Challenges the practices of the travel industry, sharing stories of memorable discoveries and misadventures that demonstrate how to enjoy a technology-balanced vacation. Kugel takes the modern travel industry to task, determined to reignite humanity's age-old sense of adventure that has virtually been vanquished by spontaneity-obliterating websites. Sharing tales of his own perfectly imperfect adventures, Kugel explains how to make the most of new...

Traces the author's explorations of U.S. territories including American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Northern Mariana Islands to juxtapose their blends of culture against the expansionist views of the Founding Fathers.

"On an autumn morning in 1849, Henry David Thoreau stepped out his front door to walk the beaches of Cape Cod. Over a century and a half later, Ben Shattuck does the same. With little more than a loaf of bread, brick of cheese, and a notebook, Shattuck sets out to retrace Thoreau's path through the Cape's outer beaches, from the elbow to Provincetown's fingertip. This is the first of six journeys taken by Shattuck, each one inspired by a walk once...

Presents thirty essays and articles highlighting a variety of American individuals, communities, and subcultures.

In one of his first books, "The Mountains of California", John Muir, famed naturalist, environmentalist, and author, recounts his travels through the Sierra Nevada Mountains and Yosemite Valley. First published in 1894, "The Mountains of California" is a captivating and vivid portrait of the raw beauty of this spectacular place. He takes the readers on a tour of the wonders that abound, writing "Go where you may within the bounds of California, mountains...

"The riveting tale of two pioneering botanists and their historic boat trip down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon. In the summer of 1938, botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter set off to run the Colorado River, accompanied by an ambitious and entrepreneurial expedition leader, a zoologist, and two amateur boatmen. With its churning waters and treacherous boulders, the Colorado was famed as the most dangerous river in the world. Journalists...

Yemen is arguably the most fascinating and least known country in the Arab world. Long regarded by classical geographers as a fabulous land where flying serpents guarded sacred incense groves, our current ideas of this country at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula have been hijacked -- by images of the desert, by oil, by the Gulf War. But, as Tim Mackintosh-Smith reminds us with this brilliant book, there is another Arabia. Mackintosh-Smith...

If Clanlands was a gentle road trip through Scotland, this almanac is a top down, pedal to the metal up and down odyssey through the many byways of a Scottish year. An invitation to anyone who picks up the book to join us on a crazy camper van exploration over 12 glorious, whisky fueled months. Mountains, battles, famous (and infamous) Scots, the alarming competitiveness of Men in Kilts, clans, feuds, flora, fauna, with a healthy sprinkling of embarrassing...

After eleven years as an American living in London, the renowned travel writer Paul Theroux set out to travel clockwise around the coast of Great Britain to find out what the British were really like. The result is this perceptive, hilarious record of the journey. Whether in Cornwall or Wales, Ulster or Scotland, the people he encountered along the way revealed far more of themselves than they perhaps intended to display to a stranger. Theroux captured...

If the saga of Top O' Hill Casino becoming Arlington Baptist College were written as fiction, readers would dismiss it as improbable and were written as fiction, readers would dismiss it as improbable and impossible. The story of a tearoom evolving into the gambling hot spot of North Central Texas that was then acquired by a fiery gospel preacher, who foretold its transformation into a Baptist seminary and ultimately an accredited Bible college, is...