Awards Lists

Worst Journey in the World
by Apsley Cherry-Garrard

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Call Number: Electronic Resources

Publication Date: 1922

Rank:
1

West With the Night
by Beryl Markham

Call Number: DT365.75.M3 M3

Publication Date: 1942

Rank:
8

Voyage of the Beagle
by Charles Darwin

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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

Spirit of St. Louis
by Charles Lindbergh

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

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Call Number: F868 .S5 K542 1997 EB

Publication Date: 1872

Rank:
54

Desert Solitaire
by Edward Abbey

Call Number: PS3551.B2 Z463 1988

Publication Date: 1968

Rank:
7

South
by Ernest Shackleton

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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

Oregon Trail
by Francis Parkman

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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

Out of Africa
by Isak Dinesen

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Call Number: DT433 .D56 1985

Publication Date: 1937

Rank:
37

To Conquer the Air
by James Tobin

Call Number: TL540.W7 T63 2003

Publication Date: 2003

Rank:
101

Running the Amazon
by Joe Kane

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Call Number: F2546 .K19 1989

Publication Date: 1989

Rank:
57

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

Call Number: F788 .P886 1957

Publication Date: 1975

Rank:
4

Into Thin Air
by Jon Krakauer

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

Roughing It
by Mark Twain

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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

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Call Number: DT472 .K53 2009 EB

Publication Date: 1897

Rank:
18

Annapurna
by Maurice Herzog

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

Alone
by Richard Byrd

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Call Number: G875 .B9 A32 1984 EB

Publication Date: 1938

Rank:
49

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

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

Seven Pillars of Wisdom
by T.E. Lawrence

Call Number: D568.4 .L4 1935B C2

Publication Date: 1926

Rank:
24

Kon-Tiki
by Thor Heyerdahl

Call Number: G530 .H463 1950a

Publication Date: 1950

Rank:
17

Right Stuff
by Tom Wolfe

Call Number: TL789.8.U5 W64

Publication Date: 1979

Rank:
26

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