Geographical Discovery & Exploration

A portrait of Madagascar, the world's fourth-largest island and a place of enduring fascination for its rich biodiversity (including a plethora of endemic species), as well as for its tangled and troubled history.

In the 1930s, as official government expeditions set their sights on conquering Everest, a little-known World War I veteran named Maurice Wilson conceived his own crazy, beautiful plan: he would fly a Gipsy Moth airplane from England to Everest, crash land on its lower slopes, th...en become the first person to reach its summit - all utterly alone. Wilson didn't know how to climb. He barely knew how to fly. But he had pluck, daring and a vision - he wanted to be the first man to stand on top of the world. Traumatised by his wartime experiences and leaving behind a trail of broken hearts, Wilson believed that Everest could redeem him. This is the tale of an adventurer unlike any you have ever encountered: an unforgettable story about the power of the human spirit in the face of adversity. Maurice Wilson is a man written out of the history books - dismissed as an eccentric and a charlatan by many, but held in the highest regard by renowned mountaineers such as Reinhold Messner. The Moth and the Mountain restores him to his rightful place in the annals of Everest and in doing so attempts to answer that eternal question - why do we climb mountains?
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An exploration narrative of the highest order: the bestselling author of Over the Edge of the World brings alive the extraordinary life and adventures of Sir Francis Drake, whose mastery of the seas during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I changed the course of history--as a pirate ...raiding Spanish galleons, as the first explorer to successfully circumnavigate the globe, and as a naval hero who defeated the Spanish Armada and reshaped the global order. Queen Elizabeth's favorite pirate, Francis Drake, was a hot-tempered, red-haired rogue who plundered and pillaged his way to the ends of the earth. The most fascinating and accomplished of all buccaneers, Drake is regarded as a folk hero throughout Great Britain, a combination of unparalleled explorer and Robin Hood. He was vigorous and daring, but also a brash hustler who beguiled the nearly insolvent young queen of England with promises of gold and silver, and tales of heroic quests in exotic lands. For Elizabeth, he made the impossible real. Drake was the first captain to circumnavigate the globe successfully (Ferdinand Magellan had died in his attempt), and a decade later, when Elizabeth called upon Drake again, he dramatically defeated the Spanish Armada, making possible the rise of the British Empire. Throughout his career he reaped benefits by making himself into the instrument of Elizabeth's imperial ambitions. And as the devil-may-care vice-admiral of the English fleet, he personified England's transition to Great Britain. The relationship between Drake and Elizabeth is the missing link in the rise of the British empire, and its importance has not been fully described or appreciated--until now. Framed around Francis Drake's key explorations as a way to illuminate this crucial moment in British history, In Search of a Kingdom is a rousing adventure narrative mingling wide-ranging historical themes with intimate passions.
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Brilliant young polymath Andrew Rader provides a stunning history of human exploration and assesses where our desire to explore could take us next.

The story of the rise of modern navigation technology, from radio location to GPS-and the consequent decline of privacy