National Network for Equitable Library Service

In 1969, five young men from Montana set out to accomplish what no one had before: to scale the sheer north face of Mount Cleveland, Glacier National Park's tallest mountain, in winter. Two days later tragedy struck: they were buried in an avalanche so deep that their bodies would not be discovered until the following June. This is the account of that fated climb and of the heroic rescue attempt that ensued.

This is the captivating account of the magnificent but doomed quest, led by Robert O'Hara Burke and William Wills, to be the first Europeans to cross the harsh Australian continent in 1860. Plagued with disputes and food shortages they battled the extremes - the searing desert heat, the boggy mangroves, the flooding rains... Only one man survived the expedition's dash to reach the Gulf of Carpentaria. Yet despite their tragic fates, the names Burke and Wills remain synonymous with perseverance and bravery in the face of overwhelming odds.

An American fighter pilot doomed to die in Buchenwald but determined to survive. On August 13, 1944, Joe Moser set off on his forty-fourth combat mission over occupied France. Soon, he would join almost 170 other Allied airmen as prisoners in Buchenwald, one of the most notorious and deadly of Nazi concentration camps. Tom Clavin's Lightning Down tells this largely untold and riveting true story. Moser was just twenty-two years old, a farm boy from Washington State who fell in love with flying.

An inspiring collection of thrilling personal adventures and stunning photographs sharing the incredible diversity and profound beauty of Canada's national parks. Distributed across the second-largest country in the world, the Canadian national parks can be challenging to get to. Many of them are so remote that they have no road access or infrastructure of any kind, but they are not impossible to visit.

Additional information from two survivors and two Sabena pilots compliment this popular bestseller. In the cold dark of an early September morning, the crew and passengers of a Sabena Airlines DC4, flight OOCBG, were brutally hurled into an experience that killed many of them and tested the strength of the survivors to incredible limits. The story of their determination to live and the masterful, courageous effort of their rescuers is a thrilling true life adventure.

The human story has always been one of perseverance--often against remarkable odds. The most astonishing survival tale of all might be that of 16th-century Dutch explorer William Barents and his crew of sixteen, who ventured farther north than any Europeans before and, on their third polar exploration, lost their ship off the frozen coast of Nova Zembla to unforgiving ice. The men would spend the next year fighting off ravenous polar bears, gnawing hunger, and endless winter.

In 1968, nine sailors set off on the most daring race ever held: to single-handedly circumnavigate the globe nonstop. It was a feat that had never been accomplished and one that would forever change the face of sailing. Ten months later, only one of the nine men would cross the finish line and earn fame, wealth, and glory. For the others, the reward was madness, failure, and death. In this extraordinary book, Peter Nichols chronicles a contest of the individual against the sea, waged at a time before cell phones, satellite dishes, and electronic positioning systems.

It started on a summer afternoon in 1795 when a young man named Daniel McGinnis found what appeared to be an old site on an island off the Acadian coast, a coastline fabled for the skullduggery of pirates. The notorious Captain Kidd was rumored to have left part of his treasure somewhere along here, and as McGinnis and two friends started to dig, they found what turned out to be an elaborately engineered shaft constructed of oak logs, nonindigenous coconut mats, and landfill that came to be known as the Money Pit.

The story of a ship begins after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, when Great Britain had more bomb ships than it had enemies. The solid, reinforced hulls of HMS Erebus, and another bomb ship, HMS Terror, made them suitable for discovering what lay at the coldest ends of the earth. In 1839, Erebus was chosen as the flagship of an expedition to penetrate south to explore Antarctica. Under the leadership of the charismatic James Clark Ross, she and HMS Terror sailed further south than anyone had been before.

This is a new reading of the thrilling account of one of the most astonishing feats of exploration and human courage ever recorded. In August of 1914, the British ship Endurance set sail for the South Atlantic. In October, 1915, still half a continent away from its intended base, the ship was trapped, then crushed in the ice. For five months, Sir Ernest Shackleton and his men, drifting on ice packs, were castaways in one of the most savage regions of the world.