Best Expeditions & Discoveries World History Books
Here you will get Best Expeditions & Discoveries World History Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. Into the Wild
Author: by Jon Krakauer
Anchor Books
English
240 pages
Krakauer’s page-turning bestseller explores a famed missing person mystery while unraveling the larger riddles it holds: the profound pull of the American wilderness on our imagination; the allure of high-risk activities to young men of a certain cast of mind; the complex, charged bond between fathers and sons.”Terrifying…Eloquent…
A heart-rending drama of human yearning.” New York TimesIn April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt.McKinley. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself.
Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. How Christopher Johnson McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild. Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir.
2. Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage
Author: by Alfred Lansing
English
357 pages
0465062881
Experience one of the greatest adventure stories of the modern age: The harrowing tale of British explorer Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 attempt to reach the South Pole. In August 1914, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton boarded the Endurance and set sail for Antarctica, where he planned to cross the last uncharted continent on foot.
In January 1915, after battling its way through a thousand miles of pack ice and only a day’s sail short of its destination, the Endurance became locked in an island of ice. Thus began the legendary ordeal of Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven men.
When their ship was finally crushed between two ice floes, they attempted a near-impossible journey over 850 miles of the South Atlantic’s heaviest seas to the closest outpost of civilization. In Endurance, the definitive account of Ernest Shackleton’s fateful trip, Alfred Lansing brilliantly narrates the harrowing and miraculous voyage that has defined heroism for the modern age.
3. Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica's Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night
Author: by Julian Sancton
Crown (May 4, 2021)
English
368 pages
The exquisitely researched and deeply engrossing (The New York Times) true survival story of an early polar expedition that went terribly awrywith the ship frozen in ice and the crew trapped inside for the entire sunless, Antarctic winterDeserves a place beside Alfred Lansing’s immortal classic Endurance.
Nathaniel Philbrick A riveting tale, splendidly told … Madhouse at the End of the Earth has it all. Stacy Schiff Julian Sancton has deftly rescued this forgotten saga from the deep freeze. Hampton Sides In August 1897, the young Belgian commandant Adrien de Gerlache set sail for a three-year expedition aboard the good ship Belgica with dreams of glory.
His destination was the uncharted end of the earth: the icy continent of Antarctica. But de Gerlache’s plans to be first to the magnetic South Pole would swiftly go awry. After a series of costly setbacks, the commandant faced two bad options: turn back in defeat and spare his men the devastating Antarctic winter, or recklessly chase fame by sailing deeper into the freezing waters.
4. The Ride of Her Life: The True Story of a Woman, Her Horse, and Their Last-Chance Journey Across America
Author: by Elizabeth Letts
English
336 pages
0525619321
The triumphant true story of a woman who rode her horse across America in the 1950s, fulfilling her dying wish to see the Pacific Ocean, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Perfect Horse and The Eighty-Dollar ChampionThe gift Elizabeth Letts has is that she makes you feel you are the one taking this trip.
This is a book we can enjoy always but especially need now. Elizabeth Berg, author of The Story of Arthur Truluv In 1954, sixty-three-year-old Maine farmer Annie Wilkins embarked on an impossible journey. She had no money and no family, she had just lost her farm, and her doctor had given her only two years to live.
But Annie wanted to see the Pacific Ocean before she died. She ignored her doctor’s advice to move into the county charity home. Instead, she bought a cast-off brown gelding named Tarzan, donned men’s dungarees, and headed south in mid-November, hoping to beat the snow.
Annie had little idea what to expect beyond her rural crossroads; she didn’t even have a map. But she did have her ex-racehorse, her faithful mutt, and her own unfailing belief that Americans would treat a stranger with kindness. Annie, Tarzan, and her dog, Depeche Toi, rode straight into a world transformed by the rapid construction of modern highways.
5. The Burning Blue: The Untold Story of Christa McAuliffe and NASA's Challenger Disaster
Author: by Kevin Cook
English
288 pages
1250755557
The untold story of a national traumaNASA’s Challenger explosionand what really happened to America’s Teacher in Space, illuminating the tragic cost of humanity setting its sight on the starsYou’ve seen the pictures. You know what happened.Or do you? On January 28, 1986, NASA’s space shuttle Challenger exploded after blasting off from Cape Canaveral.
Christa McAuliffe, America’s Teacher in Space, was instantly killed, along with the other six members of the mission. At least that’s what most of us remember. Kevin Cook tells us what really happened on that ill-fated, unforgettable day. He traces the pressuresleading from NASA to the White Housethat triggered the fatal order to launch on an ice-cold Florida morning.
Cook takes readers inside the shuttle for the agonizing minutes after the explosion, which the astronauts did indeed survive. He uncovers the errors and corner-cutting that led an overconfident space agency to launch a crew that had no chance to escape.
But this is more than a corrective to a now-dimming memory. Centering on McAuliffe, a charmingly down-to-earth civilian on the cusp of history, The Burning Blue animates a colorful cast of characters: a pair of red-hot flyers at the shuttle’s controls, the second female and first Jewish astronaut, the second Black astronaut, and the first Asian American and Buddhist in space.
6. Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific
Author: by Nicholas Thomas
English
224 pages
1541619838
An award-winning scholar explores the sixty-thousand-year history of the Pacific islands in this dazzling, deeply researched account. The islands of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia stretch across a huge expanse of ocean and encompass a multitude of different peoples. Starting with Captain James Cook, the earliest European explorers to visit the Pacific were astounded and perplexed to find populations thriving thousands of miles from continents.
Who were these people? From where did they come? And how were they able to reach islands dispersed over such vast tracts of ocean? In Voyagers, the distinguished anthropologist Nicholas Thomas charts the course of the seaborne migrations that populated the islands between Asia and the Americas from late prehistory onward.
Drawing on the latest research, including insights gained from genetics, linguistics, and archaeology, Thomas provides a dazzling account of these long-distance migrations, the seagoing technologies that enabled them, and the societies they left in their wake.
7. They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America (Journal of African Civilizations)
Author: by Ivan Van Sertima
English
336 pages
0812968174
A landmark …Brilliantly [demonstrates] has that there is far more to black history than the slave trade.John A. Williams They Came Before Columbus reveals a compelling, dramatic, and superbly detailed documentation of the presence and legacy of Africans in ancient America.
Examining navigation and shipbuilding; cultural analogies between Native Americans and Africans; the transportation of plants, animals, and textiles between the continents; and the diaries, journals, and oral accounts of the explorers themselves, Ivan Van Sertima builds a pyramid of evidence to support his claim of an African presence in the New World centuries before Columbus.
Combining impressive scholarship with a novelist’s gift for storytelling, Van Sertima re-creates some of the most powerful scenes of human history: the launching of the great ships of Mali in 1310 (two hundred master boats and two hundred supply boats), the sea expedition of the Mandingo king in 1311, and many others.
In They Came Before Columbus, we see clearly the unmistakable face and handprint of black Africans in pre-Columbian America, and their overwhelming impact on the civilizations they encountered.
8. Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West
Author: by Stephen Ambrose
0684826976
Simon & Schuster
English
From the New York Times bestselling author of Band of Brothers and D-Day, the definitive book on Lewis and Clark’s exploration of the Louisiana Purchase, the most momentous expedition in American history and one of the great adventure stories of all time.
In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson selected his personal secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, to lead a voyage up the Missouri River to the Rockies, over the mountains, down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean, and back. Lewis and his partner, Captain William Clark, made the first map of the trans-Mississippi West, provided invaluable scientific data on the flora and fauna of the Louisiana Purchase territory, and established the American claim to Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.
Ambrose has pieced together previously unknown information about weather, terrain, and medical knowledge at the time to provide a vivid backdrop for the expedition. Lewis is supported by a rich variety of colorful characters, first of all Jefferson himself, whose interest in exploring and acquiring the American West went back thirty years.
9. The Third Pole: Mystery, Obsession, and Death on Mount Everest
Author: by Mark Synnott
Dutton (April 13, 2021)
English
448 pages
If you’re only going to read one Everest book this decade, make it The Third Pole… A riveting adventure. OutsideShivering, exhausted, gasping for oxygen, beyond doubt … A hundred-year mystery lured veteran climber Mark Synnott into an unlikely expedition up Mount Everest during the spring 2019 season that came to be known as the Year Everest Broke.
What he found was a gripping human story of impassioned characters from around the globe and a mountain that will consume your souland your lifeif you let it.The mystery? On June 8, 1924, George Mallory and Sandy Irvine set out to stand on the roof of the world, where no one had stood before.
They were last seen eight hundred feet shy of Everest’s summit still going strong for the top. Could they have succeeded decades before Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay? Irvine is believed to have carried a Kodak camera with him to record their attempt, but it, along with his body, had never been found.
Did the frozen film in that camera have a photograph of Mallory and Irvine on the summit before they disappeared into the clouds, never to be seen again? Kodak says the film might still be viable…. Mark Synnott made his own ascent up the infamous North Face along with his friend Renan Ozturk, a filmmaker using drones higher than any had previously flown.
10. The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey
Author: by Candice Millard
0767913736
Broadway Books
English
At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, The River of Doubt is the true story of Theodore Roosevelt’s harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth. The River of Doubtit is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes through one of the most treacherous jungles in the world.
Indians armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows; piranhas glide through its waters; boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling cauldron. After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon.
Together with his son Kermit and Brazil’s most famous explorer, Cndido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it. In the process, he changed the map of the western hemisphere forever.
Along the way, Roosevelt and his men faced an unbelievable series of hardships, losing their canoes and supplies to punishing whitewater rapids, and enduring starvation, Indian attack, disease, drowning, and a murder within their own ranks. Three men died, and Roosevelt was brought to the brink of suicide.
11. A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca
Author: by Andrés Reséndez
Basic Books
English
336 pages
In 1528, a mission set out from Spain to colonize Florida. But the expedition went horribly wrong: Delayed by a hurricane, knocked off course by a colossal error of navigation, and ultimately doomed by a disastrous decision to separate the men from their ships, the mission quickly became a desperate journey of survival.
Of the four hundred men who had embarked on the voyage, only four survived-three Spaniards and an African slave. This tiny band endured a horrific march through Florida, a harrowing raft passage across the Louisiana coast, and years of enslavement in the American Southwest.
They journeyed for almost ten years in search of the Pacific Ocean that would guide them home, and they were forever changed by their experience. The men lived with a variety of nomadic Indians and learned several indigenous languages. They saw lands, peoples, plants, and animals that no outsider had ever before seen.
In this enthralling tale of four castaways wandering in an unknown land, AndrResndez brings to life the vast, dynamic world of North America just a few years before European settlers would transform it forever.
12. Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe
Author: by Steven Strogatz
Mariner Books
English
400 pages
From preeminent math personality and author of The Joy of x, a brilliant and endlessly appealing explanation of calculushow it works and why it makes our lives immeasurably better. Without calculus, we wouldn’t have cell phones, TV, GPS, or ultrasound.
We wouldn’t have unraveled DNA or discovered Neptune or figured out how to put 5,000 songs in your pocket. Though many of us were scared away from this essential, engrossing subject in high school and college, Steven Strogatz’s brilliantly creative, downtoearth history shows that calculus is not about complexity; it’s about simplicity.
It harnesses an unreal numberinfinityto tackle realworld problems, breaking them down into easier ones and then reassembling the answers into solutions that feel miraculous. Infinite Powers recounts how calculus tantalized and thrilled its inventors, starting with its first glimmers in ancient Greece and bringing us right up to the discovery of gravitational waves (a phenomenon predicted by calculus).
13. Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings
Author: by Neil Price
Basic Books
English
624 pages
The definitive history of the Vikings – from arts and culture to politics and cosmology – by a distinguished archaeologist with decades of expertiseThe Viking Age – from 750 to 1050 – saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples into the wider world.
As traders and raiders, explorers and colonists, they ranged from eastern North America to the Asian steppe. But for centuries, the Vikings have been seen through the eyes of others, distorted to suit the tastes of medieval clerics and Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian imperialists, Nazis, and more.
None of these appropriations capture the real Vikings, or the richness and sophistication of their culture. Based on the latest archaeological and textual evidence, Children of Ash and Elm tells the story of the Vikings on their own terms: their politics, their cosmology and religion, their material world.
Known today for a stereotype of maritime violence, the Vikings exported new ideas, technologies, beliefs, and practices to the lands they discovered and the peoples they encountered, and in the process were themselves changed. From Eirk Bloodaxe, who fought his way to a kingdom, to Gudrid Thorbjarnardttir, the most traveled woman in the world, Children of Ash and Elm is the definitive history of the Vikings and their time.
14. 1493: How Europe's Discovery of the Americas Revolutionized Trade, Ecology and Life on Earth
Author: by Charles C. Mann
B005WJ4LO0
September 15, 2011
English
Two hundred million years ago the earth consisted of a single vast continent, Pangea, surrounded by a great planetary sea. Continental drift tore apart Pangaea, and for millennia the hemispheres were separate, evolving almost entirely different suites of plants and animals.
Columbus’s arrival in the Americas brought together these long-separate worlds. Many historians believe that this collision of ecosystems and cultures – the Columbian Exchange – was the most consequential event in human history since the Neolithic Revolution. And it was the most consequential event in biological history since the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Beginning with the world of microbes and moving up the species ladder to mankind, Mann rivetingly describes the profound effect this exchanging of species had on the culture of both continents.
15. The White Ship: Conquest, Anarchy and the Wrecking of Henry I’s Dream
Author: by Charles Spencer
B084X4QP56
September 17, 2020
English
As gripping as any thriller. History doesn’t get any better than this’ BILL BRYSON’A brilliant read Game of Thrones but in the real world’ ANTHONY HOROWITZPICKED AS A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 BY THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, THE GUARDIAN, THE DAILY MAIL AND THE DAILY EXPRESS.
The sinking of the White Ship in 1120 is one of the greatest disasters England has ever suffered. In one catastrophic night, the king’s heir and the flower of Anglo-Norman society were drowned and the future of the crown was thrown violently off course.
In a riveting narrative, Charles Spencer follows the story from the Norman Conquest through to the decades that would become known as the Anarchy: a civil war of untold violence that saw families turn in on each other with English and Norman barons, rebellious Welsh princes and the Scottish king all playing a part in a desperate game of thrones.
All because of the loss of one vessel the White Ship the medieval Titanic. Highly enjoyable’ Simon HefferBrilliant’ Dan JonesFascinating’ Tom Bower
16. The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story
Author: by Douglas Preston
Grand Central Publishing
English
336 pages
The #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, named one of the best books of the year by The Boston Globe and National Geographic: acclaimed journalist Douglas Preston takes readers on a true adventure deep into the Honduran rainforest in this riveting narrative about the discovery of a lost civilization – culminating in a stunning medical mystery.
Since the days of conquistador Hernn Corts, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and they warn that anyone who enters this sacred city will fall ill and die.
In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an electrifying story of having found the Lost City of the Monkey God-but then committed suicide without revealing its location. Three quarters of a century later, bestselling author Doug Preston joined a team of scientists on a groundbreaking new quest.
