I'm Currently about 1/3 of the way through The Unconquered by Scott Wallace and it's a great read so far. Firmly places you right into the primordial jungles of the Amazon with all its delightful creatures. Other books that I highly recommend would be Undaunted Courage (Lewis and Clark plus a lot of insight into Jefferson as well), Endurance by Alfred Lansing chronicling Ernest Shackleton's harrowing expedition to the South Pole, In The Heart of the Sea (whaleship Essex) and Unbroken which has recently received a lot of media pub with Louis Zamperini passing and a movie being made. I haven't seen the movie and after reading the book there really should be no reason to. Two books on my to do list is Skeletons on the Zahara and Esvale from Davao.
I'm sure there are hundreds more. What say ye BBI?
Perfect Storm is also good. Considering all the hurricane's we've had lately, it seems apt.
Not an adventure book, but Hellhound on His Trail, about the manhunt for MLK's assassin is pretty interesting.
Perfect Storm is also good. Considering all the hurricane's we've had lately, it seems apt.
Thanks for sharing!!!!
Columbus:The 4 Voyages
Over the Edge of the World (Magellan)
(Just picked up the Zahara book at a library sale last weekend -- looking forward.)
Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell's 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Canyon by Edward Dolnick.
On May 24, 1869, Powell, an ambitious, autocratic, one-armed Civil War veteran and amateur scientist, and a casually recruited crew of nine--without a lick of white water experience--embarked from an obscure railroad stop in the Wyoming Territory to travel through a region "scarcely better known than Atlantis." Ninety-nine days, 1,000 miles and nearly 500 rapids later, six of the men came ashore in Arizona--the first humans to run the waters of the Grand Canyon. Dolnick tells this story of courage, naiveté, hardship, and petty squabbling simply and authoritatively using entries from the men's journals, deft overviews (we always know where we are), and short science, history, and psychology lessons, as well as the prodigious knowledge of present-day river runners and his own first-hand observations.
One maybe a bit different - West With the Night by Beryl Markham The 1st women to fly solo over Atlantic east to west (last chapter of the book)
Blurb from the list - A bloody wonderful book," Ernest Hemingway called it, and so it is—Africa from the seat of an Avro biplane, winged prose, if you will, about the lion that mauled her, about the Masai and the Kikuyu, about flying over the Serengeti, searching for the downed plane of her lover. It appears that Markham's third husband, writer Raoul Schumacher, contributed much of the literary polish. But what of it? The book, and the life, still radiate excitement: "I have lifted my plane from the Nairobi airport for perhaps a thousand flights and I have never felt her wheels glide from the earth into the air without knowing the uncertainty and the exhilaration of firstborn adventure."
National Geographic - ( New Window )
wow just intense book
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster - ( New Window )
Quote:
about a tragedy on Everest in the '90s.
Perfect Storm is also good. Considering all the hurricane's we've had lately, it seems apt.
Not sure how I forgot Into Thin Air, one of my favorites
Easily one of my favorites, too.
Great read.
At times Millard gets a little to text bookish for my tastes while describing things as the flora and fauna of the rain forest, etc., but for the most part I couldn't help but wonder why hasn't Spielberg turned this into a movie yet?