Best Northeast US Travel Guides

The AT offers an astonishing landscape of silent forests and sparkling lakes — and to a writer with the comic genius of Bill Bryson, it also provides endless opportunities to witness the majestic silliness of his fellow human beings. When this American transplant to Britain decided to return home, he made a farewell walking tour of the British countryside and produced Notes from a Small Island . Accompanied only by his old college buddy Stephen Katz, Bryson starts out one March morning in north Georgia, intending to walk the entire 2,100 miles to trail's end atop Maine's Mount Katahdin. As Bryson and Katz haul their out-of-shape, middle-aged butts over hill and dale, the reader is treated to both a very funny personal memoir and a delightful chronicle of the trail, the people who created it, and the places it passes through. Awed by merely the camping section of his local sporting goods store, he nevertheless plunges into the wilderness and emerges with a consistently comical account of a neophyte woodsman learning hard lessons about self-reliance.

Living in a tent even through brutal winters, he had survived by his wits and courage, developing ingenious ways to store edibles and water, and to avoid freezing to death. It is a gripping story of survival that asks fundamental questions about solitude, community, and what makes a good life, and a deeply moving portrait of a man who was determined to live his own way, and succeeded. Though the ‘stranger’ in the title is Knight, one closes the book with the sense that Knight, like all seers, is the only sane person in a world gone insane—that modern civilization has made us strangers to ourselves." —Jennifer Senior, The New York Times "Michael Finkel has done something magical with this profound book… [His] investigation runs deep, summoning…the human history of our own attempts to find meaning in a noisy world."

Disarmed of falsehood, he was left only with the awful truth: John Hodgman is an older white male monster with bad facial hair, wandering like a privileged Sasquatch through three wildernesses: the hills of Western Massachusetts where he spent much of his youth; the painful beaches of Maine that want to kill him (and some day will); and the metaphoric haunted forest of middle age that connects them. An Amazon Best Book of November 2017: In Vacationland , John Hodgman describes an afternoon he spent building cairns – those steeple-shaped piles of stones you see along hiking trails. But Hodgman’s first cairns are “ass”: “Naturally,” he says, “I went for the big rocks, the showy ones with flashy colors and boss marbling. I hauled them out of the mud as if strength mattered even for a second in cairn building and used them as the base for huge, high monuments to overthink … And then I would step back and see how terrible they were.” Just when a metaphor for the writing process begins to seem obvious, Hodgman lets his grand creation fall. “Oh, I forgot to mention: we were high out of our minds.” Throughout Vacationland , Hodgman strikes a delicately calibrated, seemingly artless balance of pathos and humor. A memoir, of any sort, by a man whose success as an actor, podcaster, and writer (of the Complete World Knowledge trilogy) allows him to own not just one, but two vacation homes, seems fated to evoke resentment, but though he may be fulfilling his “Caucasian class destiny in the most loathsome way possible,” the book never feels braggy. Setting it down, you’re left with the sense that you’ve just finished a long, pleasant trip into the author’s mind. The book is a cleverly composed meditation on one privileged American’s life—and, glancingly, on America—at a crucial moment for both.” — Chicago Tribune. Hodgman has a gift for capturing the modes and mores of New England in a way that is wry and true.” —Los Angeles Times. Sharp, silly, and sensitive, Vacationland is a literary selfie of a concerned citizen storyteller—one in which the oldest slice of the United States does a little inelegant photobombing.” —NPR. At some point, long after I gave up resisting the near-constant impulse to laugh out loud, I came to the realization that with Vacationland , Hodgman has established himself as a memoirist and, unquestionably, a master prose stylist, of rare power and restraint.” —Michael Chabon “This book is genuinely it-will-make-you-laugh funny, it is a wistful and sad examination of the impulse that causes us to move to out of the way places and of what John Hodgman found when he went there, and it is always wiser than it seems. “John Hodgman is a literary wizard, an imaginative humorist, and a true man of mystery. “I am delighted that Vacationland exists, because it will finally prove something to the world that I have known for years: John Hodgman is a seriously great writer. It's easy to miss this point about John, as his literary talents are often overshadowed by his well-known and much-loved sense of humor. These essays demonstrate his rare gift in a volume that is rich with sensitivity, subtlety, grace, and—yes, of course— wit. ‘Show him to me, that I may mock him for his lousy sense of humor and his inability to know good prose when he sees it.’” —John Darnielle, bestselling author of Universal Harvester and primary member of the Mountain Goats “John Hodgman thinks we’re rubes, trying to convince us he’s some unlovable fraud or a post-post Dick Cavett. But his wondrous Vacationland proves the truth: he is a man from the future sent here to save us with comedic metaphors, relishable scoldings, and neoclassic wit.” —Brad Meltzer, bestselling author of The Escape Artist “We’ve known for a while now that John Hodgman is a master of invention. Moving, hilarious, and deeply heartfelt, Vacationland is a wonder.” —Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, bestselling author of The Nest. “John Hodgman returns to the page with a humorous, yet sincere look at his time spent on the beaches of Maine and his trek through middle age.

Now, Brandon is back with the Humans of New York book that his loyal followers have been waiting for: Humans of New York: Stories . “Some street photographers hide behind phone booths like paparazzi so their subject won't be aware of their presence, but for Stanton it's precisely that awkward interaction, the tearing down of the wall between strangers, that he covets.” ― The Huffington Post. He was a 2013 Time Magazine "30 people under 30 changing the world," an ABC News Person of the Week, told stories from around the world in collaboration with the United Nations, and was invited to photograph President Obama in the Oval Office.

Living in a tent even through brutal winters, he had survived by his wits and courage, developing ingenious ways to store edibles and water, and to avoid freezing to death. It is a gripping story of survival that asks fundamental questions about solitude, community, and what makes a good life, and a deeply moving portrait of a man who was determined to live his own way, and succeeded. Though the ‘stranger’ in the title is Knight, one closes the book with the sense that Knight, like all seers, is the only sane person in a world gone insane—that modern civilization has made us strangers to ourselves." —Jennifer Senior, The New York Times "Michael Finkel has done something magical with this profound book… [His] investigation runs deep, summoning…the human history of our own attempts to find meaning in a noisy world."

A must-read for any of the thousands of listeners who made Boers part of their daily routine, The Score of a Lifetime is a freewheeling, frank portrait of a man, a career, a station no one thought would survive, and a city that loves its sports. Terry Boers is a legend in Chicago sports media.

Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 selection: This special eBook edition of Cheryl Strayed’s national best seller, Wild ,features exclusive content, including Oprah’s personal notes highlighted within the text, and a reading group guide. Amazon Best Books of the Month, March 2012: At age 26, following the death of her mother, divorce, and a run of reckless behavior, Cheryl Strayed found herself alone near the foot of the Pacific Crest Trail--inexperienced, over-equipped, and desperate to reclaim her life. While readers looking for adventure or a naturalist's perspective may be distracted by the emotional odyssey at the core of the story, Wild vividly describes the grueling life of the long-distance hiker, the ubiquitous perils of the PCT, and its peculiar community of wanderers. But Strayed doesn't want sympathy, and her confident prose stands on its own, deftly pulling both threads into a story that inhabits a unique riparian zone between wilderness tale and personal-redemption memoir. Two months before Wild was published I stood on a Mexican beach at sunset with my family assisting dozens of baby turtles on their stumbling journey across the sand, then watching as they disappeared into the sea. Echoing the ever-popular search for wilderness salvation by Chris McCandless (Back to the Wild, 2011) and every other modern-day disciple of Thoreau, Strayed tells the story of her emotional devastation after the death of her mother and the weeks she spent hiking the 1,100-mile Pacific Crest Trail. As her family, marriage, and sanity go to pieces, Strayed drifts into spontaneous encounters with other men, to the consternation of her confused husband, and eventually hits rock bottom while shooting up heroin with a new boyfriend. Woefully unprepared (she fails to read about the trail, buy boots that fit, or pack practically), she relies on the kindness and assistance of those she meets along the way, much as McCandless did.

The AT offers an astonishing landscape of silent forests and sparkling lakes — and to a writer with the comic genius of Bill Bryson, it also provides endless opportunities to witness the majestic silliness of his fellow human beings. When this American transplant to Britain decided to return home, he made a farewell walking tour of the British countryside and produced Notes from a Small Island . Accompanied only by his old college buddy Stephen Katz, Bryson starts out one March morning in north Georgia, intending to walk the entire 2,100 miles to trail's end atop Maine's Mount Katahdin. As Bryson and Katz haul their out-of-shape, middle-aged butts over hill and dale, the reader is treated to both a very funny personal memoir and a delightful chronicle of the trail, the people who created it, and the places it passes through. Awed by merely the camping section of his local sporting goods store, he nevertheless plunges into the wilderness and emerges with a consistently comical account of a neophyte woodsman learning hard lessons about self-reliance.

They were pushing, adventurous, and fearless men, who thought nothing of laying down their lives in the service of a friend, or often, it might be, only as a matter of humanity. Equipped with nothing but their skill and endurance, a few ponies, a gun or two, and provisions enough to last them for the day, they set out to make their way through a vast wilderness that held all the terrors of the unknown. In 1882, while Mr. Hamilton was a witness in the Star Route trial in Washington, the Smithsonian Institution endeavored to photograph these signs, but with indifferent success. His story also gives, for the first time, an account of three years of the life of the great scout and mountaineer, Bill Williams, one of the prominent figures in the early history of the plains. William Thomas Hamilton was born into a wealthy family in England but was brought to American when he was two years old.