It's all a long way from his childhood, growing up in a terraced house in post-war Accrington, Lancashire. But cricket has taken him all over the globe, and he has experienced everything from excruciating agony Down Under to the Bollywood glamour of the IPL - he's even risked it all to cross the Pennines into Yorkshire.  In Around the World in 80 Pints, Bumble relives some of the most exciting and remarkable periods in his life, showing how his travels have opened up new and exciting avenues for him. The book is packed full of brilliant stories from famous Ashes matches and Roses clashes, sharing the commentary box with Ian Botham and Shane Warne, and much else besides - all told in his idiosyncratic style that has won him so many fans the world over. His previous autobiography, Last in the Tin Bath, was a huge bestseller, and this one is sure to appeal to anyone who shares Bumble's unquenchable love for cricket - and life!

    But after falling backwards into the specialty, Dr. Fulkerson found neurosurgery to be a field filled with joy, sadness, a little humor, and courageous and inspiring patients.In an honest and compelling retelling of his long and winding road to train and then practice as a pediatric neurosurgeon, Dr. Fulkerson guides others through his journey from medical school to service on a small military base, through residency training, and finally, to a practice in a highly specialized children's hospital. The journey reveals the dramatic swings of emotions experienced by both patients and doctors in an increasingly hostile medical environment. Dr. Fulkerson also shares stories of dedicated professors who train medical students and resident surgeons to care for the tiniest neurosurgical patients.Nothing Good Happens at ... The Baby Hospital offers a compelling glimpse into the joys, tragedies, and hopeful moments that surround the highly specialized and sometimes silly world of pediatric neurosurgery.

    Corinne, a European entrepreneur, meets Lketinga, a Samburu warrior, while on vacation in Mombasa on Kenya's glamorous coast. Despite language and cultural barriers, they embark on an impossible love affair. Corinne uproots her life to move to Africa—not the romantic Africa of popular culture, but the Africa of the Masai, in the middle of the isolated bush, where five-foot-tall huts made from cow dung serve as homes. Undaunted by wild animals, hunger, and bouts with tropical diseases, she tries to forge a life with Lketinga. But slowly the dream starts to crumble when she can no longer ignore the chasm between their two vastly different cultures.A story that taps into our universal belief in the power of love, The White Masai is at once a hopelessly romantic love story, a gripping adventure yarn, and a compulsively good read.

    All three books are set on the enchanted island of Corfu in the 1930s, and tell the story of the eccentric English family who moved there. For Gerald, the budding zoologist, Corfu was a natural paradise, teeming with strange birds and beasts that he could collect, watch and care for. But life was not without its problems - his family often objected to his animal-collecting activities, especially when the beasts wound up in the villa or - even worse - the fridge. With hilarious yet endearing portraits of his family and their many unusual hangers-on, The Corfu Trilogy also captures the beginnings of the author's lifelong love of animals. Recounted with immense humour and charm, this wonderful account of Corfu's natural history reveals a rare, magical childhood.

    Fate landed her at a wildlife sanctuary on the edge of the Amazon jungle where she was assigned to a beautiful and complex puma named Wayra. Wide-eyed, inexperienced, and comically terrified, Laura made the scrappy, make-do camp her home. And in Wayra, she made a friend for life.They weren’t alone, not with over a hundred quirky animals to care for, each lost and hurt in its own way: a pair of suicidal, bra-stealing monkeys, a frustrated parrot desperate to fly, and a pig with a wicked sense of humor. The humans, too, were cause for laughter and tears. There were animal whisperers, committed staff, wildly devoted volunteers, handsome heartbreakers, and a machete-wielding prom queen who carried Laura through. Most of all, there were the jungle—lyrical and alive—and Wayra, who would ultimately teach Laura so much about love, healing, and the person she was capable of becoming.Set against a turbulent and poignant backdrop of deforestation, the illegal pet trade, and forest fires, The Puma Years explores what happens when two desperate creatures in need of rescue find one another.

    With no hiking experience, he bought a backpack and a plane ticket to Georgia and started walking home to New England. One month after deciding to hike the 2,189- mile trail, and after three weeks of intensive YouTube-training, Sam takes his first step north, armed with all the critical gear REI could part with. The journey was long, dangerous and took a toll on his body, but as he lay in his hammock after yet another day of endless climbs and punishing descents, he was determined to finish… or at least make it to day three. This book takes the reader on a modern-day adventure along a 2,189-mile hike from Georgia to Maine on the Appalachian Trail. First-time hiker and retired prison guard “Sam I Am” entertains the reader with trail stories which are humorous, poignant and informative as he hikes northward in his quest to become a “Thru-Hiker.” Comparing himself to a bruised and dirty onion from a career spent inside prisons, Sam I Am takes the readers along as he interacts with thousands of people on the trail and worldwide. With the help of social media and YouTube, these people watched as he shared his adventure from the trail. The countless unexpected acts of kindness Sam I Am received from strangers slowly peeled each dirty layer away. When he stands on top of Katahdin nearly six months after he started, covered in dirt from the trail, it is the cleanest he has been in decades.

    In his search for American myths and realities - along with comfort, cable TV and good, reasonably priced coffee - Sean Condon paints a hilarious road-portrait of the USA.

    When JoAnn began exhibiting signs of Alzheimer’s, she’d been estranged from her daughter, Robert’s mother Jessica, for decades. As her disease progressed, JoAnn lost most of her memories, but she also forgot her old wounds and anger. She became a happy, gentler person who was finally able to reach out to her daughter in what became a strangely life-affirming experience, an unexpected blessing that gave a divided family a second chance.

    In April 1868, a very young John Muir stepped off a boat in San Francisco and inquired about the quickest way out of town. “But where do you want to go?” was the response, to which Muir replied, “Anywhere that is wild.” Using Muir’s personal correspondence and published articles, Peter and Donna Thomas have reconstructed the real story of Muir’s literal ramblings over California hills and through dales, with lofty Sierra Nevada peaks, Englishmen, and bears mixed in for good measure. The trip is illustrated by charming cut-paper illustrations that take their inspiration from Muir's love of nature. John Muir’s story-telling is so compelling that even 150 years later, seeing the world through his eyes makes us want to head out into the wild.

    Twenty years old and in love, Phyllis Chesler, a Jewish-American girl from Brooklyn, embarked on an adventure that has lasted for more than a half-century. In 1961, when she arrived in Kabul with her Afghan bridegroom, authorities took away her American passport. Chesler was now the property of her husband's family and had no rights of citizenship. Back in Afghanistan, her husband, a wealthy, westernized foreign college student with dreams of reforming his country, reverted to traditional and tribal customs. Chesler found herself unexpectedly trapped in a posh polygamous family, with no chance of escape. She fought against her seclusion and lack of freedom, her Afghan family's attempts to convert her from Judaism to Islam, and her husband's wish to permanently tie her to the country through childbirth. Drawing upon her personal diaries, Chesler recounts her ordeal, the nature of gender apartheid--and her longing to explore this beautiful, ancient, and exotic country and culture. Chesler nearly died there but she managed to get out, returned to her studies in America, and became an author and an ardent activist for women's rights throughout the world. An American Bride in Kabul is the story of how a naive American girl learned to see the world through eastern as well as western eyes and came to appreciate Enlightenment values. This dramatic tale re-creates a time gone by, a place that is no more, and shares the way in which Chesler turned adversity into a passion for world-wide social, educational, and political reform.

    She had envisioned lazy mornings sipping espresso while penning a best-selling novel and jovial Sunday group dinners, just like in the movies and books about expatriate life in Italy. But then she met the reality: no work, constant struggles with Italian bureaucracy to claim citizenship through her ancestors, and, perhaps worst of all, becoming the talk of the town after her torrid affair with a local fruit vendor.At Least You’re in Tuscany is the intimate, honest, and often hilarious tale of Jennifer’s first year in Montepulciano. During that time, her internal optimist was forced to work overtime, reminding her that if she were going to be homeless, lonely, and broke, at least she would be all those things—in Tuscany. Jennifer’s mantra, along with a healthy dose of enthusiasm, her willingness to embrace Italian culture, and lessons gleaned from small-town bumblings, help her not only build a new, rewarding life in Italy but also find herself along the way.

    In Travels with Charlie, William and Charlotte Stronghold quit their jobs and sell their belongings in order to set sail and find a new home somewhere between their native California and the green mountains of Vermont. Along the way, they fall in love and into hate with the popular culture that binds Americans together. The lines are blurred between shady roadside attractions and heralded national monuments, between the natural wonders of the country and the loud and annoying tourists who populate them, between the concepts of place and self. A head-on collision, a single burrito nearly a yard long, dead presidents, something that is probably a bear, and a Canadian sex club provide the backdrop for this story that is part romance story, part tall-tale, and part coming of age memoir. At times sweet and heartbreaking, almost always bitingly funny, Travels with Charlie is an American story about life on the road, in the tradition of Huck Finn, On the Road, and Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley.

    Now all he had to do was explain to Ana, his wife, that they were the proud owners of an isolated sheep farm in the Alpujarra Mountains in Southern Spain. That was the easy part.Lush with olive, lemon, and almond groves, the farm lacks a few essentials—running water, electricity, an access road. And then there's the problem of rapacious Pedro Romero, the previous owner who refuses to leave. A perpetual optimist, whose skill as a sheepshearer provides an ideal entrée into his new community, Stewart also possesses an unflappable spirit that, we soon learn, nothing can diminish. Wholly enchanted by the rugged terrain of the hillside and the people they meet along the way—among them farmers, including the ever-resourceful Domingo, other expatriates and artists—Chris and Ana Stewart build an enviable life, complete with a child and dogs, in a country far from home.

    Tales of heroics, wrecks and rescues are all captured in this unique collection of epic tales that will have fans of the show and readers alike setting sail for adventures on the frigid Bering Sea.

    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).