Adventure - Nonfiction


Showing 1 - 20 of 47  There are a total of 190 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "American journey"
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"The epic road trips-and surprising friendship-of John Burroughs, nineteenth-century naturalist, and Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, inventors of the modern age"--
Book cover for "The bad-ass librarians of Timbuktu and their race to save the world's most precious manuscripts"
Star rating for The bad-ass librarians of Timbuktu and their race to save the world's most precious manuscripts
Average Rating:
2.9 stars
Description:
In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River, tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that were crumbling in the trunks of desert farmers. His goal was to preserve this crucial part of the world's patrimony in a gorgeous library. But then Al Qaeda showed up at the door.The Bad-Ass Librarians...
Book cover for "Born to be hanged"
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Average Rating:
4.5 stars
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"Discover the fascinating and outrageously readable account of the roguish acts of the first pirates to raid the Pacific in a crusade that ended in a sensational trial back in England"--
Book cover for "Brave the wild river"
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Average Rating:
5 stars
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"The riveting tale of two pioneering botanists and their historic boat trip down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon. In the summer of 1938, botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter set off to run the Colorado River, accompanied by an ambitious and entrepreneurial expedition leader, a zoologist, and two amateur boatmen. With its churning waters and treacherous boulders, the Colorado was famed as the most dangerous river in the world. Journalists...
Book cover for "A delicious country"
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5 stars
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"In 1700, John Lawson, a young man from England looking to make a name for himself, left London and landed in Charleston, in what is now South Carolina. From there for reasons still unknown he took a two-month journey through the little-known Carolina backcountry. That journey in 1709 yielded A New Voyage to Carolina, one of the great books about the Southeast in the early colonial period. Lawson wrote about the flora, the fauna, the terrain, and...
Book cover for "Dodge City"
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"Dodge City, Kansas, is a place of legend. The town that started as a small military site exploded with the coming of the railroad, cattle drives, eager miners, settlers, and various entrepreneurs passing through ... Before long, Dodge City's streets were lined with saloons and brothels and its populace was thick with gunmen, horse thieves, and desperadoes ... By the 1870s, Dodge City was known as the most violent and turbulent town in the West. Enter...
Book cover for "Driving the Green Book"
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Average Rating:
2 stars
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"Alvin Hall set out to revisit the world of the Green Book to instruct us all on the real history of the guide that saved many lives. With his friend Janée Woods Weber, he drove from New York to Detroit to New Orleans, visiting motels, restaurants, shops, and stores where Black Americans once found a friendly welcome. They explored historical and cultural landmarks, from the theatres and clubs where stars like Duke Ellington and Lena Horne performed...
Book cover for "Eighty days"
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Average Rating:
3.5 stars
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER
On November 14, 1889, Nellie Bly, the crusading young female reporter for Joseph Pulitzer’s World newspaper, left New York City by steamship on a quest to break the record for the fastest trip around the world. Also departing from New York that day—and heading in the opposite direction by train—was a young journalist from The Cosmopolitan magazine, Elizabeth Bisland. Each woman was determined...
Book cover for "Endurance"
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Average Rating:
4.6 stars
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The astonishing saga of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton's survival for over a year on the ice-bound Antarctic seas, as Time magazine put it, "defined heroism." Alfred Lansing's scrupulously researched and brilliantly narrated book has long been acknowledged as the definitive account of the Endurance's fateful trip. This new edition has been augmented with maps and illustrations. "Bound for Antarctica, where polar explorer Ernest Shackleton planned...
Book cover for "The flight"
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Average Rating:
5 stars
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"On the rainy morning of May 20, 1927, a little-known American pilot named Charles A. Lindbergh climbed into his single-engine monoplane ... and prepared to take off from a small airfield on Long Island, New York. Despite his inexperience ... he was determined to win the $25,000 Orteig Prize promised since 1919 to the first pilot to fly nonstop between New York and Paris ... Ahead of him lay a 3,600-mile solo journey across the vast north Atlantic...
Book cover for "Fly girls"
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Average Rating:
4.8 stars
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"High adventure and high ideals merge when a corps of intrepid female aviators battle to take part in the hugely popular air shows of the 1920s and 1930s. Ultimately, one of our heroines would win a race that earned her the right to be called America's best pilot"--
Book cover for "Grandma Gatewood's walk"
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Average Rating:
4.6 stars
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"Emma Gatewood told her family she was going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than two hundred dollars. The next anybody heard from her, this genteel, farm-reared, 67-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. And in September 1955, having survived a rattlesnake strike, two hurricanes, and a run-in with gangsters from Harlem, she stood atop Maine's Mount Katahdin....
Book cover for "Graveyard of the Pacific"
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"A vivid portrait of the Columbia River Bar that combines maritime history, adventure journalism, and memoir, bringing alive the history-and present-of one of the most notorious stretches of water in the world. Off the coast of Oregon, the Columbia River flows into the Pacific Ocean and forms the Columbia River Bar: a watery collision so turbulent and deadly that it's nicknamed the Graveyard of the Pacific. Two thousand ships have been wrecked on...
Book cover for "The great air race"
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Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
Reclaiming one of the most important moments in American aviation history, this incredible, untold story recounts the transcontinental air race of October 1919, which riveted a nation as the aviators pioneered the first coast-to-coast air route, despite much drama and tragedy.
Book cover for "The High Sierra"
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Average Rating:
5 stars
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A "sublime" and "radically original" exploration of the Sierra Nevadas, the best mountains on Earth for hiking and camping, from New York Times bestselling novelist Kim Stanley Robinson (Bill McKibben, Gary Snyder).--
Book cover for "A history of the world in twelve shipwrecks"
Star rating for A history of the world in twelve shipwrecks
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"From renowned underwater archaeologist David Gibbins comes an exciting and rich narrative of human history told through the archaeological discoveries of twelve shipwrecks across time. The Viking warship of King Cnut the Great. Henry VIII's the Mary Rose. Captain John Franklin's doomed HMS Terror. The SS Gairsoppa, destroyed by a Nazi U-boat in the Atlantic during World War II. Since we first set sail on the open sea, ships and their wrecks have...
Book cover for "Ice ghosts"
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Average Rating:
3.5 stars
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Ice Ghosts weaves together the epic story of the Lost Franklin Expedition of 1845―whose two ships and crew of 129 were lost to the Arctic ice―with the modern tale of the scientists, divers, and local Inuit behind the incredible discovery of the flagship's wreck in 2014.

Paul Watson, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was on the icebreaker that led the discovery expedition, tells a fast-paced historical adventure story:

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Book cover for "Imperfect union"
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Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"Steve Inskeep tells the riveting story of John and Jessie Frémont, the husband and wife team who in the 1800s were instrumental in the westward expansion of the United States, and thus became America's first great political couple."--
Book cover for "In oceans deep"
Star rating for In oceans deep
Average Rating:
5 stars
Book cover for "In the heart of the sea"
Star rating for In the heart of the sea
Average Rating:
4.7 stars
Description:
Read about the tragic ship that inspired the story of Moby Dick. In 1819, the 238-ton Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage to hunt whales. Fifteen months later the Essex was rammed and sunk by an enraged sperm whale. Fearing cannibals on the islands to the west, the 20-man crew set out in three small boats for South America, almost 3,000 miles away. Three months later, only eight were left alive. This book shares a fantastic saga of...