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Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure That Took the Victorian World by Storm
Monte Reel · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorEighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race Around the World
Matthew Goodman · 449 pages
On November 14, 1889, two young female journalists raced against one another, determined to outdo Jules Verne's fictional hero and circle the globe in less than 80 days. The dramatic race that ensued would span 28,000 miles, captivate the nation, and change both competitors' lives forever.
Scott and Amundsen
Roland Huntford · 565 pages
Examines the differences in the two men's approaches to the discovery of the South Pole. A eulogy of Roald Amundsen and a debunking of R.F. scott. Well researched, but unduly biased.
Lafayette in the Somewhat United States
Sarah Vowell · 288 pages
On August 16, 1824, an elderly French gentlemen sailed into New York Harbor and giddy Americans were there to welcome him. Or, rather, to welcome him back. It had been 30 years since the Revolutionary War hero the Marquis de Lafayette had last set foot in the United States, and he was so beloved that 80,000 people showed up to cheer for him. The entire population of New York at the time was 120,00
Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest
Wade Davis · 672 pages
If the quest for Mount Everest began as a grand imperial gesture, as redemption for an empire of explorers that had lost the race to the Poles, it ended as a mission of regeneration for a country and a people bled white by war.
The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War
Tim Butcher · 326 pages
"On a summer morning in Sarajevo almost a hundred years ago, a teenager took a pistol out of his pocket and fired not just the opening rounds of the First World War but the starting gun for modern history. By killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Gavrilo Princip, started a cycle of events that would leave 15 million dead from fighting between 1914 and 1918 and
Farther Than Any Man: The Rise and Fall of Captain James Cook
Martin Dugard · 304 pages
A portrait of eighteenth-century explorer and adventurer Captain James Cook draws on Cook's own journals to describe his youth, his career in the Royal Navy, and his expeditions that charted the Pacific Ocean. James Cook never laid eyes on the sea until he was in his teens. He then began an extraordinary rise from farmboy outsider to the hallowed rank of captain of the Royal Navy, leading three hi
The Africa House: The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream
Christina Lamb · 384 pages
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
David Grann · 339 pages
A grand mystery reaching back centuries. A sensational disappearance that made headlines around the world. A quest for truth that leads to death, madness or disappearance for those who seek to solve it. The Lost City of Z is a blockbuster adventure narrative about what lies beneath the impenetrable jungle canopy of the Amazon. After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed New Yorker wr
The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century
Ross E. Dunn, Ibn Battuta · 357 pages
Known as the greatest traveler of premodern times, Abu Abdallah ibn Battuta was born in Morocco in 1304 and educated in Islamic law. At the age of twenty-one, he left home to make the holy pilgrimage to Mecca. This was only the first of a series of extraordinary journeys that spanned nearly three decades and took him not only eastward to India and China but also north to the Volga River valley and
The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom
Simon Winchester · 316 pages
In sumptuous and illuminating detail, Simon Winchester, the bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman ("Elegant and scrupulous"—New York Times Book Review) and Krakatoa ("A mesmerizing page-turner"—Time) brings to life the extraordinary story of Joseph Needham, the brilliant Cambridge scientist who unlocked the most closely held secrets of China, long the world's most technologically adva
Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu
Laurence Bergreen · 415 pages
Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer
Tim Jeal · 608 pages
We think of Stanley as a cruel imperialist who connived with King Leopold II of Belgium in horrific crimes against the people of the Congo--and the journalist who conducted the most legendary celebrity interview in history, opening with, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" But these perceptions are not quite true, as biographer Jeal shows. With access to previously closed Stanley family archives, Jeal r
A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler
Jason Roberts · 400 pages
He was known simply as the Blind Traveler. A solitary, sightless adventurer, James Holman (1786-1857) fought the slave trade in Africa, survived a frozen captivity in Siberia, hunted rogue elephants in Ceylon, helped chart the Australian outback — and, astonishingly, circumnavigated the globe, becoming one of the greatest wonders of the world he so sagaciously explored. A Sense of the World is a s
Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith
Deborah Heiligman · 282 pages
In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great: A Journey from Greece to Asia
Michael Wood · 256 pages
Who Was Marco Polo?
Joan Holub · 105 pages
Una biografía del famoso viajero veneciano medieval, Marco Polo. A biography of the famous medieval Venetian traveler, Marco Polo.
Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia
Janet Wallach · 419 pages
Reared in the comfortable and privileged world of the "eminent Victorians," Gertrude Bell turned her back on convention and sought adventure in Arab lands. Traveling numerous times through the Syrian Desert and, at risk to her life, through the great Arabian desert of the Nejd - the last European to do so before the eruption of World War I - she wrote of her travels in widely acclaimed books. T
Killing Jesus: A History
Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard · 293 pages
The anchor of The O'Reilly Factor details the events leading up to the murder of the most influential man in history: Jesus of Nazareth. Nearly two thousand years after this beloved and controversial young revolutionary was brutally killed by Roman soldiers, more than 2.2 billion human beings attempt to follow his teachings and believe he is God. Killing Jesus will take readers inside Jesus's life
The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer
Anne-Marie O'Connor
Contributor to the Washington Post Anne-Marie O'Connor brilliantly regales us with the galvanizing story of Gustav Klimt's 1907 masterpiece -- the breathtaking portrait of a Viennese Jewish socialite, Adele Bloch-Bauer. The celebrated painting, stolen by Nazis during World War II, subsequently became the subject of a decade-long dispute between her heirs and the Austrian government. When the U.S.
Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt
Arthur T. Vanderbilt II · 544 pages
The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code
Margalit Fox · 363 pages
In the tradition of Simon Winchester and Dava Sobel, *The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code* tells one of the most intriguing stories in the history of language, masterfully blending history, linguistics, and cryptology with an elegantly wrought narrative. When famed archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flowered on
Queens Consort: England's Medieval Queens from Eleanor of Aquitaine to Elizabeth of York
Lisa Hilton · 536 pages