For reasons even he didn't understand, Bill Bryson decided in 1996 to walk the 2,100-mile Appalachian trail. Winding from Georgia to Maine, this uninterrupted 'hiker's highway' sweeps through the heart of some of America's most beautiful and treacherous terrain

At 22, the author thought she had lost everything: her mother had died, her family was scattered, and her marriage was over. 4 years later, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert to Washington State, alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, but it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone. [From publisher's description]

Barely 30 years old and a wildly successful author, Jack London determined to follow the example of his boyhood idol, Herman Melville, and explore the islands of the South Pacific. Accompanied by his wife and 2 crew members, London set sail from San Francisco in 1906 aboard the Snark, a custom-made 55-foot ketch. With wry good humor, he recounts both the exhilaration and hardship of a 2-year voyage aboard a small, leaky craft. [From publisher's...

John Muir's account of his travels in Alaska.

Chance (1914) was the first of Conrad's novels to bring him popular success and it holds a unique place among his works. It tells the story of Flora de Barral, a vulnerable and abandoned young girl who is "like a beggar, without a right to anything but compassion." After her bankrupt father is imprisoned, she learns the harsh fact that a woman in her position "has no resources but in herself." Her only means of action is to be what she is. Flora's...

English novelist, historian and science writer Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) abandoned teaching and launched his literary career with a series of highly successful science-fiction novels. The Time Machine was the first of a number of these imaginative literary inventions. First published in 1895, the novel follows the adventures of a hypothetical Time Traveller who journeys into the future to find that humanity has evolved into two races: the peaceful...

"In 1995 Bill Bryson got into his car and took a weeks-long farewell motoring trip about England before moving his family back to the United States. The book about that trip, Notes from a Small Island, is ... [often considered] one of the most acute and affectionate portrayals of England in all its glorious eccentricity ever written. Two decades later, he set out again to rediscover that country, and the result is [this book]"--Amazon.com. Bryson...

An account of an Austrian mountain climber's escape from a British internment camp in India during World War II and his twenty-one-month journey through the Himalayas to safety in the Forbidden City of Lhasa in Tibet.

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879) is a work of travel literature by British explorer Isabella Bird. Adventurous from a young age, Bird gained a reputation as a writer and photographer interested in nature and the stories and cultures of people around the world. A bestselling author and the first woman inducted into the Royal Geographical Society, Bird is recognized today as a pioneering woman whose contributions to travel writing, exploration,...

Taking up a challenge from his whist partners, a mysterious English gentleman named Phileas Fogg wagers half his fortune and abandons his quiet domestic routine to undertake a daring feat: to circle the globe in a mere 80 days, an achievement unheard of in the Victorian world. Fogg and Passepartout, his devoted manservant, avail themselves of virtually every known means of transportation in their wild race against time. All the while, a devious detective...