The seventy-fifth anniversary edition of Gunther’s classic portrait of America John Gunther’s Inside series were among the most popular books of reportage of the 1930s and 1940s. For Inside U.S.A., his magnum opus, Gunther set out from California and visited every state in the country, offering frank, lucid, and humorous observations along the way in what legendary publisher Robert Gottlieb, writing in the New York Times, calls Gunther’s “fluent, personal, casual, snappy” voice. Gunther’s insights on race, labor, the impact of massive New Deal public works projects, rural life, urbanization, and much more yield fascinating insight into life in a postwar America that had vaulted into the status of the world’s preeminent superpower. This seventy-fifth-anniversary edition of Inside U.S.A. provides an invaluable picture of America as it was and is both a delight to read and filled with insights that remain deeply relevant today.

If there's an adventure to be had, it's likely that David Hempleman-Adams has been there first. Ranking alongside Ranulph Fiennes and Chris Bonnington in the pantheon of British explorers, he is the first person in history to achieve what is termed the Adventurers' Grand Slam, by reaching the Geographic and Magnetic North and South Poles as well as climbing the highest peaks on all seven continents. The question Hempleman-Adams is most often asked is, simply: what drives him on? Why risk frostbite pulling a sledge to the North Pole? Why experience the Death Zone on Everest? Why fly in the tiny basket of a precarious balloon across the Atlantic? Is it simply the case that he likes to push himself to the limits, or is there something more to it? No Such Thing as Failure answers these questions and more, uncovering what drives arguably the world's greatest adventurer.

Moving beyond travelogue, V. S. Naipaul's The Masque of Africa considers the effects of belief (in indigenous animisms, the foreign religions of Christianity and Islam, the cults of leaders and mythical history) upon the progress of African civilization. Beginning in Uganda, at the centre of the continent, Naipaul's journey takes in Ghana and Nigeria, the Ivory Coast and Gabon, and ends, as the country does, in South Africa. Focusing upon the theme of belief - though sometimes the political or economical realities are so overwhelming that they have to be taken into account - Naipaul examines the fragile but enduring quality of the old world of magic. To witness the ubiquity of such ancient ritual, to be given some idea of its power, was to be taken far back to the beginning of things. To reach that beginning was the purpose of this book. 'The quality of Naipaul's writing - simple, concise, engaging - rarely varies . . . Above all, Naipaul's latest African journey is eyewitness reporting at its best' Time

**LONGLISTED FOR THE POLARI FIRST BOOK PRIZE** 'You've never read a travel memoir like this before' The Sunday Times, 'Pride Culture Guide' 'Sweet and fun, with real emotional depth and a rousing, feisty spirit' Matt Cain *** In the spring of 2012, Calum finds himself single again after his relationship of six years comes to an end. Heartbroken, unhappy and unsure of what to do next, he leaves the hometown he has been in all his life to embark on a journey that takes him all around the world, from teaching in a school on the outskirts of Rome to exploring the sex clubs of Berlin, to raising tigers in an animal sanctuary deep in the jungles of Thailand. Along the way, he meets LGBT+ people from all walks of life and every part of the rainbow - from an Italian teenager struggling with a homophobic father to a kathoey navigating life as a trans person in Thailand, to a young HIV-positive man living on the streets of London. Their individual stories, not only of hardship and sorrow but also of profound strength and hope, show the breadth and depth of queer life and experience, shedding light on themes such as homophobia, sexual violence, marriage equality and gender identity. Through these meetings and friendships, Calum not only finds the encouragement to embrace life after heartbreak, but also discovers a beautiful, loving global community who support and uplift him through the best and worst moments of his time on the road. A travel memoir with a difference, Eat, Gay, Love is a celebration of the power of community and a personal tribute to the extraordinary lives of LGBT+ people everywhere in the world.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER With a foreword by Diana Gabaldon. Two men. One country. And a lot of whisky. As stars of Outlander, Sam and Graham eat, sleep and breathe the Highlands on this epic road trip around their homeland. They discover that the real thing is even greater than fiction. Clanlands is the story of their journey. Armed with their trusty campervan and a sturdy friendship, these two Scotsmen are on the adventure of a lifetime to explore the majesty of Scotland. A wild ride by boat, kayak, bicycle and motorbike, they travel from coast to loch and peak to valley and delve into Scotland's history and culture, from timeless poetry to bloody warfare. With near-death experiences, many weeks in a confined space together, and a cast of unforgettable characters, Graham and Sam's friendship matures like a fine Scotch. They reflect on their acting careers in film and theatre, find a new awestruck respect for their native country and, as with any good road trip, they even find themselves. Hold onto your kilts... this is Scotland as you've never seen it before.

This book is the culmination of various expeditions made by well-known artist and bestselling author David Bellamy to his beloved Arctic. His descriptions of his travels, written from an artist's point of view, vividly bring to life the challenges he faced when painting outdoors in one of the harshest environments on the planet, and make for an exhilarating and captivating read. Filled with David's watercolour paintings and sketches, made during his various expeditions, the book provides a fascinating insight into the wildlife and people that live within the Arctic Circle and captures perfectly the majesty and breathtaking beauty of the world's final wilderness.

The Scilly Isles, one of the most remote parts of England, are in crisis. With the small population constantly leaving the islands for the mainland, those left behind are having to work harder and harder to make a living, and this summer is crunch time for many of them. Nigel Farrell is our guide through a community he has grown to know and love, filming the islanders over the last two years for the popular BBC2 series 'An Island Parish'. He introduces us to Father Guy, the new priest; another newcomer, Heike, the islands' German vet and Plymouth policewoman Nikki, who set some hearts aflutter on her summer placement last year. With a cast of fascinating characters and a beautiful setting, this is the story of the events of summer in an idiosyncratic world that is slipping away. Come August Bank Holiday, how will the islanders have fared?

"Treasure Hunt" is the story of a national obsession. Dreams of Spanish treasure, of unearned gold at the bottom of the sea, have been a part of the English psyche since long before effective diving equipment was invented. In 1687, Captain William Phips weighed anchor in English waters with an incredible cargo - nearly forty tons of silver and gold, the treasure of the Spanish galleon Concepcion, wrecked over forty years before on a coral reef in the middle of the ocean. This treasure in coins and bullion had been raised by naked divers, unaided by breathing equipment. The great British treasure-hunting boom had begun. Over the next two hundred years, many such adventures, most based on extremely dubious information, were begun, with many fortunes and lives lost in the process. The real boom for underwater treasure hunting took place in the 1690s, with the invention of crude, very dangerous diving equipment. And, with the advent of the stock market, gambling and treasure-hunting became closely connected to the birth of modern capitalism. In the 18th and 19th centuries, treasure-hunting became a professional occupation, with a new breed of diver emerging to salvage the wrecks of English and Dutch East-Indiamen carrying treasure to finance purchases in Asia. World-renowned naval historian Peter Earle returns with an extraordinary and little-known history of a peculiarly English phenomenon - of outstanding bravery, of exceptional recklessness, and above all, of dreams of treasure.

Whether she is contemplating the history of walking as a cultural and political experience over the past two hundred years ("Wanderlust"), or using the life of photographer Eadweard Muybridge as a lens to discuss the transformations of space and time in late nineteenth-century America ("River of Shadows"), Rebecca Solnit has emerged as an inventive and original writer whose mind is daring in the connections it makes. "A Field Guide to Getting Lost" draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnitas own life to explore the issues of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown. The result is a distinctive, stimulating, and poignant voyage of discovery. BACKCOVER: aA meditation on the pleasures and terrors of getting losta
a"The New Yorker"
aThis indispensable California writeras most personal book yet.a
a"San Francisco Chronicle"
aAn intriguing amalgam of personal memoir, philosophical speculation, natural lore, cultural history, and art criticism . . . a book to set you wandering down strangely fruitful trails of thought.a
a"Los Angeles Times"

First published in 1985, this is a history of the Grand Tour, undertaken by young men in the eighteenth century to complete their education - a tour usually to France, Italy and Switzerland, and sometimes encompassing Germany. Rather than being another popular treatment of the theme, this is a scholarly analysis of the motives, purposes, activities and achievements of those who made the Grand Tour.

The book considers to what extent the Grand Tour did fulfil its theoretical educational function, or whether travellers merely parroted the observations of their guidebooks. It also indicates the importance of the Grand Tour in introducing foreign customs into Britain and extending the cosmopolitanism of the European upper classes.

A landmark journey along the full length of the old Iron Curtain - from the Arctic Circle to Turkey's eastern border - tracing the history of the Cold War and meeting the people who live with its legacy. The Iron Curtain divided the continent of Europe, north to south, with the Berlin Wall as its most visible, infamous manifestation. Since the Cold War ended and these borders came down, Europe has transformed itself. New generations have grown up, freed from the tensions and restrictions of the past. But what do the Curtain and the Wall mean today? What has happened to the people and places they divided? What have they left in their wake? In a major new book, Timothy Phillips travels the route of the Iron Curtain from deep inside the Arctic Circle to the meeting point of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkey. He explores the borderlands where the clash of civilisations was at its most intense between 1945 and 1989, and where the world's most powerful ideologies became tangible in reinforced concrete and barbed wire. He looks at the new Europe that emerged from the ruins. The people he meets bear vivid witness to times of change. There are those who look back on the Cold War with nostalgia and affection. Others despise it, unable to forgive the hard and sometimes lost decades that their families, friends and nations endured. These old fault lines have much to tell us about Europe now and about our societies' current disputes - over borders, and about belonging and the meaning of progress. The Curtain and the Wall transports the reader across 5,000 kilometres of Europe and through eight decades to show how one of the defining stories of the 20th century continues to shape our world today.

This book is without a doubt the most remarkable true account ever written of adventure in Africa. It is the story of the life of George Rushby, an adventurer, ivory hunter, prospector, game rancher who immigrated to SA from Britain in search of a new life and all the curious and violent events that befell him until as a game ranger of Tanganyika. He faced and defeated the lion man-eters of the Njombe district. George Rushby vows to rid the land of these man-eaters, but he soon discovers they are unlike any lions he has ever encountered. He gets no help in his fight from the villagers who believe the killings to be the work of the local witchdoctor, a man they fear to cross - when a child Rushby loves is killed, the battle becomes personal. The reader is transported into a world of tumultuous events, many of which baffle all rational thought. George Rushy was duly referred to as "the prince of adventurers" and we join him on his travels and experiences in Africa.

Robert Mads Anderson is an elite mountaineer with a solitary goal: to conquer Everest. After nearly getting killed on his first expedition, he led a team up a new route on the Kangshung Face without oxygen or Sherpa support, climbed solo on the remote North Face, and finally guided a team to the top of the world. Incorporating a who's who of internationally recognised climbers, including Stephen Venables, Reinhold Messner and Chris Bonington, Nine Lives traces the story of Everest, from the big, nationally supported expeditions of the 1980s; through the small teams forging new routes and climbing solo; to the commercially guided expeditions of today. Set against the majestic backdrop of the world's tallest peak, Anderson's nine Everest expeditions over eighteen years define what truly drives a human being to the greatest of heights. With a foreword by Peter Hillary and 32 pages of colour photography, in Nine Lives Robert Mads Anderson offers his personal account of the world's highest mountain.

This upbeat nitty-gritty memoir, based on the author's 2001 trail journal, chronicles one man's hike the whole length of the Appalachian Trail, beginning just north of Atlanta and finishing six months later in Maine. The journey included adventures with a faithful and eccentric dog, a new romance, and the challenges and triumphs of walking 2167 miles in all kinds of weather.

The acclaimed travel writer's youthful journey - as an 18-year-old - across 1930s Europe by foot began in A Time of Gifts, which covered the author's exacting journey from the Lowlands as far as Hungary. Picking up from the very spot on a bridge across the Danube where his readers last saw him, we travel on with him across the great Hungarian Plain on horseback, and over the Romanian border to Transylvania. The trip was an exploration of a continent which was already showing signs of the holocaust which was to come. Although frequently praised for his lyrical writing, Fermor's account also provides a coherent understanding of the dramatic events then unfolding in Middle Europe. But the delight remains in travelling with him in his picaresque journey past remote castles, mountain villages, monasteries and towering ranges. The concluding part of the trilogy was published in September 2013 as The Broken Road.

For over twenty years, people turned to A. A. Gill's columns every Sunday - for his fearlessness, his perception, and the laughter-and-tear-provoking one-liners - but mostly because he was the best. 'By miles the most brilliant journalist of our age', as Lynn Barber put it. This is the definitive collection of a voice that was silenced too early but that can still make us look at the world in new and surprising ways. In the words of Andrew Marr, A.. A. Gill was 'a golden writer'. There was nothing that he couldn't illuminate with his dazzling prose. Wherever he was - at home or abroad - he found the human story, brought it to vivid life, and rendered it with fierce honesty and bracing compassion. And he was just as truthful about himself. There have been various collections of A. A. Gill's journalism - individual compilations of his restaurant and TV criticism, of his travel writing and his extraordinary feature articles. This book showcasesthe very best of his work: the peerlessly funny criticism, the extraordinarily knowledgeable food writing, assignments throughout the world, and reflections on life, love, and death. Drawn from a range of publications, including the Sunday Times, Vanity Fair, Tatler and Australian Gourmet Traveller, The Ivy Cookbook and his books on England and America, it is by turns hilarious, uplifting, controversial, unflinching, sad, funny and furious.

So this is surfing in Britain, I told myself as I grumpily walked up a slope of wet rocks and wispy beach grass, trying to keep a foothold as rain and wind both tried their utmost to send me skidding back down to the freezing beach below. Tom Anderson has always loved surfing - anywhere except the UK. But a chance encounter leads him to a series of adventures on home surf... As he visits the popular haunts and secret gems of British surfing he meets the Christians who pray for waves (and get them), loses a competition to a non-existent surfer, is nearly drowned in the River Severn and has a watery encounter with a pedigree sheep. All this rekindles his love affair with the freezing fun that is surfing the North Atlantic.

"A lyrical 'book of days' . . . A bejewelled mosaic" Financial Times "Humane, insightful and deeply cultured" Times Literary Supplement Though a tireless explorer of distant cultures, for more than forty years Cees Nooteboom has also been returning to Menorca, "the island of the wind", and it is in his house there, with a study full of books and a garden taken over by cacti and many insects, that the 533 days of writing take place. The result is not a diary, nor a set of movements of the soul organised by dates, but "a book of days", with observations about what is immediately around him, his love for Menorca, his thoughts on the world, on life and death, on literature and oblivion. Every impression opens windows onto vast horizons: the Divine Comedy and the books it generated, the contempt of Borges for Gombrowicz, the death of David Bowie, the endless flight of the Voyagers, the repetition of history as a tragedy, but never as farce. 533 is a meditative rhapsody that would like to exclude the noise of current events, yet must return to them several times, and sceptically contemplates the threat of a disintegrating Europe. Reading this book is like having an extraordinary conversation with an extraordinary mind. "The very first pages are so powerful that you suspect the author must have binned the preceding pages that were needed to climb to such heights" De Volkskrant "The 533 days captivate in their undisguised openness to the world" Suddeutsche Zeitung Photographs by Simone Sassen * Translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson

Robert Twigger goes to the Far East in search of the world's longest snake - 'echoes of Gerald Durrell's trips crossed with Redmond O'Hanlon's foray into the heart of Borneo . . . a fantastic book' DAILY MAIL About to be married, Robert Twigger decides on his last great adventure as a bachelor. Surfing the net, he discovers the Roosevelt Prize - worth $50,000 - for the capture of a live 30 foot python. Armed only with a tin of High Toast Snuff (deadly if sniffed by a snake), Twigger sets off into the remote jungles of Indonesia in search of his prey. Along the way, he investigates the legendarily beautiful women of Sulawesi, treads in Nabokov's footsteps, looks for giant snakes beneath the sewers of Kuala Lumpur, and spends time with a variety of snake catchers and cults. After being caught up in anti-Chinese riots and surviving on greasy civet cat in the jungle, Twigger finally comes face to face with the big one; but the final capture is not quite what he had in mind.

Tales of escape and adventure on Britain's waterways; In The Pull of the River two foolhardy explorers do what we would all love to do: they turn their world upside down and seek adventure on their very own doorstep.; In a handsome, homemade canoe, painted a joyous nautical red the colour of Mae West's lips, Matt and his friend James delve into a watery landscape that invites us to see the world through new eyes.; Over chalk, gravel, clay and mud; through fields, woodland, villages, towns and cities, they reveal many places that otherwise go unnoticed and perhaps unloved, finding delight in the Waveney, Stour, Alde/Ore, upper and lower Thames, Lark, Great Ouse, Granta and Cam, Wye, Otter, Colne, Severn and the Great Glen Trail.; Showing that it is still possible to get lost while knowing exactly where you are, The Pull of the River is a beautifully written exploration of nature, place and friendship, and an ode to the great art - and joy - of adventure.

Among the Believers is V. S. Naipaul's classic account of his journeys through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia; 'the believers' are the Muslims he met on those journeys, young men and women battling to regain the original purity of their faith in the hope of restoring order to a chaotic world. It is a uniquely valuable insight into modern Islam and the comforting simplifications of religious fanaticism. 'This book investigates the Islamic revolution and tries to understand the fundamentalist zeal that has gripped the young in Iran and other Muslim countries . . . He is a modern master.' - Sunday Times 'His level of perception is of the highest, and his prose has become the perfect instrument for realizing those perceptions on the page. His travel writing is perhaps the most important body of work of its kind in the second half of the century.' - Martin Amis, author of Time's Arrow.

The story behind the best-selling book One Man’s Wilderness and how author Sam Keith and Dick Proenneke met and forged an everlasting friendship. “Sam, you know right well you don’t want to leave this country. Don’t give up on it. Me and you got to figure something out.” After serving as a US Marine during World War II and attending college on the GI Bill, Sam Keith decided to seek adventure in Alaska as a laborer on the Adak Navy base. There he befriended Dick Proenneke, whose shared love of the outdoors, hard work, and self-reliance quickly bonded an alliance between the two. Together they explored the wilds of South Central Alaska while working on the Navy base, hunting and fishing with friends and breathing in the great outdoors. Keith was ready to leave after three years of finding almost everything he sought—not realizing then how his fate was intrinsically tied to his friend’s and how it would lead to writing the best-selling book One Man’s Wilderness. Sam Keith passed away in 2003. But in 2013, his son-in-law and children’s book author/illustrator Brian Lies discovered in an archive box in their garage a book manuscript, originally written in 1974 after the publication of One Man’s Wilderness. First Wilderness is the story of Keith's own experiences, at times harrowing, funny, and fascinating. Along with the original manuscript are photos and excerpts from his journals, letters, and notebooks, woven in to create a compelling and poignant memoir of search and discovery. Foreword by Nick Jans, one of Alaska's foremost authors and photographers, and Afterword by Keith’s daughter Laurel Lies.