Oh, The Adventures We Have On Our Shelves! (Part One)

The Worst Journey in the World

Selected by Adventure magazine as the number one adventure book of all time, The Worst Journey in the World is Apsley Cherry-Garrard' s dramatic, moving, and exceptionally human account of his survival as the youngest member of Robert Falcon Scott' s 1911 expedition to the South Pole.

The scion of English landed gentry, Cherry-Garrard was chosen from more than 8,000 volunteers to join the Scott expedition at the height of the craze for polar exploration. When they arrived in Antarctica, " Cherry, " as he was known, was not assigned to the team that would attain the pole, but instead, with two other members, to collect the eggs of the Emperor penguin. Cherry and his cohorts struggled in near total darkness across more than one hundred miles of ice in temperatures as low as 70 degrees below zero, slept in bags heavy with their own frozen sweat, dragged a 700-pound sled over whipping ice that felt like sand against their faces, and wore clothes that were literally frozen stiff. All things considered, his title seems almost charitable.

In spite of the sheer suffering and loss, and despite the guilty feelings that he could have done more to save Scott and his crewmembers--a guilt that haunted him until his death--Cherry-Garrard managed to write an account of the ill-fated journey that is infused with his own sweetness and humility. Sometimes funny, often sad, and thoroughly detailed, "The Worst Journey in the World is a triumph of adventure storytelling rightly deserving of its place at the top of the genre.

Wind, Sand and Stars
Recipient of the Grand Prix of the Académie Française, Wind, Sand and Stars captures the grandeur, danger, and isolation of flight. Its exciting account of air adventure, combined with lyrical prose and the spirit of a philosopher, makes it one of the most popular works ever written about flying.


The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons
One of the great works of American exploration literature, this account of a scientific expedition forced to survive famine, attacks, mutiny, and some of the most dangerous rapids known to man remains as fresh and exciting today as it was in 1874.




Annapurna
In 1950, when no mountain taller than 8,000 meters had ever been climbed, Maurice Herzog led an expedition of French climbers to the summit of an 8,075-meter (26,493-foot) Himalayan peak called Annapurna. But unlike other climbs, the routes up Annapurna had never been charted. Herzog and his team had to locate the mountain using crude maps, pick out a single untried route, and go for the summit. Annapurna is the unforgettable account of this heroic climb and of its harrowing aftermath, including a nightmare descent of frostbite, snow blindness, and near death. Herzog’s masterful narrative is one of the great mountain-adventure stories of all time.

Desert Solitaire
Abbey is our very own desert father, a hermit loading up on silence and austerity and the radical beauty of empty places. Early on he spent summers working as a ranger at Utah's Arches National Monument, and those summers were the source for this book of reverence for the wild—and outrage over its destruction. But really his whole life was an adventure and a protest against all the masks of progress. He wanted to recapture life on the outside—bare-boned, contemptuous of what we call civilization—and to do it without flinching. He helped ignite the environmental movement, teaching his followers to save the world by leaving it absolutely alone.

The Travels of Marco Polo
Marco Polo’s account of his journey throughout the East in the thirteenth century was one of the earliest European travel narratives, and it remains the most important. The merchant-traveler from Venice, the first to cross the entire continent of Asia, provided us with accurate descriptions of life in China, Tibet, India, and a hundred other lands, and recorded customs, natural history, strange sights, historical legends, and much more. From the dazzling courts of Kublai Khan to the perilous deserts of Persia, no book contains a richer magazine of marvels than the Travels.