Way back in 2007, my book club read In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick. Loved the book (I’m a big fan of real-life adventures) but it was a poor choice for the book club. There wasn’t much to debate, really – whales are big, starvation is bad – and we were all… Read more
I was of two minds about Christopher Stewart’s Jungleland: A Mysterious Lost City, a WWII Spy, and a True Story of Deadly Adventure. First of all, I love a good adventure book. Traipsing through the jungle looking for a lost city, with a plan based only on rumors and some numbers carved into an old walking stick? Love it! That’s… Read more
Knowing what this book was about, I wasn’t expecting a happy ending. What surprised me was how often I was moved to tears by the sheer bravery and strength of the men in this novel. What kind of inner strength does it take to go out into what will likely be deadly conditions, risking your own life, to rescue a… Read more
In The Mistress of Abha by William Newton, Ivor Willoughby goes searching for the father he barely knew. A British soldier stationed in Arabia, Ivor met his father, Robert, on only 2 occasions and for only a handful of days in total, but Robert was a legend in their household and beyond. Ivor is determined, from a very young age,… Read more
True or False: 1. The safest seats on an airplane are at the back. 2. If you fall into a frozen lake, you have only 3 minutes to escape the water. 3. In prisoner-of-war camps in Vietnam, optimists lived longer than anyone else. Who lives and who dies in a crisis? Do you have what it takes to be one… Read more
Michael Crichton told the kind of stories that grabbed us as readers and that drew us to the big screen. Pirate Latitudes, unpublished at the time of his death in 2008, is just that sort of story — a big, exciting tale of a handsome pirate, a woman scorned, impossible odds and a fortune in gold. You can almost imagine… Read more
Green Eyes in the Amazon is a very timely book — almost too timely. Fundamentalist religious groups are conspiring to control society and stifle scientific advances by any means necessary, including violence. It is set in a hazy but not-too-distant future. No more cellphones and SUVs, now we all have vidcoms and autopiloted cars. Central America is a Dead Zone,… Read more
I love a good adventure novel! Exploring the Arctic, searching for the source of the Nile, exploring the Amazon basin, all from the comfort of your local library. Most of us will never in our lives go anywhere that is truly unexplored, but I have great respect for the men (and occasionally women) who were unafraid of the unknown. In… Read more
I have written before about my love of travel and adventure books. Often, these are more accurately about misadventure – an expedition gone wrong, a plane crash, a shipwreck. Some people live, some die. Why did Robert Falcon Scott lose every member of his expedition, while Edmund Shackleton brought all of his crewmembers – including a stowaway – home safely?… Read more
I have always been a fan of travel and adventure books, both fiction and non-fiction, which is what drew me to Kira Salak’s book, The White Mary. Although the book is a work of fiction, she drew on her long experience as a travel journalist to present a story full of detail and vibrant description. It is immediately apparent that… Read more