biography

Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

In the first hours there was nothing, no fear or sadness, just a black and perfect silence.Nando Parrado was unconscious for three days before he woke to discover that the plane carrying his rugby team, as well as their family members and supporters, to an exhibition game in Chile had crashed somewhere deep in the Andes. He soon …

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Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (Vintage Departures)

From the author of The Last Mughal, an enlightening book that explores with remarkable compassion and expansive insight nine varieties of religious devotion in India today.In portraits of people we might otherwise never know William Dalrymple distills his twenty-five years of travel in India to explore the challenges faced by practitioners of traditional forms of faith in contemporary …

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Death in the Long Grass: A Big Game Hunter’s Adventures in the African Bush

Few men can say they have known Africa as Peter Hathaway Capstick has know it– leading safaris through lion country; tracking man-eating leopards along tangled jungle paths; running for cover as fear-maddened elephants stampede in all directions. And of the few who have known this dangerous way of life, fewer still can recount their adventures with the flair …

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Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble

The author of The Dead Beat and This Book is Overdue! turns her piercing eye and charming wit to the real-life avatars of Indiana Jones—the archaeologists who sort through the muck and mire of swamps, ancient landfills, volcanic islands, and other dirty places to reclaim history for us all.Pompeii, Machu Picchu, the Valley of the Kings, the Parthenon—the …

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Picnic in Provence: A Memoir with Recipes

The bestselling author of Lunch in Paris takes us on another delicious journey, this time to the heart of Provence. Ten years ago, New Yorker Elizabeth Bard followed a handsome Frenchman up a spiral staircase to a love nest in the heart of Paris. Now, with a baby on the way and the world’s flakiest croissant around the …

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A Tour of Bones: Facing Fear and Looking for Life

Author, academic, and adventurer, Denise Inge grew up in a large and rambunctious family on the east coast of America. She crossed the Sahara, charmed snakes in Marrakech and cycled the Adirondack mountains but her latest adventure is an interior one. It starts with the discovery that her house is built on a crypt full of human skeletons. …

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A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines

The only thing “gonzo gastronome” and internationally bestselling author Anthony Bourdain loves as much as cooking is traveling. Inspired by the question, “What would be the perfect meal?,” Tony sets out on a quest for his culinary holy grail, and in the process turns the notion of “perfection” inside out. From California to Cambodia, A Cooks’ Tour chronicles …

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Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley and Livingstone

With the utterance of a single line—“Doctor Livingstone, I presume?”—a remote meeting in the heart of Africa was transformed into one of the most famous encounters in exploration history. But the true story behind Dr. David Livingstone and journalist Henry Morton Stanley is one that has escaped telling. Into Africa is an extraordinarily researched account of a thrilling …

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The Final Frontiersman: Heimo Korth and His Family, Alone in Alaska’s Arctic Wilderness

The inspiration for The Last Alaskans—the eight-part documentary series on Animal Planet! Called “[one of] the greatest life-or-death-tales ever told” (Esquire), James Campbell’s inimitable insider account of a family’s nomadic life in the unshaped Arctic wilderness “is an icily gripping, intimate profile that stands up well beside Krakauer’s classic [Into the Wild], and it stands too, as a …

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