Not long after I moved with my family to a small town in New Hampshire, I happened upon a path that vanished into a wood on the edge of town.' So begins Bill Bryson's hilarious book 'A Walk in the Woods. Following his return to Americ...

Part foreign affairs discourse, part humor, and part twisted self-help guide, The Geography of Bliss takes the reader from America to Iceland to India in search of happiness, or, in the crabby author's case, moments of 'un-unhappiness...

Kinky Friedman, the original Texas Jewboy, takes us on a rollicking, rock-and-rolling tour of his favorite city: Austin.Maybe you want to know which restaurant President Bush rates as his favorite Austin burger joint. Or maybe you wan...

It was seven years ago that Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil achieved a record-breaking four-year run on the New York Times bestseller list. John Berendt's inimitable brand of nonfiction brought the dark mystique of Savannah so...

DIVHaving seen Europe with a rucksack on his back and a youthful spring in his step twenty years earlier, Bill Bryson decides to make a sentimental journey back to that familiar territory, to wander perilously through the minefields o...

In June 1867, Mark Twain set out for Europe and the Holy Land on the paddle steamer Quaker City. His enduring, no-nonsense guide for the first-time traveler also served as an antidote to the insufferably romantic travel books of the p...

In this celebration of one of America's oldest towns (incorporated in 1720), Michael Cunningham, author of the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning The Hours/b, brings us Provincetown, one of the most idiosyncratic and extraordinary...

The fascinating story of the explorers and their race to the South PoleAt the beginning of the 20th century, the South Pole was the most coveted prize in the modern age of exploration. In this brilliant dual biography, every detail of...

Two Years Before the Mast is a book by the American author Richard Henry Dana, Jr., written after a two-year sea voyage starting in 1834 and published in 1840.While at Harvard College, Dana had an attack of the measles that affected h...

From the master of literary reportage whose acclaimed books include 'Shah of Shahs, The Emperor,' and 'The Shadow of the Sun,' an intimate account of his first youthful forays beyond the Iron Curtain. Just out of university in 1955, K...

The father of our country slept with Martha, but schlepped in the District. Now in the great man's footsteps comes humorist and twenty-year Washington resident Christopher Buckley with the real story of the city's founding. Well, not ...

"Let's get lost together . . . "Lost in My Own Backyard/b brings acclaimed author Tim Cahill together with one of his—and America's—favorite destinations: Yellowstone, the world's first national park. Cahill has been &qu...

The author who unforgettably captured the experience of starting a new life in Tuscany in bestselling travel memoirs expands her horizons to immerse herself—and her readers—in the sights, aromas, and treasures of twelve new specia...

I always imagine each of the signoras who lived in this house—where she shelled peas, rocked the grandchild, placed a vase of the pink roses. Now I would like to take one of these women back to my house in California to show her how...

With generous splashes of popular culture and human interest, the NPR Road Trips series introduces you not only to far-off locations and unusual destinations, but to the people who inhabit them—and seek them out. Each story focuses ...

SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE Back in America after twenty years in Britain, Bill Bryson decided to reacquaint himself with his native country by walking the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail, which stretches from Georgia to Maine. The...

Richard Grant and his girlfriend were living in a shoebox apartment in New York City when they decided on a whim to buy an old plantation house in the Mississippi Delta. Dispatches from Pluto is their journey of discovery into this st...