travel

Explorer and conservationist Paul Rosolie recounts his adventures exploring the inaccessible area of the Mother of God River, or, the Madre de Dios, the region of Peru where the Amazon River begins flowing into the lowland Amazon rainforest.

Tells of the author's fight to raise awareness and solve the problem of plastic marine debris. Eriksen writes of his voyage from Los Angeles to Hawaii aboard his homemade 'junk raft,' and recounts the efforts to fight corporate influence and demand that plastics producers take responsibility. Eriksen also provides concrete, actionable solutions to reduce plastics and microplastics in the oceans.

Examines the lives of ordinary Russians in Chelyabinsk, an aging military-industrial center that is home to the Russian nuclear program, charting the social and political aftershocks of the USSR's collapse.

"On Christmas Eve 2013, off the coast of East Antarctica, an abrupt weather change trapped the Shokalskiy--the ship carrying earth scientist Chris Turney and seventy-one others involved in the Australasian Antarctic Expedition--in a densely packed armada of sea ice, 1400 miles from civilization. With the ship's hull breached and steerage lost, the wind threatened to drive the vessel into the frozen continent, smashing it to pieces. If nearby floating icebergs picked up speed, they could cause a devastating collision, leaving little time to abandon ship and potentially creating an environmental disaster. The forecast offered no relief--a blizzard was headed their way. As Turney chronicles his modern-day ordeal, he revisits famed polar explorer Ernest Shackleton's harrowing Antarctic expedition almost a century prior."--Dust jacket.

"In 2012, after the overthrow of Qaddafi, the acclaimed novelist Hisham Matar journeys to his native Libya after an absence of thirty years. When he was twelve, Matar and his family went into political exile. Eight years later, Matar's's father, a former diplomat and military man turned brave political dissident, was kidnapped from the streets of Cairo by the Libyan government and is believed to have been held in the regime's most notorious prison. Now, the prisons are empty and little hope remains that Jaballah Matar will be found alive..."--Provided by publisher.

"When eighty-one-year-old Jay Mendelsohn decides to enroll in the undergraduate Odyssey seminar his son teaches at Bard College, the two find themselves on an adventure as ... emotional as it is intellectual. For Jay, a retired research scientist who sees the world through a mathematician's unforgiving eyes, this return to the classroom is his 'one last chance' to learn the great literature he'd neglected in his youth--and, even more, a final opportunity to more fully understand his son, a writer and classicist."--Provided by publisher.

Yossi Ghinsberg discusses his travels in the Amazonian rainforest with only the things he carried on his back.

"A veteran war correspondent journeys to remote mountain communities across the globe--from Albania and Chechnya to Nepal and Colombia--to investigate why so many conflicts occur at great heights..."----Provided by publisher.

Provides an account of the voyage undertaken by polar explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew aboard the Endurance in 1914-15, telling how the men survived after their ship became locked inside an island of ice and drifted for ten months before being crushed.

Michael Wolfe, an American Muslim, describes the experience of his hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca.