|
Armchair Travel August 2023
|
|
|
|
| The Last Ride of the Pony Express: My 2,000-Mile Horseback Journey Into the Old West by Will GrantThe Pony Express was a fast-horse frontier mail service that spanned the American West— the high, dry, and undeniably lonesome part of North America. While in operation during the 1860s, it carried letter mail on a blistering ten-day schedule between Missouri and San Francisco, running through a vast and mostly uninhabited wilderness. It covered a massive distance—akin to running horses between Madrid and Moscow— and to this day, the Pony Express is irrefutably the greatest display of American horsemanship to ever color the pages of a history book. The Last Ride of the Pony Express is a uniquely tenacious tale of adventure by a native son of the West who defies most modern conveniences to compass some two thousand miles on horseback. The result is an unforgettable narrative that will forever change how you see the West, the Pony Express, and America as a whole. Also available as an and an |
|
|
100 places to see after you die : a travel guide to the afterlife by Ken Jennings100 Places to See After You Die is written in the style of iconic bestselling travel guides. But instead of recommending must-see destinations in Mexico, Thailand, or Rome, this book outlines journeys through the afterlife, as dreamed up over the past 5,000 years of human history by our greatest prophets, poets, mystics, artists, and TV showrunners. Where's the best place to grab a bite to eat in the ancient Egyptian underworld? Which circles of Dante's Inferno have the nicest accommodations? How does one dress like a local in the heavenly palace of Hinduism's Lord Vishnu, or avoid the flesh-eating river serpents in the Klingon afterlife? What are the hidden treasures to be found off the beaten path in Hades, Valhalla, or NBC's The Good Place? This book answers all those questions and more about the world(s) to come. The destiny of the human soul in the great beyond is one of life's deepest mysteries. But you won't have to wonder anymore! 100 Places to See After You Die comprehensively indexes one hundred different afterlife destinations, exhaustively researched from sources ranging from the Epic of Gilgamesh to modern-day pop songs, video games, and Simpsons episodes. Be ready for whatever post-mortal destiny awaits, whether you're hoping for the astral plane, a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape, or the baseball diamond from Field of Dreams. This is one trip no one should leave to chance. Most vacation sojourns are brief, but this destination could be your eternal resting place!
|
|
|
American ramble : a walk of memory and renewal by Neil KingA stunning, revelatory memoir about a 330-mile walk from Washington, D.C., to New York City--an unforgettable pilgrimage to the heart of America across some of our oldest common ground. Neil King Jr's desire to walk from Washington, D.C., to New York City began as a whim and soon became an obsession. Determined to rediscover what matters in life and to see our national story with new eyes, Neil turned north with a small satchel on his back and one mission in mind: To pay close attention to the land he crossed and the people he met. The journey travels deep into America's past and present, uncovering forgotten pockets and overlooked people. By turns amusing, inspiring, and sublime, American Ramble offers an exquisite account of personal and national renewal--an indelible study of our country as we've never seen it before.
|
|
| Walking With Sam: A Father, a Son, and Five Hundred Miles Across Spain by Andrew McCarthyWhen Andrew McCarthy's eldest son began to take his first steps into adulthood, McCarthy found himself wishing time would slow down. Looking to create a more meaningful connection with Sam before he fled the nest, as well as recreate his own life-altering journey decades before, McCarthy decided the two of them should set out on a trek like few others: 500 miles across Spain's Camino de Santiago. Over the course of the journey, the pair traversed an unforgiving landscape, having more honest conversations in five weeks than they'd had in the preceding two decades. Discussions of divorce, the trauma of school, McCarthy's difficult relationship with his own father, fame, and Flaming Hot Cheetos threatened to either derail their relationship or cement it. Walking With Sam captures this intimate, candid and hopeful expedition as the father son duo travel across the country and towards one another. Also available as an and an |
|
| In the summer of 1938, botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter set off to run the Colorado River, accompanied by an ambitious and entrepreneurial expedition leader, a zoologist, and two amateur boatmen. With its churning waters and treacherous boulders, the Colorado was famed as the most dangerous river in the world. Journalists and veteran river runners boldly proclaimed that the motley crew would never make it out alive. But for Clover and Jotter, the expedition held a tantalizing appeal: no one had yet surveyed the plant life of the Grand Canyon, and they were determined to be the first. Through the vibrant letters and diaries of the two women, science journalist Melissa L. Sevigny traces their daring forty-three-day journey down the river, during which they meticulously cataloged the thorny plants that thrived in the Grand Canyon's secret nooks and crannies. Along the way, they chased a runaway boat, ran the river's most fearsome rapids, and turned the harshest critic of female river runners into an ally. Clover and Jotter's plant list, including four new cactus species, would one day become vital for efforts to protect and restore the river ecosystem. Brave the Wild River is a spellbinding adventure of two women who risked their lives to make an unprecedented botanical survey of a defining landscape in the American West. Also available as an |
|
Focus on: Traveling Celebrities
|
|
| Clanlands: Whisky, Warfare, and a Scottish Adventure Like No Other by Sam Heughan & Graham McTavish A road trip book with a difference. Stars of Outlander—Sam Heughan & Graham McTavish—explore Scotland, a land of raw beauty, poetry, feuding, music, history, and warfare. From their faithful camper van to boats, kayaks, bicycles, and motorbikes, join stars of Outlander Sam and Graham on a road trip with a difference, as two Scotsmen explore a land of raw beauty, poetry, feuding, music, history, and warfare. Unlikely friends Sam and Graham begin their journey in the heart of Scotland at Glencoe and travel from there all the way to Inverness and Culloden battlefield, where along the way they experience adventure and a cast of highland characters. In this story of friendship, finding themselves, and whisky, they discover the complexity, rich history, and culture of their native country. Also available as an |
|
| From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home by Tembi LockeIt was love at first sight when actress Tembi met professional chef, Saro, on a street in Florence. There was just one problem: Saro's traditional Sicilian family did not approve of his marrying a black American woman. However, the couple, heartbroken but undeterred, forged on. They built a happy life in Los Angeles, with fulfilling careers, deep friendships, and the love of their lives: a baby girl they adopted at birth. Eventually, they reconciled with Saro's family just as he faced a formidable cancer that would consume all their dreams. From Scratch chronicles three summers Tembi spends in Sicily with her daughter, Zoela, as she begins to piece together a life without her husband in his tiny hometown hamlet of farmers. Where once Tembi was estranged from Saro's family, now she finds solace and nourishment—literally and spiritually—at her mother-in-law's table. In the Sicilian countryside, she discovers the healing gifts of simple fresh food, the embrace of a close knit community, and timeless traditions and wisdom that light a path forward. All along the way she reflects on her and Saro's romance—an incredible love story that leaps off the pages. In Sicily, it is said that every story begins with a marriage or a death—in Tembi Locke's case, it is both. "Locke's raw and heartfelt memoir will uplift readers suffering from the loss of their own loved ones" (Publishers Weekly), but her story is also about love, finding a home, and chasing flavor as an act of remembrance. From Scratch is for anyone who has dared to reach for big love, fought for what mattered most, and those who needed a powerful reminder that life is...delicious. |
|
| Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey I’ve been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me. Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life’s challenges—how to get relative with the inevitable—you can enjoy a state of success I call “catching greenlights.” So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. This is fifty years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops. Hopefully, it’s medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot’s license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears. It’s a love letter. To life. It’s also a guide to catching more greenlights—and to realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too. Good luck. an , and an |
|
| The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey by Candice MillardThe River of Doubt—it is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes through one of the most treacherous jungles in the world. Indians armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows; piranhas glide through its waters; boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling cauldron. After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon. Together with his son Kermit and Brazil’s most famous explorer, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it. In the process, he changed the map of the western hemisphere forever. Along the way, Roosevelt and his men faced an unbelievable series of hardships, losing their canoes and supplies to punishing whitewater rapids, and enduring starvation, Indian attack, disease, drowning, and a murder within their own ranks. Three men died, and Roosevelt was brought to the brink of suicide. The River of Doubt brings alive these extraordinary events in a powerful nonfiction narrative thriller that happens to feature one of the most famous Americans who ever lived. From the soaring beauty of the Amazon rain forest to the darkest night of Theodore Roosevelt’s life, here is Candice Millard’s dazzling debut. |
|
| Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant... by Nick Offerman Nick Offerman has always felt a particular affection for the Land of the Free—not just for the people and their purported ideals but to the actual land itself: the bedrock, the topsoil, and everything in between that generates the health of your local watershed. In his new book, Nick takes a humorous, inspiring, and elucidating trip to America's trails, farms, and frontier to examine the people who inhabit the land, what that has meant to them and us, and to the land itself, both historically and currently. In 2018, Wendell Berry posed a question to Nick, a query that planted the seed of this book, sending Nick on two memorable journeys with pals—a hiking trip to Glacier National Park with his friends Jeff Tweedy and George Saunders, as well as an extended visit to his friend James Rebanks, the author of The Shepherd's Life and English Pastoral. He followed that up with an excursion that could only have come about in 2020—Nick and his wife, Megan Mullally, bought an Airstream trailer to drive across (several of) the United States. These three quests inspired some “deep-ish" thinking from Nick, about the history and philosophy of our relationship with nature in our national parks, in our farming, and in our backyards; what we mean when we talk about conservation; and the importance of outdoor recreation, all subjects very close to Nick's heart. With witty, heartwarming stories and a keen insight into the human problems we all confront, this is both a ramble through and celebration of the land we all love.
Also available as an |
|
Contact your librarian for more great books!
|
|
|
|
|
|