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Extreme Classics: 100 Greatest Adventure Books
( National Geographic Adventure )
My Journey to Lhasa
by Alexandra David-Neel
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1927 |
Rank:
55
Wind, Sand & Stars
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1940 |
Rank:
3
Worst Journey in the World
by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
[ACCESS EBOOK ONLINE]
As War and Peace is to novels, so is The Worst Journey in the World to the literature of polar travel: the one to beat. The author volunteered as a young man to go to the Antarctic with Robert Falcon Scott in 1910; that, and writing this book, are the only things of substance he ever did in life. They were enough. The expedition set up camp on the edge of the continent while Scott waited to go for the Pole in the spring. But first, Cherry-Garrard and two other men set out on a midwinter trek to collect emperor penguin eggs. It was a heartbreaker: three men hauling 700 pounds (318 kilograms) of gear through unrelieved darkness, with temperatures reaching 50, 60, and 70 degrees below zero (-46, -51, and -57 degrees Celsius); clothes frozen so hard it took two men to bend them. But Cherry-Garrard's greater achievement was to imbue everything he endured with humanity and even humor. Andas when he describes his later search for Scott and the doomed South Pole teamwith tragedy as well. His book earns its preeminent place on this list by captivating us on every level: It is vivid; it is moving; it is unforgettable.
| Call Number: Electronic Resources | Publication Date: 1922 |
Rank:
1
West With the Night
by Beryl Markham
'A bloody wonderful book,' Ernest Hemingway called it, and so it isAfrica from the seat of an Avro biplane, winged prose, if you will, about the lion that mauled her, about the Masai and the Kikuyu, about flying over the Serengeti, searching for the downed plane of her lover. It appears that Markham's third husband, writer Raoul Schumacher, contributed much of the literary polish. But what of it? The book, and the life, still radiate excitement: 'I have lifted my plane from the Nairobi airport for perhaps a thousand flights and I have never felt her wheels glide from the earth into the air without knowing the uncertainty and the exhilaration of firstborn adventure.'
| Call Number: DT365.75.M3 M3 | Publication Date: 1942 |
Rank:
8
Voyage of the Beagle
by Charles Darwin
[ACCESS EBOOK ONLINE]
The grand old man of modern biology was a gentleman of leisure, a crack shot, and no scientist when, at 22, he boarded the Beagle for its long survey voyage to South America and the Pacific. His record of the trip is rich in anthropology and science. (His shipmates called him 'the Fly-catcher.') The adventure comes in watching over Darwin's shoulder as he works out the first glimmerings of his theory of evolution.
| Call Number: QH11 .D2 Electronic Resource | Publication Date: 1839 |
Rank:
23
K2The Savage Mountain
by Charles Houston and Robert Bates
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1954 |
Rank:
46
Spirit of St. Louis
by Charles Lindbergh
This is Lindbergh's account of perhaps the most famous air journey ever made, the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris. It's a spacious book, too, full of incidentbailouts over Illinois cornfields, Lindbergh's barnstorming days, family lore. More than the tale of a great adventure, it's a portrait of the adventurer.
| Call Number: TL540.L5 A85 | Publication Date: 1953 |
Rank:
19
Travels in Arabia Deserta
by Charles M. Doughty
During his two years in the desert, Doughty traveled with camel caravans, lived in Bedouin tents, went hungry, and faced much danger. Then he wrote it all up in the most stylized, peculiar prose, which nevertheless gives us a fascinating picture of a type of Arab life that has been all but forgotten today.
| Call Number: DS207 .D73 1953 | Publication Date: 1888 |
Rank:
51
Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada
by Clarence King
| Call Number: F868 .S5 K542 1997 EB | Publication Date: 1872 |
Rank:
54
Man Who Walked Through Time
by Colin Fletcher
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1968 |
Rank:
45
The Mountain of My Fear
by David Roberts
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1968 |
Rank:
28
Deborah: A Wilderness Narrative
by David Roberts (1968, 1970) "The deepest despair I have ever felt,
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1970 |
Rank:
28
Home of the Blizzard
by Douglas Mawson
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1915 |
Rank:
22
Desert Solitaire
by Edward Abbey
Abbey is our very own desert father, a hermit loading up on silence and austerity and the radical beauty of empty places. Early on he spent summers working as a ranger at Utah's Arches National Monument, and those summers were the source for this book of reverence for the wildand outrage over its destruction. But really his whole life was an adventure and a protest against all the masks of progress. He wanted to recapture life on the outsidebare-boned, contemptuous of what we call civilizationand to do it without flinching. He helped ignite the environmental movement, teaching his followers to save the world by leaving it absolutely alone.
| Call Number: PS3551.B2 Z463 1988 | Publication Date: 1968 |
Rank:
7
Scrambles Amongst the Alps
by Edward Whymper
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1871 |
Rank:
36
Stranger in the Forest
by Eric Hansen
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1988 |
Rank:
50
Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
by Eric Newby
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1958 |
Rank:
16
South
by Ernest Shackleton
[ACCESS EBOOK ONLINE]
Shackleton's story bears endless retelling (and it has been retold, in fine accounts by Alfred Lansing and, more recently, Caroline Alexander). Here we have it in the great British explorer's own words, quiet, understated, enormously compelling. We all know the story: the expedition to Antarctica in the Endurance, the ship breaking up in the ice, the incredible journey in an open boat across the world's stormiest seas. Though Shackleton's literary gifts may not equal those of Cherry-Garrard or Nansen, his book is a testament, plain and true, to what human beings can endure.
| Call Number: G850 1914.S53 S53 2009 EB | Publication Date: 1919 |
Rank:
15
Endurance
by F.A. Worsley
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Worsley was the captain of the Endurance, escaped with Shackleton when their ship was crushed, and bore what they all bore. He navigated that heroic open-boat journey to South Georgia island, through weather that was so bad he could take sights on the sun only four times in 800 miles (1300 km). Still, they hit the island square on. Nice. His account is brisker than the thorough Shackleton's, but keeps the excitement intact.
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1931 |
Rank:
35
Gipsy Moth Circles the World
by Francis Chichester
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1967 |
Rank:
47
Oregon Trail
by Francis Parkman
[ACCESS EBOOK ONLINE]
In 1846, the future historian of the American West went west himself, following the trail of the emigrant trains into the Rockies. 'A month ago,' he writes along the way, 'I should have thought it rather a startling affair to have an acquaintance ride out in the morning and lose his scalp before night, but here it seems the most natural thing in the world.' Generations of readers have loved this book; you will, too.
| Call Number: F592 .P284 2010 EB | Publication Date: 1849 |
Rank:
31
Farthest North
by Fridtjof Nansen
[ACCESS EBOOK ONLINE]
1893, Nansen purposely froze his ship into the Arctic ice and traveled with the drift of the pack. When the ship approached striking distance of the Pole, he set out for it by dogsled, reaching the highest latitude yet attained by man before turning back to Norway. He was gone three years. The book is both an epic and a lyric masterpiece.
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1897 |
Rank:
11
Starlight and Storm
by Gaston Rébuffat
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1954 |
Rank:
41
Journey Without Maps
by Graham Greene
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1936 |
Rank:
40
Seven Years in Tibet
by Heinrich Harrer
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1953 |
Rank:
20
Through the Dark Continent
by Henry M. Stanley
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1878 |
Rank:
32
Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains
by Isabella L. Bird
Bird was no lady in the conventional Victorian sense but a world traveler. She ventured through the Rockies when they were still wild, met up with grizzly bears, and climbed Longs Peak when it was thought impossible for a woman to do so. She had to thaw her ink on the cabin stove to write, and she wrote delightfully.
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1879 |
Rank:
33
Out of Africa
by Isak Dinesen
| Call Number: DT433 .D56 1985 | Publication Date: 1937 |
Rank:
37
Journals
by James Cook
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1779 |
Rank:
21
To Conquer the Air
by James Tobin
James Tobin, a journalist twice nominated for a Pulitzer, is also a historian, and it's criminal a writer should be so good in two fields. In this book, the most critically acclaimed of all the books to celebrate the Wright Brothers' 100-year anniversary, Tobin jumps smoothly between the Wrights and their competitionSmithsonian Secretary Samuel Pierpont Langley, Alexander Graham Bell in Canada, a collection of assorted Frenchmenand back to the Wrights. He explains the technology of flying without losing the reader, dramatizes but does not overdramatize, and breathes life into the dead. Tobin has written a history of flight that ought to become the standard for his generation.
| Call Number: TL540.W7 T63 2003 | Publication Date: 2003 |
Rank:
101
Man-Eaters of Kumaon
by Jim Corbett
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1944 |
Rank:
48
Running the Amazon
by Joe Kane
| Call Number: F2546 .K19 1989 | Publication Date: 1989 |
Rank:
57
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig
by John Gilmette
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 2003 |
Rank:
101
Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile
by John Hanning Speke
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1996 |
Rank:
56
My First Summer in the Sierra
by John Muir
In the summer of 1869, young and fresh, Muir traveled through the Sierra Nevada with a shepherd and his flock. This book is his journal, and it, too, is young and fresh. Muir, who would become a legendary advocate for wilderness and the founder of the Sierra Club, always played down the dangers he faced. But this book is full, nevertheless, of bears. And charm. It reminds you of how much wildness we have lost.
| Call Number: QH31.M9 A3 1997 | Publication Date: 1911 |
Rank:
42
Exploration of the Colorado River
by John Wesley Powell
Powell lost most of his right arm fighting for the Union, but that didn't stop him from leading the first descent of the Grand Canyon. The year was 1869, and he and his nine men started on the Green River in wooden boats. 'We have an unknown distance yet to run,' writes Powell, 'an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Ah, well!' Ah, well, indeed. The rapids were overpowering. They lost boats and supplies. They ran out of food. Near the end, three of the men lost their nerve and climbed out of the canyon; they were killed by Indians. The others stayed with Powell and survived. Powell himself was an unusual mantough, driven, hard to please. He was also a thoughtful man, a friend of Native Americans, and a gifted geologist. It is this combinationdeep curiosity allied with great couragethat makes the book a classic.
| Call Number: F788 .P886 1957 | Publication Date: 1975 |
Rank:
4
Into Thin Air
by Jon Krakauer
Was it fate that put Krakauerat once a crack climber, a seasoned journalist, and a sensitive conscienceon the world's highest mountain during that notorious 1996 season? Unpredictable weather, human folly, and a mind-set committed to client satisfaction killed 12 people on Everest that year, while the whole world watched. Krakauer showed us what it really meant: the traffic jams on the summit ridge; guides bending their own rules to get exhausted clients to the top. He showed us the consequences of disrespect for this formidable goddess, Chomolungma, as the Sherpas call her. And Krakauer is as hard on himself as he is on the rest. Whereas Annapurna is the record of a triumph, Into Thin Air is the postmortem of a debacleless inspiring, but no less powerful. As the most widely read mountaineering work in recent history, it has profoundly shaped our idea of extreme adventure and who and what it is for.
| Call Number: GV199.44.E85 K725 1997 | Publication Date: 1997 |
Rank:
9
Sailing Alone Around the World
by Joshua Slocum
At loose ends and in your 50s, what better way to pass the time than to sail alone around the world? The journey took three years and covered 46,000 miles (74,000 kilometer); Slocum was chased by pirates, survived major storms, suffered hallucinations. But he made it. He was the first to do it alone. Then he wrote this marvelous, salty book. In 1909, he put to sea again. This time, he disappeared.
| Call Number: G440 .S63 S56 2008 EB | Publication Date: 1900 |
Rank:
27
Travels
by Marco Polo
Polo dictated these tales to a scribe, a writer of romances named Rustichello, while the two men shared a cell in a Genoese prison. Just how much Rustichello added to the text nobody knows. Yet most of what Polo tells us about his overland journey to Asia checks out. He traveled during a relatively peaceful time, so this is not a book about taking physical risks. Nor is it as accessible to modern readers as many of the books on this list. Yet it is without question the founding adventure book of the modern world. Polo gave to the age of exploration that followed the marvels of the East, the strange customs, the fabulous riches, the tribes with gold teeth. It was a Book of Dreams, an incentive, a goad. Out of it came Columbus (whose own copy of the book was heavily annotated), Magellan, Vasco da Gama, and the rest of modern history.
| Call Number: G370 .P72 1958 | Publication Date: 1298 |
Rank:
10
Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow
by Maria Coffey
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 2003 |
Rank:
101
Roughing It
by Mark Twain
[ACCESS EBOOK ONLINE]
Twain lit out for the territory when the Civil War started and knocked around the West for six years. Roughing It is the record of that time, a great comic bonanza, hilarious when it isn't simply funny, full of the most outrageous characters and events. It is not an adventure book, it is an anti-adventure book, but no less indispensable.
| Call Number: PS1318 .A1 2010 EB | Publication Date: 1972 |
Rank:
13
Travels in West Africa
by Mary Kingsley
| Call Number: DT472 .K53 2009 EB | Publication Date: 1897 |
Rank:
18
Annapurna
by Maurice Herzog
Abbey is our very own desert father, a hermit loading up on silence and austerity and the radical beauty of empty places. Early on he spent summers working as a ranger at Utah's Arches National Monument, and those summers were the source for this book of reverence for the wildand outrage over its destruction. But really his whole life was an adventure and a protest against all the masks of progress. He wanted to recapture life on the outsidebare-boned, contemptuous of what we call civilizationand to do it without flinching. He helped ignite the environmental movement, teaching his followers to save the world by leaving it absolutely alone.
| Call Number: DS485.H6 H434 | Publication Date: 1952 |
Rank:
6
Journals
by Meriwether Lewis & William Clark
Are there two American explorers more famous? Were there any braver? When they left St. Louis in 1804 to find a water route to the Pacific, no one knew how extensive the Rocky Mountains were or even exactly where they were, and the land beyond was terra incognita. Lewis and Clark's Journals are the closest thing we have to a national epic, and they are magnificent, full of the wonder of the Great West. Here are the first sightings of the vast prairie dog cities; here are huge bears that keep on coming at you with five or six bullets in them, Indian tribes with no knowledge of white men, the mountains stretching for a thousand miles; here are the long rapids, the deep snows, the ways of the Sioux, Crow, Assiniboin; here are buffalo by the millions. Here is the West in its true mythic proportions.
| Call Number: F592.4 .L49 2001 V.8 EB | Publication Date: 1814 |
Rank:
2
Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa
by Mungo Park
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1799 |
Rank:
25
Sea of Glory
by Nathaniel Philbrick
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 2003 |
Rank:
101
Snow Leopard
by Peter Matthiessen
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1978 |
Rank:
12
Alive
by Piers Paul Read
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1974 |
Rank:
58
In Trouble Again
by Redmond O'Hanlon
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1988 |
Rank:
44
First Footsteps in East Africa
by Richard Burton
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1856 |
Rank:
29
Alone
by Richard Byrd
| Call Number: G875 .B9 A32 1984 EB | Publication Date: 1938 |
Rank:
49
Principal Navigations
by Richard Hakluyt
ABRIDGED VERSION: Hakluyt believed that England should rule the seas and develop colonies before Spain gobbled up the whole world, and he compiled this book to fire the ambitions of his countrymen. At a million and a half words, it's less a book than an encyclopedia, packed with exploration and adventure stories that run from the tales of King Arthur to Drake, Raleigh, and beyond. It was, of course, influential beyond measure.
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1589 |
Rank:
59
Royal Road to Romance
by Richard Halliburton
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1925 |
Rank:
52
Two Years Before the Mast
by Richard Henry Dana
Scion of a prominent Boston family, Dana dropped out of Harvard and, hoping to recover the strength of his eyes, weakened by measles, signed on with a merchant ship as a common sailor. His book about his time at sea is an American classic, vivid in its description of the sailor's life and all its dangers and delights.
| Call Number: G540 .D36 2008 EB | Publication Date: 1840 |
Rank:
14
Scott's Last Expedition: The Journals
by Robert Falcon Scott
Whatever else English explorers can do, they can almost always write. And when things are at their worst, they manage, somehow, to be most eloquent. That's the only word for Scott's Journals, with its entries running right to the end of his desperate race home from the South Pole. Scott's courageand his mistakesare known to everyone. Here it all is as he lived it, and as he died.
| Call Number: G850 1910.S4 S358 2006 EB | Publication Date: 1913 |
Rank:
38
Perfect storm : a true story of men against the sea
by Sebastian Junger
Waves ten stories high, hurricane-force winds, longline swordfish fishermen and their wives and girlfriends, bad omens, National Guard air-rescue teams, heroism, fear, and the bars of Gloucester, Massachusetts: Junger has a gift for gathering the elements, if you will, of his story, dramatizing them and impressing the hell out of you with the power of weather.
| Call Number: QC945 .J66 1999 | Publication Date: 1997 |
Rank:
30
Long Walk
by Slavomir Rawicz
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1956 |
Rank:
52
My Life as an Explorer
by Sven Hedin
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1925 |
Rank:
43
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
by T.E. Lawrence
A desert woman speaks to the British adventurer of his 'horrible blue eyes which looked, she said, like the sky shining through the eye-sockets of an empty skull.' Indeed. He must have been somethingcrazily intense in his white robes, as romantic a figure as any who has ever lived: Lawrence of Arabia. Who could resist such a book as this?
| Call Number: D568.4 .L4 1935B C2 | Publication Date: 1926 |
Rank:
24
Everest: The West Ridge
by Thomas Hornbein
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1965 |
Rank:
39
Kon-Tiki
by Thor Heyerdahl
This is Lindbergh's account of perhaps the most famous air journey ever made, the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris. It's a spacious book, too, full of incidentbailouts over Illinois cornfields, Lindbergh's barnstorming days, family lore. More than the tale of a great adventure, it's a portrait of the adventurer.
| Call Number: G530 .H463 1950a | Publication Date: 1950 |
Rank:
17
Darkest Jungle
by Todd Balf
[ACCESS EBOOK ONLINE]
U.S. Navy Lt. Isaac Strain's 1854 expedition into the Darién Gap was one of the first to explore the remote, seductive jungle and, without question, one of the unluckiest. They were unable to obtain native guides. They didn't carry enough provisions. Existing maps were a joke. Vampire bats drank their blood when they were sleeping. Worms hatched under their skin and starting eating their flesh. And so on. To read about their ordeal is horrendous and thrilling and all the other things you want a book like this to be.
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 2003 |
Rank:
101
Right Stuff
by Tom Wolfe
With all the flash and fireworks of Wolfe's writing, it's easy to overlook that, at bottom, he's a great reporter. And this long and intimate look into the lives, minds, and deeds of the men who rode the first American rockets into space remains Wolfe's best book and the first true classic from the dawn of space exploration. The race with the Russians, the dauntless Chuck YeagerWolfe piles story upon story, and the pile glows.
| Call Number: TL789.8.U5 W64 | Publication Date: 1979 |
Rank:
26
In the Land of White Death
by Valerian Albanov
[ACCESS EBOOK ONLINE]
In 1912, two dozen men on a Russian ship found themselves frozen into the Arctic ice. Eleven tried to walk out. In the end, two made it back to civilization; Albanov was one of them. It's a great survival story, well told, and (at least until its recent reissue, which was excerpted in Adventure, November/December 2000) virtually unknown in the English-speaking world.
| Unavailable at GCC: Availability at Other Libraries | Publication Date: 1917 |
Rank:
34
Arabian Sands
by Wilfred Thesiger
The southern Arabian desert, a quarter million square miles of sand (650,000 square kilometers), is now a place of oil wells and Land Rovers, but before the 1950s it was still known as the Empty Quarter, a place you entered only on camel and only as an Arab. Only a few white men had ever seen it, much less crossed it. From 1945 to 1950, the British Thesiger crossed it twice, living with the Bedouin, sharing their hard lives. His book is the classic of desert exploration, a door opening on a vanished feudal world. It is a book of touches, little things-why the Bedouin will never predict the weather ('since to do so would be to claim knowledge that belongs to God'), how they know when the rabbit is in its hole and can be caught. It is written with great respect for these people and with an understanding that acknowledges its limits. With humility, that is, which is appropriate. Fail the humility test, and the desert will surely kill you.
| Call Number: DS208 .T48 | Publication Date: 1959 |
Rank:
5