'This is an epic journey by a man who’s not only obsessed with birds but who has a deep spiritual connection with the planet as he observes the environments and habitats he encounters.' David Lindo, author of How to be an Urban Birder The (Big) Year Flew By is the tale of one avid birder’s epic, record-breaking adventure through 40 countries over 6 continents – in just one year – to see 6,852 bird species, many on the precipice of extinction. When Arjan Dwarshuis first heard of the ‘Big Year’ – the legendary record for birdwatching – he was just twenty years old. It was midnight, and he was sitting on the roof of a truck high up in the Andean Mountains. In that moment, Arjan made a promise to himself that someday, somehow, he would become a world-record-holding birder. Ten years later, he embarked on an incredible, arduous and perilous journey that took him around the globe; over uninhabited islands, through dense unforgiving rainforests, across snowy mountain peaks and unrelenting deserts – in just a single year. Would he survive? Would he be able to break the ‘Big Year’ record, navigating through a world filled with shifting climate and geopolitical challenges? The (Big) Year that Flew By is an unforgettable, personal exploration of the limits of human potential when engaging with the natural world. It is a book about birds and birding and Arjan’s attempts to raise awareness for critically endangered species, but it is also a book about overcoming mental challenges, extreme physical danger and human competition and fully realizing your passions through nature, adventure and conservation.

Fat, forty-four, father of three sons, and facing a vasectomy, Mark Obmascik would never have guessed that his next move would be up a 14,000-foot mountain. But when his twelve-year-old son gets bitten by the climbing bug at summer camp, Obmascik can't resist the opportunity for some high-altitude father-son bonding by hiking a peak together. After their first joint climb, Obmascik, addled by the thin air, decides to keep his head in the clouds and try to scale "all "fifty-four of Colorado's 14,000-foot mountains, known as the Fourteeners--and to do it "in less than one year. "The result is "Halfway to Heaven, "a rollicking, witty, sometimes harrowing chronicle of an outrageous adventure that is no walk in the park. This "hilarious midlife picaresque" ("Publishers Weekly") has garnered wide critical acclaim, was named an "Editor's Pick" by "Parade, "won the 2009 National Outdoor Book Award for Outdoor Literature, and made one reviewer laugh so hard he "blew beer out of his] nose" ("Colorado Daily"). Like the author's critically acclaimed debut, "The Big Year, "it brings a keen eye and sharp humor to an obsessive subculture: climbers who share the author's crazed passion of scaling all fifty-four of the famed and feared Fourteeners.

Now reissued to tie in to the 2011 major motion picture release from 20th Century Fox starring Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson, the critically heralded book by award-winning journalist Mark Obmascik--"a feathered version of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World " ( Outside ).

With engaging, unflappably wry humor, The Big Year re-creates the grand, grueling, expensive, and occasionally vicious, "extreme" 365-day contest for a new North American birdwatching record. In this thrilling real-life adventure, three men battle the daunting forces of nature--and each other--in their whirlwind 275,000-mile odyssey from Texas to British Columbia, Cape May to Alaska. One of them achieves an astonishing record unlikely ever to be bested.

A captivating tour of human and avian nature, passion and paranoia, honor and deceit, fear and loathing, The Big Year shows the lengths to which people will go to pursue their dreams, to conquer and categorize--no matter how low the stakes.