Empfehlungen basierend auf "Don't Go There From Chernobyl to North Korea--One Man's Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World's Strangest Places"

Streetlamps, neon signs – an ever-present glow that has changed the natural world and adversely affected our health; Paul Bogard illuminates the problems caused by a lack of darkness.We live awash in artificial light. But night’s natural darkness has always been invaluable for our spiritual health and the health of the natural world, and every living creature suffers from its loss.Paul Bogard investigates what we mean when we talk about darkness. He travels between the intensely lit cities – from glittering Las Vegas to the gas-lit streets of Westminster – and the sites where real darkness still remains, such as the Brecon Beacons and the island of Sark. Encountering scientists, physicians, activists and writers, Bogard discusses how light is negatively affecting the natural world; how our well-being is significantly influenced by darkness or its lack; and how it’s not a matter of using light at night or not, but rather when and where, how and how much.A beautiful invocation of our constant companion, the night, which returns every day of our lives, this book reminds us of the power and mystery of the dark.

A dazzlingly original, lyrical and epic encounter with the Earth as it used to beThis is the past as we've never seen it before.Otherlands is an epic, exhilarating journey into deep time, showing us the Earth as it used to exist, and the worlds that were here before ours. Travelling back in time to the dawn of complex life, and across all seven continents, award-winning young palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday gives us a mesmerizing up close encounter with eras that are normally unimaginably distant.Halliday immerses us in a series of ancient landscapes, from the mammoth steppe in Ice Age Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica, with its colonies of giant penguins, to Ediacaran Australia, where the moon is far brighter than ours today. We visit the birthplace of humanity; we hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the Earth has ever known; and we watch as life emerges again after the asteroid hits, and the age of the mammal dawns. These lost worlds seem fantastical and yet every description - whether the colour of a beetle's shell, the rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air - is grounded in the fossil record.Otherlands is a staggering imaginative feat: an emotional narrative that underscores the tenacity of life - yet also the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, including our own. To read it is to see the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous and familiar.

NATIONAL BEST SELLER • Oprah's Book Club 2.0 selection. • A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again.At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and to do it alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was little more than “an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise.” But it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone.Strayed faces down rattlesnakes and black bears, intense heat and record snowfalls, and both the beauty and loneliness of the trail. Told with great suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild vividly captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.

“A gripping tale . . . A convincing, page-turning evocation of recent history.”—The New York TimesRay Barton travels to war-ravaged Southeast Asia to search for his missing friend Michael Langford, a brilliant, risk-taking combat photographer who was stolen into Khmer Rouge Cambodia on a mysterious mission and disappeared. The search illuminates Langford’s heroism, his fierce loyalties, and the personal highways he has traveled to war. Langford’s empathy for the brave but poorly commanded Cambodian troops and his love for a young Cambodian woman have led him in the end to put down the camera and take up the gun in a foreign struggle he had made his own.Koch richly evokes Indochina—from the deceptively tranquil rice paddies of South Vietnam to the corrupt, doomed pink-and-white city of Phnom Penh. Highways to a War is a story of intense relationships forged in a dangerous and hallucinatory land that continues to haunt the American soul.“An absorbing, deeply moving . . . tale of love and heroism. . . . The evocation of the Cambodian landscape . . . is truly haunting.”—Kirkus Reviews“Highways to a War ranks among the best of the . . . literature that has come out of the agony of the wars in Southeast Asia.”—The Orlando Sentinel

Recounts the true stories of five women who climbed the dangerous K2 mountain, describing how they overcame the harshest climbing and weather conditions of any mountain in the world.

“A first-rate historical page turner.” —New York Times Book ReviewThe acclaimed and bestselling account of Ferdinand Magellan’s historic 60,000-mile ocean voyage.Ferdinand Magellan's daring circumnavigation of the globe in the sixteenth century was a three-year odyssey filled with sex, violence, and amazing adventure. Now in Over the Edge of the World, prize-winning biographer and journalist Laurence Bergreen entwines a variety of candid, firsthand accounts, bringing to life this groundbreaking and majestic tale of discovery that changed both the way explorers would henceforth navigate the oceans and history itself.Now updated to include a new introduction commemorating the 500th anniversary of Magellan’s voyage.

"Deep Water is a major achievement....Bradley's skills both as novelist and essayist converge here to create this wise, compassionate and urgent book, characterized throughout by a clarity of prose and a bracing moral gaze that searches water, self and reader." —ROBERT MACFARLANE, bestselling author of UnderlandIn this thrilling work—a blend of history, science, nature writing, and environmentalism—acclaimed writer James Bradley plunges into the unknown to explore the deepest recesses of the natural world.Seventy-one percent of the earth’s surface is ocean. These waters created, shaped, and continue to sustain not just human life, but all life on Planet Earth, and perhaps beyond it. They serve as the stage for our cultural history—driving human development from evolution through exploration, colonialism, and the modern era of global leisure and trade. They are also the harbingers of the future—much of life on Earth cannot survive if sea levels are too low or too high, temperatures too cold or too warm. Our oceans are vast spaces of immense wonder and beauty, and our relationship to them is innate and awe inspired.Deep Water is both a lyrically written personal meditation and an intriguing wide-ranging reported epic that reckons with our complex connection to the seas. It is a story shaped by tidal movements and deep currents, lit by the insights of philosophers, scientists, artists and other great minds. Bradley takes readers from the atomic creation of the oceans, to the wonders within, such as fish migrations guided by electromagnetic sensing. He describes the impacts of human population shifts by boat and speaks directly and uncompromisingly to the environmental catastrophe that is already impacting our lives. It is also a celebration of the ocean’s glories and the extraordinary efforts of the scientists and researchers who are unlocking its secrets. These myriad strands are woven together into a tapestry of life that captures not only our relationship with the planet, but our past, and perhaps most importantly, what lies ahead for us.A brilliant blend of Robert MacFarlane’s Underland, Susan Casey’s The Underworld, and Simon Winchester’s Pacific and The Atlantic, Deep Water taps into the essence of our planet and who we are.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A gripping story of man pitted against nature’s most fearsome and efficient predator. This "travelogue about tiger poaching in Russia’s far east opens up a new genre ... [the] conservation thriller" (Nature). Outside a remote village in Russia’s Far East a man-eating tiger is on the prowl. The tiger isn’t just killing people, it’s murdering them, almost as if it has a vendetta. A team of trackers is dispatched to hunt down the tiger before it strikes again. They know the creature is cunning, injured, and starving, making it even more dangerous. As John Vaillant re-creates these extraordinary events, he gives us an unforgettable and masterful work of narrative nonfiction that combines a riveting portrait of a stark and mysterious region of the world and its people, with the natural history of nature’s most deadly predator.

In April of 1846, Sarah Graves was twenty-one and in love with a young man who played the violin. But she was torn. Her mother, father, and eight siblings were about to disappear over the western horizon forever, bound for California. Sarah could not bear to see them go out of her life, and so days before the planned departure she married the young man with the violin, and the two of them threw their lot in with the rest of Sarah's family. On April 12, they rolled out of the yard of their homestead in three ox-drawn wagons. Seven months later, after joining a party of emigrants led by George Donner, Sarah and her family arrived at Truckee Lake in the Sierra Nevada Mountains just as the first heavy snows of the season closed the pass ahead of them. After a series of desperate attempts to cross the mountains, the party improvised cabins and slaughtered what remained of their emaciated livestock. By early December they were beginning to starve. Sarah's father, a Vermonter, was the only member of the party familiar with snowshoes. Under his instruction, fifteen sets of snowshoes were hastily constructed from oxbows and rawhide, and on December 15, Sarah and fourteen other relatively young, healthy people set out for California on foot, hoping to get relief for the others. Over the next thirty-two days they endured almost unfathomable hardships and horrors. In this gripping narrative, Daniel James Brown takes the reader along on every painful footstep of Sarah's journey. Along the way, he weaves into the story revealing insights garnered from a variety of modern scientific perspectives–psychology, physiology, forensics, and archaeology–producing a tale that is not only spell-binding but richly informative.

Ecologist Anne LaBastille created the life that many people dream about. When she and her husband divorced, she needed a place to live. Through luck and perseverance, she found the ideal spot: a 20-acre parcel of land in the Adirondack mountains, where she built the cozy, primitive log cabin that became her permanent home. Miles from the nearest town, LaBastille had to depend on her wits, ingenuity, and the help of generous neighbors for her survival. In precise, poetic language, she chronicles her adventures on Black Bear Lake, capturing the power of the landscape, the rhythms of the changing seasons, and the beauty of nature’s many creatures. Most of all, she captures the struggle to balance her need for companionship and love with her desire for independence and solitude. Woodswoman is not simply a book about living in the wilderness, it is a book about living that contains a lesson for us all.