Travel Books - Page 4

Ridin' High, Livin' Free: Hell-Raising Motorcycle Stories

Ralph "sonny" Barger

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Stories from the road. 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This isn't really a biography, but more of a collection of stories from Sonny Barger. A lot of them are very funny, and some of them are tales from the road that would make anyone want to hop on a motorcycle. The problem with this book is the introduction when Sonny Barger tells you that some of the stories may be true, and some of them may not be true. He leaves it up to you as you read, but either way the stories are fun to read, and some of them will have you laughing for quite awhile. He even goes outside of the Hell's Angels into other clubs he's aware of and other people he knows sharing stores from them, one of them was on the Dragons leader who was about to buy a Honda until his club members knocked on his door and asked him if it was true.

Editorial Review:

The open road, a well-tuned machine, and a fine "old lady" hanging on to your back. That's freedom. That's living.

Sonny Barger is the number one spokesman for the outlaw biker life. And what stories he has to tell -- freewheeling, bare-knuckle tales of brawls and battles, brotherhood, amazing adventures, crazy quests, and the inevitable classic scrapes with "John Law."

The most colorful legends and unforgettable characters of biker lore come alive here: including badass dudes like Cincinnati, one of the many Folsom State Prison graduates riding the nation's highways, and lone-wolf dreamer Moto Guzzi Ron and his remarkable run at the North Pole, dodging killer bears along the way. Whether you ride or just dream of riding, Ridin' High, Livin' Free is a fascinating glimpse into a unique culture of freedom that recognizes only one commandment: the code of the road.

Flying the Alaska Wild: The Adventures and Misadventures of an Alaska Bush Pilot

Mort D. Mason

Amazon Price: $13.57 List Price: $19.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Voyageur Press Amazon Marketplace: 31 new & used starting at $11.95

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Flying the Alaska Wild: The Adventures and Misadventures of an Alaska Bush Pilot 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 4 people found this review helpful.

gave as gift -- very well received

great read 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

i'm only into the 3rd chapter of this book but i have really enjoyed the read thus far. i'm not a pilot but i do alot of flying in flight sims so i have at least 1/2 a clue as to what he's talking about! its well written, easy to understand, descriptive but not to a point where u get lost in the details. its easy on my imagination if that makes any sense. will certainly enjoy reading the rest! if u like the book, his email address is in the back! just makes it that much more personal.

Editorial Review:

"Flying the Alaska Wild" is true grit stuff: a collection of fascinating stories about the rough-and-tumble life of an Alaskan bush pilot--straight from the pilot's seat. Recounting twenty-plus years of adventures, skilled storyteller Mort Mason presents his own death-defying tales, and also tells the legendary stories of other old-time bush pilots.

Flying through the wildly unpredictable weather conditions and unforgiving terrain of the Big Empty--where bush pilots find few paved runways, control towers, friendly voices on their silent radios, navigational aids, and few places to drop in for coffee and fuel for their flimsy planes--Mason honed his skill--and his luck--in a profession that just a few have the stamina to endure. Here, he recounts his more memorable flights and the conditions, circumstances, and admitted errors that made them so. For pilots and airplane buffs; Alaska buffs; hunters, guides, and outdoors enthusiasts.

Desperate Voyage

John Caldwell

Amazon Price: $13.45 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Sheridan House Amazon Marketplace: 40 new & used starting at $4.49

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 21 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Personal challenge 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

More than thirty years ago when my young family were avid deep water sailors, I read many survival and adventure stories written by those who had had narrow escapes. John Caldwell's vivid tale of his struggle to return to his Australian lady love following his release from the Navy at the end of WWII still stands out in my mind. This year, as I home school my grandson and encourage him to develop innovative thinking, determination and loyalty, "Desperate Voyage" once again comes to mind. One of your other reviewers remarked that Caldwell "had no literary pretentions," but his book is, nevertheless, well worth reading for Caldwell's own humor and durability in the face of disaster. I am happy once again to add it to my library on my grandson's behalf.

A Story of a Plucky Screw-up with a Penchant for Survival 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

John Caldwell, a young American who served in the Australian air force and the US merchant marine during WWII, found himself at the end of hostilities stranded in Panama. He had no way to get back to Australia and his new wife Mary.

With more pluck than brains Caldwell, who had not done any small boating, buys a small sailboat (about 29 feet) with the idea of sailing to far off Australia--more than 8500 miles of open Pacific. First he learns how to maneuver his boat in and around the islands off Panama, with many hilarious screw-ups. Finally he sets off across the ocean. He has a tiresome voyage to the Galapagos Islands, again with many screw-ups, some of which almost cost him his life and nearly wreck his sailboat and disable his auxiliary engine. After the Galapagos the sailing goes better as he has wind and current with him and only some 8000 miles left to go. Then about half way there, between the Marquesas Islands and Samoa, Caldwell is hit by a terrible hurricane that destroys his rig, nearly sinks his boat, and forces him to jettison all of his food, water, navigation equipment, and supplies. His prospects for survival, not to speak of getting to Australia, are remote. Fortunately he had an almost indestructible craft, and that was his greatest piece of luck.

Under jury jig and near death from starvation, he eventually fetches up in the Fiji Islands. He is nursed back to health by the kindly natives and soon makes it the rest of the way to Australia by hitching rides on boats and planes, and is reunited with his beloved Mary. They apparently have lived happily ever after (or at least until the late 1990s), even founding and running a resort in the Caribbean.

Desperate Voyage is a wonderful and wonderfully engaging story. Caldwell writes so well and so engagingly that this book is really hard to put down. I thoroughly enjoyed it. You cannot help liking this plucky screw-up with a penchant for survival. Of course, I feel somewhat guilty enjoying this tale so much--after all it is mostly about screw-ups, disaster, pain, and close brushes with death most of which resulted from Caldwell's rashness and carelessness. Caldwell's voyage is not one to emulate. But as A.J. Mackinnon says in his masterful The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow (another boating story full of screw-ups) "No screw-ups, no story." Certainly if Caldwell had been an accomplished yachtsman and as careful as we boaters are supposed to be, there would have been nothing here to laugh and cry about. Also when reading Caldwell's tale I was reminded of Mackinnon's admission: "Of course, I exaggerate for effect." How much has Caldwell exaggerated to enhance his tale? No one knows, but I sincerely doubt that he really drank his engine oil in order to assuage his hunger when he was starving.

Editorial Review:

In May 1946, John Caldwell, stranded in Panama afetr the war, set out single-handed on a 9,000 mile journey aboard the 29-foot Pagan to rejoin his wife in Sydney.

The Hills of Tuscany

Ferenc Mate

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 46 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

As seductive as A Year in Provence and Under the Tuscan Sun, but with the wit and charm of a 1930s romantic comedy, the true-life adventure of a couple who chucked New York for a new life in Tuscany. The Mates arrived in Tuscany in the late 1980s knowing no Italian and with only four weeks to search for the country house of their dreams. On their last night there, after having been chased by wild boars and befriended by a country realtor who also sells pigs and coffins, they finally concluded the deal on the hood of a rusting tractor with the lawyer speaking Italian and them responding in French, English, and Hungarian, in a Tower of Babel version of "Who's on First?" So begins Ferenc Mat's endearing, in-love-with-life memoir of their first five years in Tuscany, by turns buoyant, reflective, and laugh-out-loud hilarious. His engaging, often poetic prose describes the way of life they were looking for and found-where neighbors, community, home, and, most of all, children, form the focal point of daily life. They live in a small thirteenth-century monastery, surrounded by their vineyards and olive groves, in the spectacular hills near Siena, a few miles from where The English Patient was filmed. The Hills of Tuscany-steeped in mesmerizing scenery and wonderful medieval towns, full of unforgettably delightful characters and spectacular food and wine-nourishes body, mind, and soul. If you're not passionately in love with life at the moment, you'll be hopelessly so by the time you turn the last page.

Goodbye to a River: A Narrative

John Graves

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Total reviews: 21 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In the 1950s, a series of dams was proposed along the Brazos River in north-central Texas. For John Graves, this project meant that if the stream’s regimen was thus changed, the beautiful and sometimes brutal surrounding countryside would also change, as would the lives of the people whose rugged ancestors had eked out an existence there. Graves therefore decided to visit that stretch of the river, which he had known intimately as a youth.

Goodbye to a River is his account of that farewell canoe voyage. As he braves rapids and fatigue and the fickle autumn weather, he muses upon old blood feuds of the region and violent skirmishes with native tribes, and retells wild stories of courage and cowardice and deceit that shaped both the river’s people and the land during frontier times and later. Nearly half a century after its initial publication, Goodbye to a River is a true American classic, a vivid narrative about an exciting journey and a powerful tribute to a vanishing way of life and its ever-changing natural environment.

The Cure for Anything Is Salt Water: How I Threw My Life Overboard and Found Happiness at Sea

Mary South

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The Cure for This Book is More Salt Water 3 out of 5 stars.
14 of 20 people found this review helpful.

Perhaps I should have done more homework. The book I read wasn't exactly the book that I thought I had bought. The subtitle, "How I Threw My Life Overboard and Found Happiness at Sea" gives a pretty good clue, though. There are essentially two parts to this book. The first is the story of a woman who experiences a mid-life crisis at work and in relationships, and goes forth to seek true happiness. The second is the story of this same woman looking for that happiness in buying a boat and going to sea. I had thought the book was really more the latter, but the story turns out to be more the former.

THE CURE FOR ANYTHING IS SALT WATER is competently written, as one should expect from a former book editor. The book is interesting, and the story told without artifice. When Mary South tells of her sudden, almost irrational interest in boats while living well inland in Pennsylvania, her experience will strike a chord with every boatstruck reader. But South's book is not likely to meet the needs of the boat or sailing enthusiast. It's not that she doesn't take her newfound interest seriously--nobody who quits her job and sells her house to buy a boat should be regarded as simply a dilettante (even if she doesn't take traditional methods of navigation seriously)--it's just that she doesn't write about boating with much passion beyond her love for her particular boat. What should be the centerpiece of the book, her voyage up the Eastern Seaboard, is reduced to a series of good days, bad weather, mishaps, bars, and some occasional local color. When it comes to boating, her prose fails to capture the poetry of the experience.

The reader learns that the real point of this book is to describe Mary South's midlife crisis, in particular, her losing interest in her career as a book editor and her being troubled by a lack of permanence in her intimate relationships. This in itself might be the clay from which a story might be shaped, but the effort falls short, clodlike. South, despite her humorous turns, tends towards the ad hominem comment: "My boss was a micromanager with an imagination that was significantly smaller than the stick up her butt" (p. 5). A Christian school administrator of the boating school South attends makes her wonder "what kind of crackpot school I had committed myself to"; this is followed by a rather poor joke on theodicy (p. 35). A boating classmate is described as a very intelligent guy "though a smart Republican is an oxymoronic concept to me" (p. 56). When an elderly couple out rowing express concern for the author's dogs, they are disdainfully dismissed as "Biff" and "Muffy" (p. 176). South's tendency towards personal attack, combined with her refrain of seeking isolation on her boat, leads one to think she's a misanthrope. But here's the thing: I don't think she is; she just gravitates to ridicule as a literary tool of humor. However you slice it, though, it's not very appealing.

In the last part of the book, South, who describes herself as a lesbian, discusses her surprising affair with a man. Her boat at this point is but a piece of inconvenient furniture. You may, like me, find yourself at this point happy that your voyage with South is nearly over.

Editorial Review:

At forty, Mary South had a beautiful home, good friends, and a successful career in book publishing. But she couldn't help feeling that she was missing something intangible but essential. So she decided to go looking for it . . . at sea. Six months later she had quit her job, sold the house, and was living aboard a forty-foot, thirty-ton steel trawler she rechristened Bossanova. Despite her total lack of experience, South set out on her maiden voyage—a fifteen-hundred-mile odyssey from Florida to Maine—with her one-man, two-dog crew. But what began as the fulfillment of an idle wish became a crash course in navigating the complicated byways of the self.

Walk in a Relaxed Manner: Life Lessons from the Camino

Joyce Rupp

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A Pilgrimage Of Body and Spirit 5 out of 5 stars.
43 of 43 people found this review helpful.

Back in the summer of 2003, I visited a former seminary roommate in Leon, Spain. I showed up a couple of days before his wedding after backpacking through Amsterdam, Paris, London, and Madrid. While strolling together through Leon, my Spanish friend remarked that people thought I was a "Pilgrim" because of my clothing and backpack. I asked him to clarify, and he replied that Leon was on the path of the Camino Pilgrimage. Thus began my interest in the topic.

"Walk in a Relaxed Manner" was the first book I read about the Camino. It's newly published, written by a 60-year-old nun who walked the Pilgrimage around the time I was in Leon. She hit the trail with a retired priest, and this book was born from that experience. The subtitle and theme is "Life Lessons From the Camino," and each chapter is based on a way she grew due to the Pilgrimage. For example, the book's title is shared with a chapter where Sr. Rupp describes how she learned to walk slowly and thoughtfully instead of quickly and competitively. Other chapter titles include "Savor Solitude," "Deal with Disappointments," and "Live in the Now." Such topics may strike some as trite. But I found it impressive that more often than not, it was the walk's difficulties that enabled her to internalize these truths.

The author writes in a clear and readable manner. She rejoices in the high points of the Pilgrimage, and is honest about the lows as well. Each lesson is presented in a thoughtful manner, and all are applicable to everyday life. However, like many spiritual insights perhaps some sort of defining experience is required to truly own them. But reading about these truths may be a way to prepare the heart for their eventual actualization. Although a Catholic nun in the Servite Community, Sr. Rupp keeps things fairly ecumenical throughout her tale. In addition, practical advice about the Pilgrimage is sprinkled throughout the book, and a list of helpful Camino resources is included at the end. There's even an authorized website based on Joyce Rupp's name if you want more info about her.

Someday I'd like to do the El Camino Pilgrimage. I hope I don't have to wait until my sixties, but sometimes you have to let things happen in their time. If I do walk it, I'll be glad if I learn and grow half as much as Sr. Rupp did. Recommended for all travelers and pilgrims.

UPDATE 9/7/07: Well, I only had to wait until I was forty to do the Camino. On 7/14/07 I stepped off in St. Jean Pied-de-Port (France), and on 8/24/07 I walked into Santiago, Spain. After returning home to the US, I went through this book again. It was nice reading about familiar places on the Way, and also to identify with the lessons Ms. Rupp writes about. Recommended even more now that I've actually done the trek.

Educating Alice: Adventures of a Curious Woman

Alice Steinbach

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

stick with Without Reservations 1 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I too really enjoyed Without Reservations, however, this book is Borrrinnng. I suppose her list of things to do/learn is vastly different than mine. She definitely has a Jones for the Ritz [in both books], which does nothing for me. I love Jane Austen, but have no interest in the all-things-Jane vigil. Gardens in Provence? I did enjoy the Havana story, but still am unsure how she went from the states to Cuba...I thought this wasn't legal. Upon reading other reviews right now, I've decided to skip her holocaust non-fiction writing [nothing like an American going to "holocaust country" and writing a story. sheesh.], and the apparently ever so REALLY boring sheep herding education.

Editorial Review:

This funny and tender book combines three of Alice Steinbach’s greatest passions: learning, traveling, and writing. After chronicling her European journey of self-discovery in Without Reservations, this Pulitzer Prize—winning columnist for the Baltimore Sun quit her job and left home again. This time she roamed the world, taking lessons and courses in such things as French cooking in Paris, Border collie training in Scotland, traditional Japanese arts in Kyoto, and architecture and art in Havana. With warmth and wit, Steinbach guides us through the pleasures and perils of discovering how to be a student again. She also learns the true value of this second chance at educating herself: the opportunity to connect with and learn from the people she meets along the way.

Touch the Top of the World: A Blind Man's Journey to Climb Farther than the Eye Can See: My Story

Erik Weihenmayer

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Total reviews: 35 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

"A vivid and compelling book." (Time magazine)

Erik Weihenmayer was born with retinoscheses, a degenerative eye disorder that would leave him blind by the age of thirteen. But Erik was determined to rise above this devastating disability and lead a fulfilling and exciting life.

In this poignant and inspiring memoir, he shares his struggle to push past the limits imposed on him by his visual impairment-and by a seeing world. He speaks movingly of the role his family played in his battle to break through the barriers of blindness: the mother who prayed for the miracle that would restore her son's sight and the father who encouraged him to strive for that distant mountaintop. And he tells the story of his dream to climb the world's Seven Summits, and how he is turning that dream into astonishing reality (something fewer than a hundred mountaineers have done).

From the snow-capped summit of McKinley to the towering peaks of Aconcagua and Kilimanjaro to the ultimate challenge, Mount Everest, this is a story about daring to dream in the face of impossible odds. It is about finding the courage to reach for that ultimate summit, and transforming your life into something truly miraculous.

"I admire you immensely. You are an inspiration to other blind people and plenty of folks who can see just fine." (Jon Krakauer, author of Into Thin Air)

Days on the Road: Crossing the Plains in 1865: The Diary of Sarah Raymond Herndon

Sarah Raymond Herndon

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Absolutely wonderful! 5 out of 5 stars.
11 of 12 people found this review helpful.

I found this diary charming and informative. Having always had a fascination with the time period and wagon trains, I couldn't put this book down. By the end of the book, I was saddened by the fact that Sarah didn't continue recording her life in Montana. I felt as if I had known her personally and was touched by the whole accounting of her travels.

Editorial Review:

Sarah Raymond was an unmarried woman of twenty-four who in May 1865--barely a month after the end of the Civil War--mounted her beloved pony and headed west alongside the wagon carrying her mother and two younger brothers. They traveled by wagon train over the Great Plains toward the Rocky Mountains, with no certain idea of where they would settle themselves but a strong desire to leave war-torn Missouri behind and start a new life.
Days on the Road is the story of this remarkable journey and of the young woman who made it. Written on the trail and originally published in 1902, it is a tribute to all of the emigrants who made their way west and the tale of a truly extraordinary woman.