The Maine Woods is a characteristically Thoreauvian book. A personal account of exploration, of exterior and interior discovery in a natural setting, conveyed in taut, workmanlike prose. Thoreau's evocative renderings of the life of the primitive forest--its mountains, waterways, fauna, flora, and inhabitants--are valuable in themselves. But his impassioned protest against despoilment in the name of commerce and sport, which even by the 1850s threatened...

Voyage of the Beagle chronicles Charles Darwin's five years as a naturalist on board the H.M.S. Beagle. The notes and observations that he recorded in his diary included Chile, Argentina and Galapagos Islands and encompasses the ecology, geology and anthropology of the places he visits. A fascinating travel memoir the ideas that were later to evolve into Darwin's theory of natural selection find their naissance in Voyage of the Beagle.

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In September 1960, at age fifty-eight, the author and his poodle, Charley, riding in a three-quarter ton pickup truck named Rocinante, embarked on a journey across America. This chronicle of their trip through almost 40 states, meanders from small towns to growing cities to glorious wilderness oases. Providing an intimate look at one of America's most beloved writers in the later years of his life, this is a self-portrait of a man who never wrote...

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in 1835 and is far better known by his pen name; Mark Twain. An American author and humorist of the first order he is perhaps most famous for his novels, The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer, written in 1876, and its sequel, The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, written in 1885 and often described with that mythic line - "the Great American Novel." Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which would later provide the backdrop

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"DAZZLING."
—Time
"[THEROUX'S] WORK IS DISTINGUISHED BY A SPLENDID EYE FOR DETAIL AND THE TELLING GESTURE; a storyteller's sense of pacing and gift for granting closure to the most subtle progression of events; and the graceful use of language. . . . We are delighted, along with Theroux, by the politeness of the Turks, amazed by the mountainous highlands in Syria, touched by the gesture of an Albanian waitress who will not let...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The classic chronicle of a “terribly misguided and terribly funny” (The Washington Post) hike of the Appalachian Trail, from the author of A Short History of Nearly Everything and The Body
 
“The best way of escaping into nature.”—The New York Times 
 
Back in America after...

From the author of A Short History of Nearly Everything and The Body comes a travel diary documenting a visit to Kenya. All royalties and profits go to CARE International.
 
In the early fall of 2002, famed travel writer Bill Bryson journeyed to Kenya at the invitation of CARE International, the charity dedicated to working with local communities to eradicate poverty around the world. He arrived with a set of mental...

"In 1995 Bill Bryson got into his car and took a weeks-long farewell motoring trip about England before moving his family back to the United States. The book about that trip, Notes from a Small Island, is ... [often considered] one of the most acute and affectionate portrayals of England in all its glorious eccentricity ever written. Two decades later, he set out again to rediscover that country, and the result is [this book]"--Amazon.com. Bryson...

"Legendary travel writer Paul Theroux fearlessly drives the entire length of the US-Mexico border, then goes deep into the hinterland, on the back roads of Chiapas and Oaxaca, to uncover the rich, layered world behind today's brutal headlines."--