There are still wild places out there on our crowded planet. Through a series of personal journeys, Dan Richards explores the appeal of far-flung outposts in mountains, tundra, forests, oceans and deserts. Following a route from the Cairngorms of Scotland to the fire-watch lookouts of Washington State; from Iceland’s ‘Houses of Joy’ to the Utah desert; frozen ghost towns in Svalbard to shrines in Japan; Roald Dahl’s writing hut to a lighthouse in the North Atlantic, Richards explores landscapes which have inspired writers, artists and musicians, and asks: why are we drawn to wilderness? What can we do to protect them? And what does the future hold for outposts on the edge?

"An expert on nomadic peoples, Malcolm Hunter shares stories from a lifetime of working in some of the world's most remote, colorful, and neglected communities. In the early 1960s Malcolm and his wife, Jean, arrived in Ethiopia with only their professional skills--medicine and engineering--and a desire to show God's love to those in need. Over the next forty years God would lead them across Africa, through lush hills and scorched bush, to a dozen people groups who hadn't heard the gospel. Wherever the Hunters went, they found that God had been there first." - description of the first edition.

'A thoughtful exploration of humanity ... Fabes is great company and makes riding bicycles seem like the best way to see and understand the world' - Guardian They say that being a good doctor boils down to just four things: Shut up, listen, know something, care. The same could be said for life on the road, too. When Stephen Fabes left his job as a junior doctor and set out to cycle around the world, frontline medicine quickly faded from his mind. Of more pressing concern were the daily challenges of life as an unfit rider on an overloaded bike, helplessly in thrall to pastries. But leaving medicine behind is not as easy as it seems. As he roves continents, he finds people whose health has suffered through exile, stigma or circumstance, and others, whose lives have been saved through kindness and community. After encountering a frozen body of a monk in the Himalayas, he is drawn ever more to healthcare at the margins of the world, to crumbling sanitoriums and refugee camps, to city dumps and war-torn hospital wards. And as he learns the value of listening to lives - not just solving diagnostic puzzles - Stephen challenges us to see care for the sick as a duty born of our humanity, and our compassion.

This book is a history of exploration"from the first voyages of the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, and Phoenicians, to humanity's first ventures beyond the confines of our own planet. Each chapter covers a particular continent, presents the biographies of the explorers closely identified with each region, and relates the significance of their most important discoveries to the wider world.

“There are those who think that Paul Theroux is the finest travel writer working in English. This collection can only enhance that reputation.”—The New York Times Book Review Author and travel writer Paul Theroux does what no one else can: he travels to the isolated, unusual, and fascinating spots of the world, and creates an elegy to them that makes readers feel they are traveling with him. Evocative, breathtaking, intriguing, here is the armchair traveler's guide to the sites of the world he makes us feel we know. Praise for To the Ends of the Earth “Reads like a wonderful novel.”—The Pittsburgh Press “Powerful . . . This compendium unequivocally offers insight into the mind of a foremost American fiction writer who became an accidental tourist.”—The Christian Science Monitor “Theroux is a wonderful traveling companion. . . . To the Ends of the Earth combines the best of his travel writing. . . . With him the reader shares a conversation with a sultan on a polo ground in Malaysia; hears people ‘mourn with firecrackers, scattering cherrybombs on the tombstone’ in a Chinese cemetery in Singapore; feels overdressed around nudists in Corsica; sees sandbagged houses and bombcraters left in Vietnam on a cold December day in 1973.”—The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star “Travel writing at its best . . . As you travel voyeuristically with Theroux, across the vast wastelands of interior China, the convoluted cultures of Latin America or campy seacoast towns of England, you're struck with his slightly jaundiced eye for the overlooked but telling detail, his skeptic's ear for the offhand but important comment.”—The Houston Post

Journeys through Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

"Matthiessen chronicles two voyages into the frozen seas that surround a landmass larger than the continental United States, most of it buried under eternal snow and ice as much as three miles deep. Ninety percent of the world's fresh water is locked in this immense ice cap, a remote region profoundly important to our environment. The author addresses the subject with authority and passion, discussing everything from global warming and the ozone layer to the vital role of krill, the teeming crustacean that is the cornerstone of the marine food chain." "Nature lovers - birders especially - will be fascinated by descriptions of more than half of the penguin species and an astonishing array of seabirds, from tiny storm-petrels to magnificent albatrosses, which may soar for years without alighting on land; here too are close encounters with whales, leopard seals, and elephant seals, and elusive creatures such as the oceanic orca. There are also remarkable descriptions of the seldom seen polar rookeries where thousands of emperor penguins stand motionless for months at a time, brooding their giant eggs through the long, cold darkness of Antarctic winter."--BOOK JACKET.

Migration is a way of life for most birds found in Ireland. Our nation sits with its back to the Old World and its face to the New World, so the variety of bird species reaching our shores is derived from two hemispheres. From across the planet, 'our' birds come - to breed, stop off, or spend the winter. How these visitors reached our shores puzzled us for centuries. So how do birds navigate so successfully over enormous distances and make a return trip to the same nesting site each year? Modern tracking results are revealing journeys once thought impossible - such as sustained flight for days at a time. Feats of endurance are one thing but their homing ability is even more impressive. Most of the youngsters fly solo to faraway winter quarters they have never seen. The evidence - and some of the history behind its discovery - is pieced together in a simple way that brings a new coherence to the complex ways that birds navigate, the preparations they make before departure, and their decisions en route - such as when drifted off course by inclement weather. In a nutshell, birds' array of sense far exceeds our own. Rather than relying purely on the sun and the stars for guidance, birds make use of something we cannot sense - the Earth's magnetic field. Overall they integrate a range of global phenomena, including patterns of polarised light visible (to their specially tuned vision) in the sky. This spectacular book is a must for anyone who has ever wondered how and why these seemingly fragile creatures make such gruelling journeys.

An eye-opening and fascinating slow travel journey from an acclaimed writer who circled the globe without ever leaving the ground. In this age of globalism and high-speed travel, Seth Stevenson, the witty, thoughtful Slate columnist, takes us back to a time when travel meant putting one foot in front of the other, racing to make connections between trains and buses in remote transit stations, and wading through the chaos that most long-haul travelers float 35,000 feet above. Stevenson winds his way around the world by biking, walking, hiking, riding in rickshaws, freight ships, cruise ships, ancient ferries, buses, and the Trans-Siberian Railway-but never gets on an airplane. He finds that from the ground, one sees the world anew-with a deeper understanding of time, distance, and the vastness of the earth. In this sensational travelogue, each step of the journey is an adventure, full of unexpected revelations in every new port, at every bend in the railroad tracks, and around every street corner.