Washoe County Library System

Considered a masterpiece of travel literature for nearly a century, The Sea and the Jungle is a wise and witty book of firsts: ostensibly a lighthearted story of a Londoner's first ocean voyage, it is also a carefully crafted journalistic account of the first successful ascent of the Amazon River and its tributary, the Madeira, by an English steamer. First published in 1912,The Sea and the Jungle remains one of the most popular accounts of a traveler's...

In the winter of 1933 eighteen-year-old Patrick ('Paddy') Leigh Fermor set out to walk across Europe, starting in Holland and ending in Constantinople, a trip that took him the better part of a year. Decades later, when he was well over fifty, Leigh Fermor told the story of that life-changing journey in A time of gifts and Between the woods and the water ... The broken road is the long and avidly awaited account of the final leg of his youthful adventure...

"On an autumn morning in 1849, Henry David Thoreau stepped out his front door to walk the beaches of Cape Cod. Over a century and a half later, Ben Shattuck does the same. With little more than a loaf of bread, brick of cheese, and a notebook, Shattuck sets out to retrace Thoreau's path through the Cape's outer beaches, from the elbow to Provincetown's fingertip. This is the first of six journeys taken by Shattuck, each one inspired by a walk once...

"In this enlightening personal account, one man tells the story of his groundbreaking project to sleep overnight in former slave dwellings that still stand across the country—revealing the fascinating history behind these sites and shedding light on larger issues of race in America. Joseph McGill Jr., a historic preservationist and Civil War reenactor, founded the Slave Dwelling Project in 2010 based on an idea that was sparked and first developed...

Chronicles the lives of the handful of residents of a dying Nevada mining town, focusing on the comings and goings at the town general store that make the town seem like a more vibrant place than many small cities.--

When Canadian brothers Colin and Ryan Pyle set out from Shanghai on a motorcycle journey that had never previously been attempted, they thought they had some idea of what lay ahead of them. It was a misconception that had become evident by the end of Day 1. But, despite the many challenges they faced, 65 days and 18,000 km later they'd succeeded in circumnavigating China. In an expedition of extremes, Colin and Ryan visited the third lowest point...

The author's chronicle of his year-long trek through Alaska introduces the people and places of the nation's "last frontier."

"A product of beige California suburbs, Mandel was overlooked and unexceptional. When her father ships her off on a youth group tour of Israel, he inadvertently catapults his seventeen-year-old daughter into a world of angry European backpackers, seize-the-day Israelis, and the fall out of cold war-era politics. Border violence hadn't been on the birthright tour agenda. But then neither had domestic violence, going broke, getting wasted, getting sick,...