Top 100 Sports Books of All Time, Sports Illustrated "Those who have never seen the Himalayas, those who never care to risk an assault, will know when they finish this book that they have been a companion of greatness." -New York Times Book Review 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. This new edition-due for publication shortly before the sixtieth anniversary of the Annapurna ascent on June 3, 2010-will feature a new foreword by Conrad Anker.

A journey through time and water, to the bottom of the ocean and the future of our planet. We do not see the ocean when we look at the water that blankets more than two thirds of our planet. We only see the entrance to it. Beyond that entrance is a world hostile to humans, yet critical to our survival. The first divers to enter that world held their breath and splashed beneath the surface, often clutching rocks to pull them down. Over centuries, they invented wooden diving bells, clumsy diving suits, and unwieldy contraptions in attempts to go deeper and stay longer. But each advance was fraught with danger, as the intruders had to survive the crushing weight of water, or the deadly physiological effects of breathing compressed air. The vertical odyssey continued when explorers squeezed into heavy steel balls dangling on cables, or slung beneath floats filled with flammable gasoline. Plunging into the narrow trenches between the tectonic plates of the Earth's crust, they eventually reached the bottom of the ocean in the same decade that men first walked on the moon. Today, as nations scramble to exploit the resources of the ocean floor, The Frontier Below recalls a story of human endeavour that took 2,000 years to travel seven miles, then investigates how we will explore the ocean in the future. Meticulously researched and drawing extensively on unpublished sources and personal interviews, The Frontier Below is the untold story of the pioneers who had the right stuff, but were forgotten because they went in the wrong direction.

This collection focuses on different expeditions and their role in the process of knowledge acquisition from the eighteenth century onwards. It investigates various forms of scientific practice conducted during, after and before expeditions, and it places this discussion into the scientific context of experiments. In treating expeditions as experiments in a heuristic sense, we also propose that the expedition is a variation on the laboratory in which different practices can be conducted and where the transformation of uncertain into certain knowledge is tested. The experimental positioning of the expedition brings together an ensemble of techniques, strategies, material agents and social actors, and illuminates the steps leading from observation to facts and documentation. The chapters show the variety of scientific interests that motivated expeditions with their focus on natural history, geology, ichthyology, botany, zoology, helminthology, speleology, physical anthropology, oceanography, meteorology and magnetism.

Upon that Mountain is the first autobiography of the mountaineer and explorer Eric Shipton. In it, he describes all his pre-war climbing, including his Everest bids of the 1930s, and his second Karakoram survey in 1939, when he returned to Snow Lake to complete the mapping of the ranges flanking the Hispar and Choktoi glacier systems around the Ogre. Crossing great swathes of the Himalaya, the book, like so many of Shipton's works, is both entertaining and an important addition to the mountain literature genre. It captures an important period in mountaineering history - that just before the Second World War - an ends on an elegiac note as Shipton describes his last evening at the starkly-beautiful snow lake, before he returns to a 'civilisation' about to embark on a cataclysmic war.

The life of the great Portuguese explorer who dared to sail beyond the horizon The Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521) is one of the most famous navigators in history-he was the first man to sail from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, and led the first voyage to circumnavigate the globe, although he was killed en route in a battle with natives in the Phillipines. In this biography, Zweig brings to life the Age of Discovery by telling the tale of one of the era's most daring adventurers. In typically flowing and elegant prose he takes us on a fascinating journey of discovery ourselves. Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was born in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear. In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he moved to London, where he wrote his only novel Beware of Pity. He later moved on to Bath, taking British citizenship after the outbreak of the Second World War. With the fall of France in 1940 Zweig left Britain for New York, before settling in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.

Alexander von Humboldt visited the tropics of the New World between 1799 and 1804. On his return he wrote this book, a classic work of travel that is also one of the great products of Enlightenment natural science. In his lifetime, Humboldt was described as "next to Napoleon, the most famous man in Europe". An admirer of the French Revolution, a Neptunist, an anti-slavist, a lover of Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and a close friend of Goethe (whom he resembled), he was also a profound influence upon Darwin and the course of Victorian science, as well as upon the proponents of new world independence.

In 1869, Hayyim Habshush, a Yemeni Jew, accompanied the European orientalist Joseph Halévy on his archaeological tour of Yemen. Twenty years later, Habshush wrote A Vision of Yemen, a memoir of their travels, that provides a vivid account of daily life, religion, and politics. More than a simple travelogue, it is a work of trickster-tales, thick anthropological descriptions, and reflections on Jewish–Muslim relations. At its heart lies the fractious and intimate relationship between the Yemeni coppersmith and the "enlightened" European scholar and the collision between the cultures each represents. The book thus offers a powerful indigenous response to European Orientalism. This edition is the first English translation of Habshush's writings from the original Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew and includes an accessible historical introduction to the work. The translation maintains Habshush's gripping style and rich portrayal of the diverse communities and cultures of Yemen, offering a potent mixture of artful storytelling and cultural criticism, suffused with humor and empathy. Habshush writes about the daily lives of men and women, rich and poor, Jewish and Muslim, during a turbulent period of war and both Ottoman and European imperialist encroachment. With this translation, Alan Verskin recovers the lost voice of a man passionately committed to his land and people.

Explore the impact of humans on the planet in this beautiful new edition of Gaia Vincent's powerful work. In recent decades human beings have altered the planet beyond anything it has experienced in its 4.5 billion-year history. We have become a force on a par with earth-shattering asteroids and planet-cloaking volcanoes. As a result, our planet is said to be crossing a geological boundary - from the Holocene into the Anthropocene, or the Age of Man. Gaia Vince quit her job to travel the world and to explore what all these changes really mean to our daily lives. She discovers the shocking ways in which we have reshaped our living planet and reveals the ingenious solutions we've evolved to engineer Earth for the future. PATTERNS OF LIFE: SPECIAL EDITIONS OF GROUNDBREAKING SCIENCE BOOKS

Hans Staden's sixteenth-century account of shipwreck and captivity by the Tupinamba Indians of Brazil was an early modern bestseller. This retelling of the German sailor's eyewitness account known as the " True History" shows both why it was so popular at the time and why it remains an important tool for understanding the opening of the Atlantic world.

Eve M. Duffy and Alida C. Metcalf carefully reconstruct Staden's life as a German soldier, his two expeditions to the Americas, and his subsequent shipwreck, captivity, brush with cannibalism, escape, and return. The authors explore how these events and experiences were recreated in the text and images of the " True History." Focusing on Staden's multiple roles as a go-between, Duffy and Metcalf address many of the issues that emerge when cultures come into contact and conflict.

An artful and accessible interpretation, "The Return of Hans Staden" takes a text best known for its sensational tale of cannibalism and shows how it can be reinterpreted as a window into the precariousness of lives on both sides of early modern encounters, when such issues as truth and lying, violence, religious belief, and cultural difference were key to the formation of the Atlantic world.

Anthony Sherley (1565-1633) was one of three brothers from a Sussex gentry family, whose adventures abroad fascinated their contemporaries. Their doings were celebrated and exaggerated in printed pamphlets and a play on the London stage, but are scarcely known today. Anthony was a soldier fighting in France and the Netherlands, and then an unsuccessful privateer, before his patron, the earl of Essex, chose him to lead a group on a mission to Ferrara, which proved abortive. Sherley then undertook on his own initiative to take his followers on a highly risky journey across Turkey to Persia. He hoped to persuade the Shah to ally with the West against their mutual enemy, Ottoman Turkey. Surprisingly, Shah Abbas the Great (1587-1629) approved the plan, and sent Sherley back to Europe as his ambassador. But after that things went badly wrong. Essex lost all influence at court, and was eventually executed for treason. Sherley was refused permission to return to England. He was on his own, and had to find new ways of living and earning. After various episodes in Venice and Morocco he ended up in the pay of Spain, and was chosen to command a fleet created to stop pirates from attacking Spanish possessions. After the failure of this project he was forced to retire to Granada, and lived the rest of his life on a meagre royal pension. But he continued trying to give advice, based on his past experiences, to the king of Spain and his ministers. The book will concentrate on Sherley's career, but will broaden the theme by including chapters on his father and his two brothers, and in particular on Persia and Shah Abbas, the Persian king whom he met. Anthony was an irascible, complex character, often derided and disliked. This biography is more sympathetic than previous ones, and discusses his self-fashioning and his belief in his personal honour, both of which might account for some of his misdemeanours, especially after the death of his patron.

Captain Cook claimed the honour of being the first man to sail into the Antarctic Ocean in 1773, which he then circumnavigated the following year. Cook, though, did not see any land, and he declared that there was no such thing as the Southern Continent. Fifty years later, an Irishman who had been impressed into the Royal Navy at the age of eighteen and risen through the ranks to reach the position of master, proved Cook wrong and discovered and charted parts of the shoreline of Antarctica. He also discovered what is now Elephant Island and Clarence Island, claiming them for the British Crown. Edward Bransfield's varied naval career included taking part in the Bombardment of Algiers in 1816 onboard the 50-gun warship HMS _Severn_. Then, in 1817, he was posted to the Royal Navy's Pacific Squadron off Valpara so in Chile, and it was while serving there that the owner and skipper of an English whaling ship, the _Williams_, was driven south by adverse winds and discovered what came to be known as the South Shetland Islands where Cook had said there was no land. Bransfield's superior officer, Captain Sherriff, decided to investigate this discovery further. He chartered Williams and sent Bransfield with two midshipmen and a ship's surgeon into the Antarctic - and the Irishman sailed into history. Despite his achievements, and many parts of Antarctica and an Antarctic survey vessel being named after him, as well as a Royal Mail commemorative stamp being issued in his name in 2000, the full story of this remarkable man and his historic journey, have never been told - until now. Following decades of research, Sheila Bransfield MA, a member of the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust, has produced the definitive biography of one of Britain's greatest maritime explorers. The book has been endorsed by the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust, whose patron the Princess Royal, has written the Foreword.

A monumental book - I defy anyone to read it and remain unmoved. - Stephen Venables, Alpine Journal. Acclaimed as one of the most powerful accounts of mountain adventure and tragedy ever written, The Endless Knot is a harrowing account of the 1986 K2 disaster. A rare first-hand account from a survivor at the very epicentre of the drama, The Endless Knot describes the disaster in frank detail. Kurt Diemberger's account of the final days of success, accident, storm and escape during which five climbers died, including his partner Julie Tullis and the great British mountaineer Al Rouse, is lacerating in its sense of tragedy, loss and dogged survival. Only Diemberger and Willi Bauer escaped the mountain. K2 had claimed the lives of 13 climbers that summer. Kurt Diemberger is one of only two climbers to have made first ascents of two 8000-metre peaks, Broad Peak and Dhaulagiri. A superb mountaineer, the K2 trauma left him physically and emotionally ravaged, but it also marked him out as an instinctive and tenacious survivor. After a long period of recovery Diemberger published The Endless Knot and resumed life as a mountaineer, filmmaker and international lecturer.

'A book of marvels, marvellously written' RICHARD DAWKINS A pioneering marine biologist takes us down into the deep ocean to understand bioluminescence, the language of light that helps life communicate in the darkness, and what it tells us about the future of life on Earth. Edith Widder grew up determined to become a marine biologist. But after complications from a surgery during college caused her to go temporarily blind, she became fascinated by light as well as the power of optimism. Her focus turned to oceanic bioluminescence, a scientific frontier, and with little promise of funding or employment she took a leap into the dark. Below the Edge of Darkness explores the depths of the planet's oceans as Widder seeks to understand one of the most important and widely used forms of communication in nature. In the process, she reveals hidden worlds and a dazzling menagerie of behaviours and animals, many never-before-seen or, like the legendary Giant Squid, never-before-filmed in its deep-sea lair. Alongside Widder, we experience life-and-death equipment malfunctions and witness breakthroughs in technology and understanding, all of it set against a growing awareness of the deteriorating health of our largest and least understood ecosystem. This is an adventure story as well as a science story. But it's also about the sometimes complicated business of exploration. And ultimately, Widder shows us that exploration, and the corresponding senses of discovery and wonder, are the keys to the ocean's salvation and thus our future on this planet. 'Edie's story is one of hardscrabble optimism, two-fisted exploration and groundbreaking research. As I've said many times, I'd have wrapped my submersible, the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER, in bacon if it would have lured the elusive giant squid from the depths. In Below the Edge of Darkness, Edie tells you how she did it' JAMES CAMERON

"WESTWARD HO! FOR OREGON AND CALIFORNIA!" In the eerily warm spring of 1846, George Donner placed this advertisement in a local newspaper as he and a restless caravan prepared for what they hoped would be the most rewarding journey of a lifetime. But in eagerly pursuing what would a century later become known as the "American dream," this optimistic-yet-motley crew of emigrants was met with a chilling nightmare; in the following months, their jingoistic excitement would be replaced by desperate cries for help that would fall silent in the deadly snow-covered mountains of the Sierra Nevada. We know these early pioneers as the Donner Party, a name that has elicited horror since the late 1840s. With The Best Land Under Heaven, Wallis has penned what critics agree is "destined to become the standard account" (Washington Post) of the notorious saga. Cutting through 160 years of myth-making, the "expert storyteller" (True West) compellingly recounts how the unlikely band of early pioneers met their fate. Interweaving information from hundreds of newly uncovered documents, Wallis illuminates how a combination of greed and recklessness led to one of America's most calamitous and sensationalized catastrophes. The result is a "fascinating, horrifying, and inspiring" (Oklahoman) examination of the darkest side of Manifest Destiny.

'Forget routine; now is the time to embrace the unknown, step out of your comfort zone and open the gateway to the Art of Exploration.' 'Britain's best loved adventurer' (The Times) talks about his secrets of discovery for the first time in this revealing manual of what it means to be an explorer in the modern age. The man who has walked the Nile, the Himalayas and the Americas discusses his lessons from a life on the road, how he managed to turn a passion into a lifestyle, and what inspired and motivated him along the way. Wood explains how he and other explorers face up to life's challenges, often in extraordinary circumstances and demonstrate resilience in the face of overwhelming odds. He shares examples of pioneers in many fields, using their work to show how we can all develop our own explorers mindset and how these lessons can be applied in daily life. With chapters on curiosity, teamwork, resilience and positivity this is a book that provides a tool kit - no matter your age or profession. As Levison says, 'these lessons can help you to fulfil your potential for living a happy life, regardless of your circumstances'.

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.

The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, recently ranked number four on Adventure magazine’s list of top 100 classics, is legendary pioneer John Wesley Powell’s first-person account of his crew’s unprecedented odyssey along the Green and Colorado Rivers and through the Grand Canyon. A bold foray into the heart of the American West’s final frontier, the expedition was achieved without benefit of modern river-running equipment, supplies, or a firm sense of the region’s perilous topography and the attitudes of the native inhabitants towards whites.

Sir Chris Bonington is a household name as a result of his distinguished mountaineering career during which he has lead pioneering expeditions to the summits of some of the most stunning mountains in the world. The Everest Years shares the story of his relationship with the highest and most sought-after peak on the planet, Everest, and his ultimate fulfilment upon finally summiting in 1985 at age fifty. Bonington chronicles four expeditions to the Himalaya and Everest, including the 1975 South-West Face expedition on which he was leader and on which Doug Scott and Dougal Haston became the first Britons to summit the mountain. Bonington also recounts expeditions to K2 and The Ogre (Baintha Brakk) in the Karakoram, and Kongur, in China, describing passionately each attempt: the logistics, glory, and tragedy, seeking to explain his perpetual fascination with the highest points on earth, despite repeatedly enduring the trauma of losing friends, and often placing huge responsibility upon anxious loved ones left at home. The Everest Years reveals Bonington's love and appreciation for his ever-supportive wife Wendy, the loyal Sherpas, the companions sharing his mountain memories including Doug Scott, Dougal Haston, Peter Boardman, Joe Tasker and Mo Anthoine, and of course the glorious peaks of the Himalaya and Karakoram mountain ranges. Following I Chose to Climb and The Next Horizon, this final instalment of Bonington's autobiography will take you through a huge spectrum of brutally honest emotions and majestic landscapes.

A fascinating account of the early days of Antarctic exploration from an expert storyteller.

In the 1830s, the forbidding Antarctic region represented the ultimate mystery. The prospect of discovering a lucrative whaling ground made this uncharted and untapped region especially enticing. Three expeditions to the pole were launched simultaneously by the United States, France, and Britain, each vying to be the first to venture farther south than any vessel had ever sailed before. These expeditions paved the way for the explorers, traders, and whalers of what was to become known as the "Heroic Age" of Antarctic exploration. The Race to the White Continent is a captivating account of their adventures.

"Enthralling enough to make the most steadfastly land-loving reader want to set sail through arduous conditions to uncharted lands. Highly recommended."—Booklist

"[Gurney] is obviously at home with sailing ships....Consequently, there is a refreshing gusto to this book."—Roland Huntford, New York Times Book Review