enters the first Ultimate Florida Challenge, an all-out twelve-hundred-mile kayak race around Florida.The UFC is less of a race than it is a dare or a threat. The thirty-day deadline sets a grueling, twenty-four-hour-a-day pace through shark- , alligator- , and even python-infested waters. But those twelve hundred miles are only a fraction of a journey that pulls Richey back to when he was embedded with troops in Iraq, reporting on missing children, and hiking the mountains of Montana with his son, and shows him where he went wrong, where he went right, and how to do it better the second time around.Warren Richey’s memoir Without a Paddle is a remarkable physical and emotional journey that cuts to the heart of what it means to be a man, a husband, and a father.

    That, in part, is exactly why Leon McCarron did it.From Jerusalem, McCarron followed a series of wild hiking trails that trace ancient trading and pilgrimage routes and traverse some of the most contested landscapes in the world. In the West Bank, he met families struggling to lead normal lives amidst political turmoil and had a surreal encounter with the world's oldest and smallest religious sect. In Jordan he visited the ruins of Hellenic citadels and trekked through the legendary Wadi Rum. His journey culminated in the vast deserts of the Sinai, home to Bedouin tribes and haunted by the ghosts of biblical history.McCarron's journey led him back through time, from the quagmire of current geopolitics to the original ideals of the faithful, through the layers of history, culture and religion that have shaped the Holy Land. Along migration and trade routes, pilgrimage trails and Bedouin paths, he found connection rather than division, hope instead of hatred and, ultimately, a shared humanity that borders and politics will never diminish.

    This decision sets her life on an entirely new course. After Manila, Hong Kong and Bangkok, their travels take an unexpected turn: she meets four young men sailing their boat around the world, and convinces them to let her and Kippy join them. Filled with sensual descriptions of the places she visits, lively accounts of the people and traditions, and intriguing characters, it is not only the luminous vitality of her prose that make this travelogue such a pleasure to read, but the courage of her decision to toss expectations to the wind and embrace all the adventures the world has to offer-an inspiration to the adventurer that lurks within us all.

    Returning to Greece to follow in the footsteps of the Romantic poet Lord Byron, the author's second trip sees him cycling around historic sites.

    This collection of women's travel writing dispels that notion by showing how there are few corners of the world that have not been visited by women travelers. There are also few difficulties, physical or emotional, real or imagined, that have not been met and overcome by these women. Life is never dull for Jane Robinson's intrepid women. From an encounter with a snake in the Amazon jungle to shipwreck and kidnap on the Barbary Coast, this book includes tales of derring-do and great danger. It also tells tales of unimaginable hardship, including caring for a family in an ammunition cart during the siege of Delhi and a journey through Tibet that leaves its author childless and widowed. There is no such thing as a typical woman traveler--and there never has been--as this exhilarating anthology shows on a journey of its own through sixteen centuries of travel writing. So get ready for adventure and excitement with some of the most extraordinary characters you are ever likely to meet

    Martin's is proud to present a new series of the greatest classics in the literature of hunting and adventure, chosen from the personal library of writer and big game hunter Peter Hathaway Capstick. These showcase volumes will once again make available the true masterpieces of Africana to collectors, armchair hunters, sportsmen, and readers at large.Considered one of the greatest man-eating sagas of all time, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo is the firsthand account of the infamous Tsavo lions. These lions-- who for nearly a year terrorized East Africa-- succeeded in bringing the construction of a railway line to a complete halt, and have been credited with the deaths of some one hundred people. Written by the legendary officer who shot these lions and risked death several times in the attempt, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo is not only the story of this breathtaking hunt, but of Lieutenant-Colonel Patterson's other adventures in the African bush."I think that the incident of the Uganda man-eating lions...is the most remarkable account of which we have any record."--Theodore Roosevelt

    The awnings are rolled up. Other tourists are gone. Cold damp weather takes him back to the 1950s & earlier--a golden, intensely personal age of tourism. Decades ago, He voyaged from N. Africa to Italy, Yugoslavia & Greece, enjoying the radical freedom of youth, unaccountable to time because there was always time to make up for mistakes. He recalls the journey less to look inward into his own past than to look outward in order to dissect the process of learning thru travel, in which a succession of new landscapes can lead to books & artwork never before encountered. He 1st imagines Tunis as the glow of gypsum lamps shimmering against lime-washed mosques; the city he actually discovers is even more intoxicating. He goes to the ramparts of a Turkish kasbah where Carthaginian, Roman & Byzantine forts once stood: "I could see deep into Algeria over a ribwork of hills so gaunt it seemed the wind had torn the flesh off them." In these surroundings he discovers Augustine; the courtyards of Tunis lead him to the historical writings of Ibn Khaldun. He goes to the 5th-century Greek temple at Segesta & reflects on the failed Athenian invasion of Sicily. At Hadrian's villa, "Shattered domes revealed clouds moving overhead in countless visions of eternity. It was a place made for silence & for contemplation, where you wanted a book handy. Everycorner was a cloister. No view was panoramic: each seemed deliberately composed." His bus, train & nighttime boat rides, his long walks to archeological sites lead him to subjects as varied as the Berber threat to Carthage; the Roman army's hunt for the warlord Jugurtha; the legacy of Byzantine art; the medieval Greek philosopher Georgios Gemistos Plethon, who helped kindle the Italian Renaissance; 20th-century British literary writing about Greece; & the links between Rodin & the Croatian sculptor Ivan Mestrovic. Within these pages are smells, tastes & the profundity of chance encounters. Mediterranean Winter begins in Rodin's sculpture garden in Paris, passes thru gritty streets of Marseilles, ends with a moving epiphany about Greece as the world prepares for the 2004 Summer Olympics. Mediterranean Winter is the story of an education, filled with memories & history, not the author's alone, but humanity's as well.

    Meet a frog with a coat of hair (which turns out not to be hair at all), full grown monkeys that fit inside a teacup, mice with wings, and many more of the species endemic to the Cameroons, not to mention the local ruler, the Fon of Bafut.

    In the grand tradition of 19th-century scoundrelas, explorers and romantics, Africa strikes him as the ideal place to find solitude and anonymity in the face of a personal crisis.What follows is Peter's journey from one end of the Dark Continent to the other. Travelling the fabled Cape Town to Cairo route by any means of transport he can blag (or if he must, pay) his way onto, it's an epic trek that sees our intrepid Antipodean experience everything from the southernmost city in Africa to the Pyramids, vast game parks and thundering falls, cosmopolitan cities and tiny villages as he journeys through the very heart of Africa. And travelling on his own, it's inevitable that Peter falls in with a motley cast of characters and has a myriad misadventures: including coming face to face with a wild Hyena with very bad breath, crossing the treacherous Sani Pass, the highest in Africa, narrowly escaping a riot by hiding in a coffin shop, saving oil-covered Penguins in South Africa, acting as an extra in a WW2 epic, not to mention dodging 20,000 single woman trying to catch the eye of the king of Swaziland during the annual Reed Dance. And then there was the time when he was kicked out of Robert Mugabe's birthday bash at gunpoint...

    In 1990, when thousands of teenage fighters, including young men wearing women's clothing and bizarre objects of decoration, laid siege to the capital, the world took notice. Since then Liberia has been through devastating civil upheaval. What began as a civil conflict, has spread to other West African nations.Eschewing popular stereotypes and simple explanations, Stephen Ellis traces the history of the civil war that has blighted Liberia in recent years and looks at its political, ethnic and cultural roots. He focuses on the role religion and ritual have played in shaping and intensifying this brutal war. In this edition, with a new preface by the author, Ellis provides a current picture of Liberia and details how much of the same problems still exist.

    In 1870, New York mountaineer Meta Brevoort climbed Mt. Blanc in a hoop skirt. Pausing at the summit only long enough to drink a glass of champagne and dance the quadrille with her alpine guides, she marched back down the mountain and into history as one of the first female mountain explorers.Here, Mick Conefrey weaves together tips, how-tos, anecdotes, and eccentric lists to tell the amazing stories of history's great female explorers--women who were just as fascinating and inspiring as all the Shackletons, Mallorys, and Livingstones. Most were brave, some were reckless, and all were fascinating. From Fanny Bullock Workman, who was photographed on top of a mountain pass in the Karakoram, holding up a banner calling for "Votes for Women" to Mary Hall, the Victorian world traveler, whose motto was, "take every precaution and abandon all fear," How to Climb Mt. Blanc in a Skirt is uproariously funny and occasionally downright strange.