Travel Books - Page 5

Breaking the Limit: One Woman's Motorcycle Journey Through North America

Karen Larsen

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Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

reaking the Limit is one woman's account of riding her motorcycle from New Jersey to Alaska and back. Realizing that years of work and travel in other people's countries made her a stranger in her own, and with an invitation to meet her biological father for the first time, Karen Larsen set out on a fifteen-thousand-mile trip with nothing but her motorcycle and the barest of essentials. Larsen's journey tests the limits of her own endurance, challenges her long-held beliefs and values, and asks what it means to belong to a family. Through the the fields of Iowa and the deserts of the Southwest, over the Rockies and across Alaska's Kenai Peninsula, Larsen confronts questions of femininity, family, independence, and personal identity. Her journey speaks to the immense space and over-whelming beauty of North America, as well as to the diversity and vitality of the people she meets along the way. Breaking the Limit invites you to join her as she braces against the wind, trades security for freedom, sacrifices stability for motion, and opens herself up to the vast canopy of a continent.

Land of a Thousand Hills: My Life in Rwanda

Rosamond Halsey Carr, Ann Howard Halsey

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Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

"A remarkable life story, reminiscent of Out of Africa."--Vogue

In 1949, Rosamond Halsey Carr, a young fashion illustrator living in New York City, accompanied her dashing hunter-explorer husband to what was then the Belgian Congo. When the marriage fell apart, she decided to stay on in neighboring Rwanda, as the manager of a flower plantation.

Land of a Thousand Hills is Carr's thrilling memoir of her life in Rwanda-a love affair with a country and a people that has spanned half a century. During those years, she has experienced everything from stalking leopards to rampaging elephants, drought, the mysterious murder of her friend Dian Fossey, and near-bankruptcy. She has chugged up the Congo River on a paddle-wheel steamboat, been serenaded by pygmies, and witnessed firsthand the collapse of colonialism. Following 1994's Hutu-Tutsi genocide, Carr turned her plantation into a shelter for the lost and orphaned children-work she continues to this day, at the age of eighty-seven.

"Carr's book is a testament to the courage, perseverance, and resilience of the land to which she has given her heart."--San Francisco Examiner

The Wild Muir: Twenty-Two of John Muir's Greatest Adventures

John Muir, Lee Stetson

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Twenty-two of Muir's best scootcher's! 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 15 people found this review helpful.

Lee Stetson, an actor who regularly has played Muir in Yosemite, compiled these 22 tales in this very readable, short book which I obtained in Tuolumne meadows visitor center in Yosemite National Forest. The Wild Muir has been on my Amazon wish list for a long time, so glad I bought my copy in the heart of Muir Territory, where one cannot escape some mention of his name in the many trails and areas he regularly trekked through. What a nice backyard, I constantly repeated to myself while hiking several days at Tuolumne! Every twist and turn of the trails revealed a new, pristine vista that the best panoramic camera could not capture. I felt like I needed a 360 degree camera to capture the beauty of this place, but I don't think anybody makes those these days! Muir expressed these same feelings when he writes: "Pursuing my lonely way down the valley, I turned again and again to gaze on the glorious picture, throwing up my arms to inclose it as in a frame. After long ages of growth in the darkness beneath the glaciers, through sunshine and storms, it seemed now to be ready and waiting for the elected artist, like yellow wheat for the reaper; and I could not help wishing that I were that artist. I had to be content, however, to take it into my soul."

It was here in Tuolumne and Yosemite that Muir would gather those who shared his desire to preserve this wilderness area like Theodore Roosevelt and others, and thankfully, they did just that. The waters still as clear as crystal, teeming still with trout.

Muir's "scootchers" began as a child in Dunbar, Scotland, his mountaineering prowess seemingly inbred, though his brother David, seems not to have shared the same level of fearfulness. In the first chapter, Muir writes of his home, "One of our best playgrounds was the famous Dunbar Castle, to which King Edward fled after his defeat at Bannockburn...The roof of our house, as well as the crags and walls of the old castle, offered fine mountaineering exercise." Of course, Muir would drag his brother David out of their room onto the roof after their mother put them to bed, telling them to "sleep like gude bairns". The first "scootcher" (adventure/daring) told in this book. In the same chapter, he writes that a servant girl would tell them about hell where bad people would go to live eternally. Muir exclaimed indomitably that "I could climb out of it. I imagined it was only a sooty pit with stone walls like those of the castle, and I felt sure there must be chunks and cracks in the masonry for fingers and toes."!

The other twenty-one scootchers contain similar tales of Muir rescuing others who attempted to follow his paths as well as his own hair-raising scootchers sliding down glaciers, surviving powerful wind storms and earthquakes in Yosemite and elsewhere.

It was a real treat to read these adventures in those wild, Muir woods of the Sierras.

Editorial Review:

Here is an entertaining collection of John Muir's most exciting adventures, representing some of his finest writing. From the famous avalanche ride off the rim of Yosemite Valley to his night spent riding out a windstorm at the top of a tree to death-defying falls on Alaskan glaciers, the renowned outdoorsman's exploits are related in passages that are by turns exhilarating, unnerving, dizzying and outrageous.

Street Justice

Chuck Zito, Joe Layden

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Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the streets of Brooklyn to the set of Oz. From Hells Angel to celebrity bodyguard. The revealing autobiography of an American man.

Chuck Zito comes by his reputation honestly as one of the toughest, most uncompromising men ever to sit astride a Harley. Now, with tales both hilarious and chilling, violent and truthful, Zito tells his life story in his own words.

From growing up on the mean streets of Brooklyn and the Bronx, where fighting was a way of life, to becoming president of the New York chapter of the Hells Angels, to the wild and crazy life of protecting some of the world's biggest celebrities, Zito might be seen as a latter-day outlaw, the last of a dying breed of men. But throughout his tempestuous days, one thing defined him: his unfailing sense of justice, of what's really right and what's really wrong. That's how Zito found himself facing his biggest challenge: refusing to cooperate with a federal investigation into his brothers, the Hells Angels, and in the process losing the very thing he cherished most-his freedom.

Zito's astonishing recovery from this experience, and the unique kind of stardom he forged based on hard work and sheer will, is a testament to his courage, his ambition, and his indomitable heart-a testament now recorded unflinchingly in Street Justice.

The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century

Ross E. Dunn

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Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A.P. World History Review 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

The Adventures of Ibn Battuta is a great novel for anyone who really wants to know a very detailed account of the Muslim world during the 15th century. The author not only describes everything that Ibn Battuta does and sees, but he also gives a very long description of the different cites' history that Ibn Battuta visits. However this description is very detailed and it normally doesn't pertain to what is happening whatsoever. These descriptions usually occur once Ibn Battuta enters a new city or town and they normally last a good couple of paragraphs, and contain more information than needed. For example, I personally didn't care what happened to Tangier in the 12th century and the author seemed to have put a good 5 pages describing every detail about it.
Although the excessive amount of information put into everything did bother me, the author did a very good job describing all things Ibn Battuta. The author describes everything about Ibn Battuta along with how he traveled, who he stayed with, what he did, who he did it with, his different adventures, etc. For instance, the author often mentioned and described the different Sufi people that Ibn Battuta stayed with and spent his time with. Probably the best thing about this novel was how the author kept the reader very entertained by sharing the many dangerous adventures and troubles that Ibn Battuta gets in, including many run ins with bandits and robbers. Overall this is an excellent book if you want to learn all about the different Muslim territories and the adventures of Ibn Battuta. Another good thing about this novel is that even if you know nothing about the time period before hand, the author explains everything so well that you'll be alright.

Editorial Review:

Known as the greatest traveler of premodern times, Abu Abdallah ibn Battuta was born in Morocco in 1304 and educated in Islamic law. At the age of twenty-one, he left home to make the holy pilgrimage to Mecca. This was only the first of a series of extraordinary journeys that spanned nearly three decades and took him not only eastward to India and China but also north to the Volga River valley and south to Tanzania. The narrative of these travels has been known to specialists in Islamic and medieval history for years. Ross E. Dunn's 1986 retelling of these tales, however, was the first work of scholarship to make the legendary traveler's story accessible to a general audience. Now updated with revisions, a new preface, and an updated bibliography, Dunn's classic interprets Ibn Battuta's adventures and places them within the rich, trans-hemispheric cultural setting of medieval Islam. Illustrations: 15 b/w photographs, 12 maps

The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag

Chol-hwan Kang, Pierre Rigoulot

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Total reviews: 51 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

"In a Concentration Camp at the Age of Nine." 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

"You people don't deserve to live, but the Party and our Great Leader have given you a chance to redeem yourselves. Don't squander it and disappoint him." So says a guard in Yodok, the place which is featured in this book. It was identified as "Border Patrol of the Korean People, unit 2915," however, as the North Korean regime sought to disguise it's real purpose. Kang Chol-Hwan arrived at its gate at age nine, along with his sister, father, and grandmother. As the author states herein, "We weren't sent to the camp as criminals but as relatives of a criminal." That so-called"criminal" was his grandfather and the charge leveled against his grandfather was "a crime of high treason." The real reason that Kang Chol-Hwan's grandfather was arrested, however, was that the North Korean police state, having duped his grandfather into returning to Korea with the fortune he accumulated in Japan, no longer had any need of him once they had got their hands on his wealth. This book is replete with examples of many other well-off Koreans, also inspired by revolutionary propaganda, who likewise left comfortable lives in Japan hoping to contribute to building communism in Kim Il-sung's Korea, but who, instead, were fleeced of their assets and wound up spending time in places like Yodok, one of the "Aquariums of Pyongyang."

The author, though, tells us almost nothing about any concentration/work camp/slave labor camp other than Yodok, the place where he was imprisoned for ten years. So the book is really about one "Aquarium" (and he utilizes the term because he actually brought his fish bowl with him to this prison, as well as attempting to coin a Korean phrase reminiscent of the Gulag Archipelago).

The first 148 pages of this rather brief book concerns the author's first 8 years at Yodok. He discusses how he was forced to trap rats for food, how his fellow political prisoners were kept in rags, denied adequate food; how they were worked to exhaustion. He also describes the execution of some prisoners: "The Party was willing to forgive this criminal. It gave him the chance here at Yodak to right himself. He chose to betray the Party's trust, and for that he merits execution." The man supposedly betrayed the state by trying to escape from his slave-labor camp. Moments later the commanding officer directed his guards thusly: "Aim at the traitor of the Fatherland...Fire!" So much for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

After telling us about his first 8 years in the camp, the author admits this: "As the years passed, another feeling began to disturb my daily existence: the feeling of injustice, which grew sharper when I considered the discrepancy between everything I had been taught and all that I was living." The writing herein, unfortunately, is a lot like this; not particularly personal and bereft of much emotion. (Maybe this has something to do with the fact that the author told his story to a French journalist---whose name appears on the cover of this book---and the book was originally published in French, perhaps having lost something through two translations.)

The final two years the author spent in Yodok's labor prison are glossed over in 6 pages, then his escape to South Korea, via China, is addressed in the final 40 or so pages. In total the book only numbers 238 (rather large print) pages and there's no index. I wish there was a lot more to this book; more about how many places such as Yodok exist in North Korea, how many people might be incarcerated in them and the like, and more of the minute detail of goings-on in such places (as opposed to the broader brush strokes offered by our author herein) so as to be better able to "feel" what it must have been like for the author to survive 10 years in such a ghastly place. (07Dec) Cheers

Editorial Review:

North Korea is today one of the last bastions of hard-line Communism. Its leaders have kept a tight grasp on their one-party regime, quashing any nascent opposition movements and sending all suspected dissidents to its brutal concentration camps for "re-education." Kang Chol-hwan is the first survivor of one of these camps to escape and tell his story to the world, documenting the extreme conditions in these gulags and providing a personal insight into life in North Korea. Part horror story, part historical document, part memoir, part political tract, this record of one man's suffering gives eyewitness proof to an ongoing sorrowful chapter of modern history. New edition with a new preface by the author.

My Journey to Lhasa: The Classic Story of the Only Western Woman Who Succeeded in Entering the Forbidden City

Alexandra David-neel

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Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

An exemplary travelogue of danger and achievement by the Frenchwoman Madame Alexandra David–Neel of her 1923 expedition to Tibet, the fifth in her series of Asian travels, and her personal recounting of her journey to Lhasa, Tibet's forbidden city.

In order to penetrate Tibet and reach Lhasa, she used her fluency of Tibetan dialects and culture, disguised herself as a beggar with yak hair extensions and inked skin and tackled some of the roughest terrain and climate in the World. With the help of her young companion, Yongden, she willingly suffered the primitive travel conditions, frequent outbreaks of disease, the ever–present danger of border control and the military to reach her goal.

The determination and sheer physical fortitude it took for this woman, delicately reared in Paris and Brussels, is inspiration for men and women alike.

David–Neel is famous for being the first Western woman to have been received by any Dalai Lama and as a passionate scholar and explorer of Asia, hers is one of the most remarkable of all travellersߴales.

Bold Spirit: Helga Estby's Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America

Linda Lawrence Hunt

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Total reviews: 79 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In 1896, a Norwegian immigrant and mother of eight children named Helga Estby was behind on taxes and the mortgage when she learned that a mysterious sponsor would pay $10,000 to a woman who walked across America.
Hoping to win the wager and save her family’s farm, Helga and her teenaged daughter Clara, armed with little more than a compass, red-pepper spray, a revolver, and Clara’s curling iron, set out on foot from Eastern Washington. Their route would pass through 14 states, but they were not allowed to carry more than five dollars each. As they visited Indian reservations, Western boomtowns, remote ranches and local civic leaders, they confronted snowstorms, hunger, thieves and mountain lions with equal aplomb.
Their treacherous and inspirational journey to New York challenged contemporary notions of femininity and captured the public imagination. But their trip had such devastating consequences that the Estby women's achievement was blanketed in silence until, nearly a century later, Linda Lawrence Hunt encountered their extraordinary story.

Digging for the Truth: One Man's Epic Adventure Exploring the World's Greatest Archaeological Mysteries (History Channel Audiobook)

Josh Bernstein

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Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Digging for Something Other Than the Author's Ego 1 out of 5 stars.
2 of 6 people found this review helpful.

Maybe I was looking for information about archaeology, but what I received was a non-stop self-aggrandizement of the author. To be honest, I have not been able to get through the whole thing yet, but it's only because I was so disappointed in the part I have read.

Marcia Davis

i love this book 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

this is a great book, for people that are fans of the show while josh bernstein was the host. to me the show is nothing without him! he is not only very informative, but you also get a sense of who he is, and all the stuff he went through to film such a great show! i would love to read more by him!

Editorial Review:

Josh Bernstein, host of the History Channel's Digging For The Truth combines his personal experiences as an outdoor survival guide as he takes readers through some of the most remote, intriguing and physically challenging locations on the planet as he uncovers the world's greatest ancient mysteries. The book cover his adventures in Jerusalem, Zimbabwe, Austria, Peru, Greenland, Ethiopia, Yemen, and the Amazon. In addition, he takes viewers behind the scenes as they witness food poisoning, snake bites and sleepless weeks, to the logistical trials of shooting in some of the most remote places on earth. No location is too dangerous, no terrain too rough, no culture too exotic for Bernstein.

The Lost Boys of Sudan: An American Story of the Refugee Experience

Mark Bixler

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In 2000 the United States began accepting 3,800 refugees from one of Africa's longest civil wars. They were just some of the thousands of young men, known as "Lost Boys," who had been orphaned or otherwise separated from their families in the chaos of a brutal conflict that has ravaged Sudan since 1983. The Lost Boys of Sudan focuses on four of these refugees. Theirs, however, is a typical story, one that repeated itself wherever the Lost Boys could be found across America. Jacob Magot, Peter Anyang, Daniel Khoch, and Marko Ayii were among 150 or so Lost Boys who were resettled in Atlanta. Like most of their fellow refugees, they had never before turned on a light switch, used a kitchen appliance, or ridden in a car or subway train-much less held a job or balanced a checkbook. We relive their early excitement and disorientation, their growing despondency over fruitless job searches, adjustments they faced upon finally entering the workforce, their experiences of post-9/11 xenophobia, and their undying dreams of acquiring an education.

As we immerse ourselves in the Lost Boys' daily lives, we also get to know the social services professionals and volunteers, celebrities, community leaders, and others who guided them-with occasional detours-toward self-sufficiency. Along the way author Mark Bixler looks closely at the ins and outs of U.S. refugee policy, the politics of international aid, the history of Sudan, and the radical Islamist underpinnings of its government. America is home to more foreign-born residents than ever before; the Lost Boys have repaid that gift in full through their example of unflagging resolve, hope, and faith.