Best Pacific U.S. Regional Travel

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.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Being an avid reader of true life adventures,this is definitely one of my favorites.I think what I loved about this story, is it is so honest, and primal.We all have times in our lives when we want to just leave everything behind, and go on an essential walkabout.Yet, we don't really know how many people are required to be involved in a singular journey."
"Some of the events that she recalls are very sad, yet it's in the sadness, her happy moments, the scenes that she describes and her "radical aloneness" that I strangely felt empowered, just from reading her story. Hers' is not just one of a woman braving it through the wild of the PCT alone, but the story of a human being on their journey to save themselves."
"Her inner mental battles, the unique people she meets along the way, the beauty and majestic world that is put for you to see (or imagine seeing) is a journey I enjoyed taking with her."
"Although I did not hike the PCT I did backpack in Yosemite."
"I have an acquaintance who also hiked this trail, writing in a moleskin book and drawing beautiful line. illustrations. Having also lost my Mother recently, lived and hiked in No CA, gave me reference points. And when noted - and her feet, body was ravaged, why not contact Paul to, at least, get new boots, proper weight in. backpack? I took it to the northern woods of Michigan - where it's raw and unpopulated, to read - when I was scattering my own Mother's ashes."

Told with suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her. 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.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Being an avid reader of true life adventures,this is definitely one of my favorites.I think what I loved about this story, is it is so honest, and primal.We all have times in our lives when we want to just leave everything behind, and go on an essential walkabout.Yet, we don't really know how many people are required to be involved in a singular journey."
"Some of the events that she recalls are very sad, yet it's in the sadness, her happy moments, the scenes that she describes and her "radical aloneness" that I strangely felt empowered, just from reading her story. Hers' is not just one of a woman braving it through the wild of the PCT alone, but the story of a human being on their journey to save themselves."
"Her inner mental battles, the unique people she meets along the way, the beauty and majestic world that is put for you to see (or imagine seeing) is a journey I enjoyed taking with her."
"Although I did not hike the PCT I did backpack in Yosemite."
"I have an acquaintance who also hiked this trail, writing in a moleskin book and drawing beautiful line. illustrations. Having also lost my Mother recently, lived and hiked in No CA, gave me reference points. And when noted - and her feet, body was ravaged, why not contact Paul to, at least, get new boots, proper weight in. backpack? I took it to the northern woods of Michigan - where it's raw and unpopulated, to read - when I was scattering my own Mother's ashes."

Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir. He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and , unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. Digging deeply, he takes an inherently compelling mystery and unravels the larger riddles it holds: the profound pull of the American wilderness on our imagination; the allure of high-risk activities to young men of a certain cast of mind; the complex, charged bond between fathers and sons. Krakauer brings McCandless's uncompromising pilgrimage out of the shadows, and the peril, adversity , and renunciation sought by this enigmatic young man are illuminated with a rare understanding--and not an ounce of sentimentality. Noted outdoor writer and mountaineer Jon Krakauer tackles that question in his reporting on Chris McCandless, whose emaciated body was found in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness in 1992. After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"(Krakauer,Into the Wild) Jon Krakauer beautifully remembered the life of Christopher Johnson McCandless through the biography, Into the Wild. By publishing the inspiring life journey of Chris McCandless, Krakauer was truly able to fulfill Chris's motto, "Happiness only real when shared.""
"Starving to death must not be a very pleasant experience, I know people who do all sorts of crimes and face dangerous situations, degrade their life, just to avoid having an empty stomach. Aren't we all at times tempted to leave everything and head for the secluded mountains and forests in search for inner peace and to find the answers to those hard questions of life, the truth of why we are living. in early years of 1990's when he was started hitchhiking after his graduation, to find the answers to his inner questions, I too was facing extremely difficult situations and from early childhood the question of finding the ultimate truth of life is the one repeating itself in my mind 24x7."
"Somehow it wasn't as powerful as I expected, and being FROM Alaska in a part where I could easily duplicate his experiment, it gives me an unusual perspective on this whole matter. His problem was over abstraction and investing too much time, energy, and thought into the Romantic level of it all."
"The author not only demonstrates his knowledge of Chris' journey, but uses that knowledge to deliver a gripping story that will change your views of natures dangers and beauties forever."
Best Maui Hawaii Travel Books

The finest guidebook ever written for Maui. Wizard guidebooks take over a year to compile and the writers are residents who personally and anonymously review every facet of the island.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"After reading this guide from cover to cover, making all kinds of notes, and cross referencing it with information from internet sources such as Trip Adviser, it's easy to see why it has such high reviews. But after making that decision, this guide devoted to Maui offered FAR more specific insight about things to do and see, where to stay and eat, and all kinds of great details. I generally consider travel guides to be completely useless when it comes to lodging and dining because the information is always so generic, and it is often there because the business paid to have it included. This is the first guide book I've ever used that actually has useful information about lodging and dining."
"We have used Andrew Doughty's Big Island version in the past."
"Mr. Doughty and his team really do get to every nook and cranny on the island and give very honest reviews of simply anything you can imagine."
"Given the nature of the road system and the traffic, it's absolutely necessary to have a guide book that lists more than just the sights to see."
"The best guide book, period..they really have great restaurant recommendactions which we follow and are never disappointed."
"Many of the top picks for activities and so forth have been seconded by my friends who have traveled to Maui therefore I have confidence in the recommendations found in the book. This makes for a very long table of contents to scroll through and I have found it to be overwhelming to read through this section in general. Don't get me wrong, there is some method to the madness as far as the organization of the restaurants (by cuisine and some region), I just don't see the need to list them all in the contents. If I'm really interested in one particular restaurant I've seen along the way then I can search through the book in the Kindle, and I imagine in the paper version there's an index? There are links in the writing to other parts of the Kindle book for things such as photos, maps, or more detailed information on a given topic."
"This is a really great book, but a lot of the pages are blank on my devise."
Best Mountain U.S. Regional Travel

In this gripping narrative, New York Times bestselling author Daniel James Brown sheds new light on one of the most legendary events in American history. The story of the ill-fated Donner party, a group of nineteenth-century settlers en route to California who became snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains and resorted to cannibalism to survive, remains an iconic moment in American history.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"If you like historical context and details, this is your Donner party story."
"I bought this book because everyone in my family read the author's The Boys in the Boat and loved it. "Oh, yeah, those are the dopes who waited too long to cross the Sierras in winter. One of the things that I liked the best was that the author didn't just stop with the disaster, but followed the characters into their subsequent lives."
"Mr. Brown, you are a true artist of the written word and an inspiration for all interested in reading about the heights and heart breaks of the human spirit."
"As a history-buff, I have long been fascinated by the story of the Donnor Party; Brown brings it to life as no other author I have read on the subject."
"Brown's gripping and detailed book about the Donner Party's ignominious trek west is a heartbreaking account of how ordinary emigrants' ambitions, hopes, courage and faith drove, sustained and challenged them to stay alive in the midst of extreme weather conditions and unimaginable hardships to realize their dream of a better life for themselves and their children."
"This was an engrossing history of what happened to a westward traveling group of people."
"Brown is very good at illuminating us on the various medical, psychological and physical conditions these people experienced as they went into the cold frigid climate of the pass in the Sierra Nevada range, thus, I was able to grasp the incredible strength of will and resilience of their bodies rebounding from such unbelievable conditions.The Donner Party story is one you must read."
"It was interesting to learn how much stronger the women were than the men both physically and psychologically."