Empfehlungen basierend auf "The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape"

**Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography**“Reading this guy on the subject of waves and water is like reading Hemingway on bullfighting; William Burroughs on controlled substances; Updike on adultery. . . . a coming-of-age story, seen through the gloss resin coat of a surfboard.”—Sports IllustratedIncluded in President Obama’s 2016 Summer Reading List Barbarian Days is William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life. Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses—off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships forged in challenging waves.Finnegan shares stories of life in a whites-only gang in a tough school in Honolulu. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. He details the intricacies of famous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. Youthful folly—he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui—is served up with rueful humor. As Finnegan’s travels take him ever farther afield, he discovers the picturesque simplicity of a Samoan fishing village, dissects the sexual politics of Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, and navigates the Indonesian black market while nearly succumbing to malaria. Throughout, he surfs, carrying readers with him on rides of harrowing, unprecedented lucidity.Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little-understood art.Praise for Barbarian Days:“Without a doubt, the finest surf book I’ve ever read . . . But on a more fundamental level, Barbarian Days offers a clear-eyed vision of American boyhood. Like Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, it is a sympathetic examination of what happens when literary ideas of freedom and purity take hold of a young mind and fling his body out into the far reaches of the world.”—The New York Times Magazine“Incandescent . . . I’d sooner press this book upon on a nonsurfer, in part because nothing I’ve read so accurately describes the feeling of being stoked or the despair of being held under. . . . [But] it’s also about a writer’s life and, even more generally, a quester’s life, more carefully observed and precisely rendered than any I’ve read in a long time.”—Los Angeles Times

Sir Ernest Shackleton's South is one of the greatest survival stories of all time. In 1914, Shackleton led a party of men hoping to be the first to traverse the Antarctic, but when their ship was crushed by ice 350 miles from land, the expedition soon became a matter of life and death. This is the extraordinary account of treacherous seas, glaciers and relentless cold - and wonderfully encapsulates the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. - South: The Endurance Expedition (Popular Penguins) By Ernest Henry Shackleton (Paperback)

The Appalachian Trail trail stretches from Georgia to Maine and covers some of the most breathtaking terrain in America–majestic mountains, silent forests, sparking lakes. If you’re going to take a hike, it’s probably the place to go. And Bill Bryson is surely the most entertaining guide you’ll find. He introduces us to the history and ecology of the trail and to some of the other hardy (or just foolhardy) folks he meets along the way–and a couple of bears. Already a classic, A Walk in the Woods will make you long for the great outdoors (or at least a comfortable chair to sit and read in).

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.

“[Kathleen Jamie’s] essays guide you softly along coastlines of varying continents, exploring caves, and pondering ice ages until the narrator stumbles over — not a rock on the trail, but mortality, maybe the earth’s, maybe our own, pointing to new paths forward through the forest.” —Delia Owens, author of Where the Crawdads Sing, “By the Book” in The New York Times Book Review.An immersive exploration of time and place in a shrinking world, from the award-winning author of Sightlines.In this remarkable blend of memoir, cultural history, and travelogue, poet and author Kathleen Jamie touches points on a timeline spanning millennia, and considers what surfaces and what reconnects us to our past. From the thawing tundra linking a Yup'ik village in Alaska to its hunter-gatherer past to the shifting sand dunes revealing the impressiely preserved homes of neolithic farmers in Scotland, Jamie explores how the changing natural world can alter our sense of time. Most movingly, she considers, as her father dies and her children leave home, the surfacing of an older, less tethered sense of herself. In precise, luminous prose, Surfacing offers a profound sense of time passing and an antidote to all that is instant, ephemeral, unrooted.

The First Volume In Tim Robinson's Phenomenal Connemara Trilogy - Which Robert Macfarlane Has Called 'one Of The Most Remarkable Non-fiction Projects Undertaken In English'. In Its Landscape, History And Folklore, Connemara Is A Singular Region: Ill-defined Geographically, And Yet Unmistakably A Place Apart From The Rest Of Ireland. Tim Robinson, Who Established Himself As Ireland's Most Brilliant Living Non-fiction Writer With The Two-volume Stones Of Aran, Moved From Aran To Connemara Nearly Twenty Years Ago. This Book Is The Result Of His Extraordinary Engagement With The Mountains, Bogs And Shorelines Of The Region, And With Its Folklore And Its Often Terrible History: A Work As Beautiful And Surprising As The Place It Attempts To Describe. Chosen As A Book Of The Year By Iain Sinclair, Robert Macfarlane And Colm Tóibín 'one Of The Greatest Writers Of Lands ... No One Has Disentangled The Tales The Stones Of Ireland Have To Tell So Deftly And Retold Them So Beautifully' Fintan O'toole 'dazzling ... An Indubitable Classic' Giles Foden, Condé Nast Traveller 'he Is That Rarest Of Phenomena, A Scientist And An Artist, And His Method Is To Combine Scientific Rigour With Artistic Reverie In A Seamless Blend That Both Informs And Delights' John Banville 'one Of Contemporary Ireland's Finest Literary Stylists' Joseph O'connor, Guardian

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.

“Hypnotic….It is ever tempting to try to fathom his restless spirit and his determination to challenge fate.”—Janet Maslin, New York TimesWerner Herzog (Grizzly Man) is one of the most revered and enigmatic filmmakers of our time, and Fitzcarraldo is one of his most honored and admired films. More than just Herzog’s journal of the making of the monumental, problematical motion picture, which involved, among other things, major cast changes and reshoots, and the hauling (without the use of special effects) of a 360-ton steamship over a mountain , Conquest of the Useless is a work of art unto itself, an Amazonian fever dream that emerged from the delirium of the jungle. With fascinating observations about crew and players—including Herzog’s lead, the somewhat demented internationally renowned star Klaus Kinski—and breathtaking insights into the filmmaking process that are uniquely Werner Herzog, Conquest of the Useless is an eye-opening look into the mind of a cinematic master.

The powerful and affirming story of a father's journey with his teenage daughter to the far reaches of AlaskaAlaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, home to only a handful of people, is a harsh and lonely place. So when James Campbell’s cousin Heimo Korth asked him to spend a summer building a cabin in the rugged Interior, Campbell hesitated about inviting his fifteen-year-old daughter, Aidan, to join him: Would she be able to withstand clouds of mosquitoes, the threat of grizzlies, bathing in an ice-cold river, and hours of grueling labor peeling and hauling logs?But once there, Aidan embraced the wild. She even agreed to return a few months later to help the Korths work their traplines and hunt for caribou and moose. Despite windchills of 50 degrees below zero, father and daughter ventured out daily to track, hunt, and trap. Under the supervision of Edna, Heimo’s Yupik Eskimo wife, Aidan grew more confident in the woods.Campbell knew that in traditional Eskimo cultures, some daughters earned a rite of passage usually reserved for young men. So he decided to take Aidan back to Alaska one final time before she left home. It would be their third and most ambitious trip, backpacking over Alaska’s Brooks Range to the headwaters of the mighty Hulahula River, where they would assemble a folding canoe and paddle to the Arctic Ocean. The journey would test them, and their relationship, in one of the planet’s most remote places: a land of wolves, musk oxen, Dall sheep, golden eagles, and polar bears.At turns poignant and humorous, Braving It is an ode to America’s disappearing wilderness and a profound meditation on what it means for a child to grow up—and a parent to finally, fully let go.