Book picks similar to
Travelers' Tales Hawai'i: True Stories by Rick Carroll
travel
non-fiction
nonfiction
short-stories
Cloud Road: A Journey through the Inca Heartland
John Harrison - 2010
Hiking at more than 10,000 feet for almost the entire trip, the author follows the great road of the Incas, the Camino Real. Hand-built more than 500 years ago, this road crosses the most difficult and dangerous mountains in all the Americas, and life continues as if Columbus had never sailed. Finding and studying remote villages is central to the quest, and—despite dog attacks, sweltering canyons, floods, and stubborn donkeys—the author makes his way from the equator to Cuzco and on to the most magical city of all: Machu Picchu.
Plays With Cars
Doug DeMuro - 2013
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.
French Revolutions: Cycling the Tour de France
Tim Moore - 2001
If ever there was an athletic exploit specifically not for the faint of heart and feeble of limb, this is it. So you might ask, what is Tim Moore doing cycling it?An extremely good question. Ignoring the pleading dictates of reason and common sense, Moore determined to tackle the Tour de France, all 2,256 miles of it, in the weeks before the professionals entered the stage. This decision was one he would regret for nearly its entire length. But readers--those who now know Moore's name deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Bill Bryson and Calvin Trillin--will feel otherwise. They are in for a side-splitting treat.French Revolutions gives us a hilariously unforgettable account of Moore's attempt to conquer the Tour de France. "Conquer" may not be quite the right word. He cheats when he can, pops the occasional hayfever pill for an ephedrine rush (a fine old Tour tradition), sips cheap wine from his water bottle, and occasionally weeps on the phone to his wife. But along the way he gives readers an account of the race's colorful history and greatest heroes: Eddy Merckx, Greg Lemond, Lance Armstrong, and even Firmin Lambot, aka the "Lucky Belgian," who won the race at the age of 36. Fans of the Tour de France will learn why the yellow jersey is yellow, and how cyclists learned to save precious seconds (a race that lasts for three weeks is all about split seconds) by relieving themselves en route. And if that isn't enough, his account of a rural France tarting itself up for its moment in the spotlight leaves popular quaint descriptions of small towns in Provence in the proverbial dust. If you either love or hate the French, or both, you'll want to travel along with Time Moore.French Revolutions is Tim Moore's funniest book to date. It is also one of the funniest sports books ever written.
Caged in Chaos: A Dyspraxic Guide to Breaking Free Updated Edition
Victoria Biggs - 2005
She offers down-to-earth advice on a wide range of issues, from body language, puberty, health and hygiene to family life and social skills. Personal stories and 'this-is-what-it's-like-for-me' accounts from other dyspraxic adolescents are also included.Her positive and practical approach and profound empathy with others in her situation make this book a must-read for dyspraxics, their parents and other family members, and for professionals working with them.
Unrelenting: The Real Story: Horses, Bright Lights and My Pursuit of Excellence
George H. Morris - 2016
He has represented our country as an athlete and a coach and, at one time or another, instructed many of our nation’s best horsemen and women. His carefully chosen, perfectly enunciated words are notoriously powerful. They can raise you up or cut you to the quick. His approval can be a rainmaker; his derision can end a career.But as much as people know and respect (or, perhaps, fear) the public face of George Morris, he has lived, in other ways, a remarkably private life, keeping his own personal struggles with insecurity, with ambition, and with love behind closed doors. It is only now that he has chosen, in his own words, to share the totality of his life—the very public and the incredibly private—with the world. This engrossing autobiography, the real story of the godlike George Morris, beautifully demonstrates his ultimate humanity.
Best of Lonely Planet Travel Writing
Tony Wheeler - 2009
This title includes stories from popular Lonely Planet anthologies such as 'On The Edge', 'By The Seat Of My Pants', 'The Kindness of Strangers', 'Tales From Nowhere', and others.
Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin-de-Siècle
Elaine Showalter - 1993
This daring new fiction, often innovative in form and courageous in its candid representations of female sexuality, marital discontent, and feminist protest, shocked Victorian critics, who denounced the authors as "literary degenerates" or "erotomaniacs." This collection brings together twenty of the most original and important stories from this period. The writers included in this highly readable volume are Kate Chopin, Victoria Cross, George Egerton, Julia Constance Fletcher, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Grand, Vernon Lee, Ada Leverson, Charlotte Mew, Olive Schreiner, Edith Wharton, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Mabel E. Wotton. As Elaine Showalter shows in her introduction, the short fiction of the Fin-de-Siecle is the missing link between the Golden Age of Victorian women writers and the new era of feminist modernism. Elaine Showalter is a professor of English at Princeton University. She is the author of A Literature of Their Own, The Female Malady, and other books, and editor of Alternative Alcott, a volume in the American Women Writers Series
Biltmore Estate
Ellen Erwin Rickman - 2005
Created in the 1890s by George Washington Vanderbilt, a member of one of America's wealthiest families, the estate combined a 250-room French Renaissance-style chateau with 125,000 acres of gardens, forests, and working farms. Biltmore House served as Vanderbilt's primary residence for almost 20 years. After Mr. Vanderbilt's death in 1914, life at Biltmore continued for his wife Edith and daughter Cornelia. In 1930, Cornelia Vanderbilt Cecil and her husband, Hon. John Francis Amherst Cecil, opened Biltmore House--the largest private home in the United States--to the public, firmly establishing the Asheville area as a major tourist destination.
Journeys with the Black Dog: Inspirational Stories of Bringing Depression to Heel
Tessa Wigney - 2008
Revealing the hardships of grappling with a depressive disorder, it emphasizes unique methods of control through regular diet and exercise. Oscillating between humor and gut-wrenching poignancy, these compelling life stories entrust readers with a key message—while depression may not be curable, it can be managed.
Trafficked
Sophie Hayes - 2012
At first, it was a typical whirlwind romance. But one day Bledi told her that love always comes at a price ...Bledi tricked Sophie into travelling to Italy, where he forced her to sell her body to help him pay off a debt. Terrified and ashamed, Sophie worked the dangerous Italian streets without rest, seeing as many as 30 clients in a night. She was completely at Bledi′s mercy for food, clothes and shelter. And without money, friends or family, she was trapped.But Sophie found the strength to keep going, clinging to life by a single thread of hope: that somehow she′d find a way to escape.
On the Water: Discovering America in a Row Boat
Nathaniel Stone - 2002
The hull glides in silence and with such perfect balance as to report no motion. I sit up for another stroke, now looking down as the blades ignite swirling pairs of white constellations of phosphorescent plankton. Two opposing heavens. ‘Remember this,’ I think to myself.”Few people have ever considered the eastern United States to be an island, but when Nat Stone began tracing waterways in his new atlas at the age of ten he discovered that if one had a boat it was possible to use a combination of waterways to travel up the Hudson River, west across the barge canals and the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, and back up the eastern seaboard. Years later, still fascinated by the idea of the island, Stone read a biography of Howard Blackburn, a nineteenth-century Gloucester fisherman who had attempted to sail the same route a century before. Stone decided he would row rather than sail, and in April 1999 he launched a scull beneath the Brooklyn Bridge to see how far he could get. After ten months and some six thousand miles he arrived back at the Brooklyn Bridge, and continued rowing on to Eastport, Maine. Retracing Stone’s extraordinary voyage, On the Water is a marvelous portrait of the vibrant cultures inhabiting American shores and the magic of a traveler’s chance encounters. From Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where a rower at the local boathouse bequeaths him a pair of fabled oars, to Vanceburg, Kentucky, where he spends a day fishing with Ed Taylor -- a man whose efficient simplicity recalls The Old Man and the Sea -- Stone makes his way, stroke by stroke, chatting with tugboat operators and sleeping in his boat under the stars. He listens to the live strains of Dwight Yoakum on the banks of the Ohio while the world’s largest Superman statue guards the nearby town square, and winds his way through the Louisiana bayous, where he befriends Scoober, an old man who reminds him that the happiest people are those who’ve “got nothin’.” He briefly adopts a rowing companion -- a kitten -- along the west coast of Florida, and finds himself stuck in the tidal mudflats of Georgia. Along the way, he flavors his narrative with local history and lore and records the evolution of what started out as an adventure but became a lifestyle. An extraordinary literary debut in the lyrical, timeless style of William Least Heat-Moon and Henry David Thoreau, On the Water is a mariner’s tribute to childhood dreams, solitary journeys, and the transformative powers of America’s rivers, lakes, and coastlines.From the Hardcover edition.
Cardiac Arrest: Five Heart-Stopping Years as a CEO On the Feds' Hit-List
Howard Root - 2016
Fifteen years later, his Minnesota company had created over 500 American jobs and developed more than 50 new medical devices that saved and improved lives. But in 2011, the federal government threatened to destroy his company and put Howard behind bars for years. Why? Federal prosecutors had been sold a bill of goods – a tall tale peddled by a money-hungry ex-employee out for revenge. All over one device. A device that never harmed a single patient and made up less than 1% of the company s sales. The investigation revealed the charges to be baseless, but the scalp-hunting prosecutors didn't back off. Instead they dug in – threatening witnesses, misleading grand juries, and strategically leaking secret documents. Whatever it took to pressure a headline-grabbing settlement. Howard Root stood up to the shakedown. Five years, 121 attorneys and $25 million in legal fees later, his life's work and freedom rested in the hands of 12 strangers in a San Antonio jury room. Would Howard and his company be vindicated by the verdict, or had he made the biggest mistake of his life by challenging the federal government? Cardiac Arrest is the eye-opening true story of life on the Feds' hit-list, told from the desk of a CEO who decided to fight back. Follow Howard from the boardroom to the courtroom, as he tells the inside story of the case that sparked outrage in the pages of The Wall Street Journal and triggered a congressional investigation.
Sir Edmund Hillary: An Extraordinary Life
Alexa Johnston - 2008
Everest. This intimate and inspiring book tells the full story of Sir Edmund Hillary's extraordinary life, from his expeditions to remote corners of the world to his humanitarian activities serving the Sherpa people. Drawing on Sir Ed's personal archives, it is a portrait of a revered yet modest man who lived life to the full—surviving personal tragedies as well as achieving historic triumphs, earning worldwide fame and displaying tireless philanthropy. Ranging from the roof of the world to the frozen extremes of the South Pole, Sir Edmund Hillary: An Extraordinary Life is a fitting and revealing tribute to a great man.
My First New York: Early Adventures in the Big City (As Remembered by Actors, Artists, Athletes, Chefs, Comedians, Filmmakers, Mayors, Models, Moguls, Porn Stars, Rockers, Writers, and Others
New York Magazine - 2010
My First New York is a glorious collection of recollections and reminiscences as fifty of the city’s most famous residents recapture the kicks and thrills of first arriving in the Big Apple. Actors and athletes, rock stars and porn stars, writers, artists, and politicos—from Yogi Berra to Liza Minnelli, from Chloe Sevigny to Andy Samberg to Diane Von Furstenberg—they all share their hilarious, touching, frightening, amazing early big city adventures in My First New York.
The Road Beneath My Feet
Frank Turner - 2015
On the laminantes that listed the tour dates, the entry for 24 September simply read: 'Get a job.'Deflated, jaded and hungover, Frank returned to his hometown of Winchester without a plan for the future. All he knew was that he wanted to keep playing music.Cut to 13 April 2012, a thousand shows later (show 1,216 to be precise), and he was headlining a sold-out gig at Wembley Arena with his band The Sleeping Souls. That summer, they played to 200,000 people at the Olympics opening ceremony warm-up by personal invitation of Danny Boyle.Told through his tour reminiscences, this is a blisteringly honest story of Frank's career from the grimy pub scene where sweat drips from the ceiling, to filling out arenas with fans roaring every word. But more than that, it is an intimate account of what it's like to spend your life constantly on the road; sleeping on floors, invariably jetlagged, all for the love of playing live music.