Nature Travel

The year is 1969... a time when the youth of America is standing up to its elder rulers, when minorities are demanding their fair share of the American pie. A time when an eternal war fought for misbegotten motives and fueled by a continuous stream of some of the most outrageous lies ever fed to a people by its leadership over the previous eight years continues to gut an entire generation. A time when the old values, the old expectations, the old imperatives are knocked flat.

Seen through the eyes of 21 year old college senior John Cassell, always out of money and soon to be out of college, it is a saga of coming of age at a time when the younger generation accepted very little of the old yardsticks and Thou-Shalt-Nots which traditionally helped that process along.

Based on a true story, and the stories of others, the book follows the young man into the year 1969 as he struggles with the decisions expected of him by elders and demanded of him by life.

An epic adventure that began with one simple question: Why does my foot hurt?
 
Isolated by Mexico's deadly Copper Canyons, the blissful Tarahumara Indians have honed the ability to run hundreds of miles without rest or injury. In a riveting narrative, award-winning journalist and often-injured runner Christopher McDougall sets out to discover their secrets. In the process, he takes his readers from science labs at Harvard to the sun-baked valleys and freezing peaks across North America, where ever-growing numbers of ultra-runners are pushing their bodies to the limit, and, finally, to a climactic race in the Copper Canyons that pits America’s best ultra-runners against the tribe. McDougall’s incredible story will not only engage your mind but inspire your body when you realize that you, indeed all of us, were born to run.

Mark Twain's own story of his youthful years as a cub-pilot on a steamboat plowing up and down the Mississippi River.

A touching and inspiring tale of the Texan pioneering spirit, English eccentricity, and two women old enough to know better.

When Susie Kelly decides, on a whim, to trek alone across France from La Rochelle to Lake Geneva, she entrusts her French farmhouse full of assorted animals to a total stranger from San Antonio, Texas. For each of them it will be a life-changing experience. Both will find their resourcefulness and ingenuity tested to the limit as, in their own ways, they explore and enjoy the culture, cuisine and people of Europe’s most fascinating country.

While Texan Jennifer Shields copes heroically with lost dogs, erratic electricity, old men hiding in bushes, and a language she cannot speak, Susie doggedly tramps 500 miles over unknown terrain, frequently lost and either too hot or too cold.

Armchair travellers will enjoy this tale of laughter and tears following the adventures of two women old enough to know better.

“A book to inspire” GOOD HOUSEKEEPING

In a compelling book that evokes the writings of Thoreau, Muir, and Jack London, Krakauer recounts the haunting and tragic mystery of 22-year-old Chris McCandless who disappeared in April 1992 into the Alaskan wilderness in search of a raw, transcendent experience. His emaciated corpse was discovered four months later. Maps. NPR sponsorship.

An Aquarian Tragedy is the story of an age and some of the people one could readily find in it. It is fiction yet absolutely authentic. It relates with equal candor both the booby traps and the blessings of those wild times, times that both the Left and Right in today?s society are determined to see never happen again. The youthful human spirit never soared quite so high? could never crash in flames quite so easily? as it did in those days. There were many such roads to the discovery of self back then. This is the story of two of them.

Journalist and author Mike McIntyre and his longtime girlfriend, Andrea Boyles, are in their early 40s and itching for a break. So they rent out their San Diego home--dog, cat and furniture included--and embark on a yearlong journey around the world. "We're not out to find ourselves, or even to lose ourselves," McIntyre writes early on. "We're merely seeking a pause in our routines." But the couple is soon swept up in the adventure of a lifetime: trekking in the Himalayas, traversing the Sahara on camel, scrambling over the temples of Angkor, crossing the world's largest salt flat in South America, scaling a New Zealand glacier. The book recounts the odyssey in 48 dispatches from 22 countries. Among them: birdwatching in Indonesia, a haircut from Vietnam's oldest barber, touring a notorious prison in Bolivia, haggling over rugs in Morocco, on safari in Nepal. McIntyre taps his self-deprecating humor to convey the joys, perils and frustrations of prolonged travel. When the couple ventures into a cyclone in Fiji on a rubber raft, he writes, "The absence of life jackets and paddles meant more room for our lunacy." And during a ride across India with a hired car and driver, he notes, "His passing technique was so precise, I could see my horrified expression reflected in the chrome bumpers of onrushing trucks." He also writes eloquently of such poignant moments as sleeping under the stars in North Africa, flying kites with a poor boy in Bali, and the death of a female tour guide in China. By journey's end, he's shucked much of his journalist's cynicism, and he stands in awe of a staggeringly beautiful world and the resilient souls who fill it.

The Wander Year is based on the popular series of the same name that ran in the Travel section of the Los Angeles Times. It includes an excerpt from the author's first travelogue, The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America.