National Network for Equitable Library Service

The Newbery Honor-winning author of Hatchet and Dogsong shares surprising true stories about his relationship with animals, highlighting their compassion, intellect, intuition, and sense of adventure. Gary Paulsen is an adventurer who competed in two Iditarods, survived the Minnesota wilderness, and climbed the Bighorns. None of this would have been possible without his truest companion: his animals. Sled dogs rescued him in Alaska, a sickened poodle guarded his well-being, and a horse led him across a desert.

Describes the events of the 1914 Shackleton Antarctic expedition when, after being trapped in a frozen sea for nine months, their ship, Endurance, was finally crushed, forcing Shackleton and his men to make a very long and perilous journey across ice and stormy seas to reach inhabited land.

On November 20, 1820, the whale ship Essex was rammed and sunk by an angry whale. Within minutes, the twenty-one man crew, including the fourteen-year-old cabin boy Thomas Nickerson, found themselves stranded in three leaky boats in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, with barely any supplies and little hope. Three months later, two of the boats were rescued 4,500 miles away, off the coast of South America. Of the twenty-one castaways, only eight survived, including young Thomas.

Published to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the first American colony, Savage Kingdom presents a bold, even reckless, political adventure driven by a sense of imperial destiny and dogged by official hostility.Four centuries ago, and fourteen years before the Mayflower, a group of men-led by a one-armed ex-pirate, an epileptic aristocrat, a reprobate cleric, and a government spy-left London aboard a fleet of three ships to start a new life in America. They arrived in Virginia in the spring of 1607 and set about trying to create a settlement on a tiny island in the James River.

Captain Kidd has gone down in history as America's most ruthless buccaneer, fabulously rich, burying treasure up and down the eastern seaboard. But it turns out that most everyone, from novelists to scholars, has the story all wrong. Captain William Kidd was no career cutthroat; he was a tough, successful New York sea captain who was hired to chase pirates in the 1690s.

Wanted: Volunteers for Project Delta. Will guarantee you a medal. A body bag. Or both.With this call to arms, Charlie Beckwith revolutionized American armed combat. Beckwith's acclaimed memoir tells the story of Delta Force as only its maverick creator could tell it-from the bloody baptism of Vietnam to the top-secret training grounds of North Carolina to political battles in the upper levels of the Pentagon itself. This is the heart-pounding, first-person insider's view of the missions that made Delta Force legendary.

To live in a pristine land unchanged by man; to roam the wilderness through which few other humans have passed; to choose an idyllic site, cut trees, and build a log cabin; to be a self-sufficient craftsman, making what is needed from materials available; to be not at odds with the world, but content with one's own thoughts and company: thousands have had such dreams, but Richard Proenneke lived them. This book is a simple account of the day-by-day explorations and activities he carried out alone, and the constant chain of nature's events that kept him company.

Adrian Tinniswood brings alive this dynamic chapter in history, where clashes between pirates of the East and governments of the West grew increasingly intense and dangerous. In vivid detail, Tinniswood recounts the brutal struggles, glorious triumphs, and enduring personalities of the pirates of the Barbary Coast, and how their maneuverings between the Muslim empires and Christian Europe shed light on the religious and moral battles that still rage today.

Minamoto Yoshitsune should not have been a samurai. But his story is legend in this real-life saga. This epic warrior tale reads like a novel, but this is the true story of the greatest samurai in Japanese history. When Yoshitsune was just a baby, his father went to war with a rival samurai family-and lost. His father was killed, his mother captured, and his surviving half-brother banished. Yoshitsune was sent away to live in a monastery. Skinny, small, and unskilled in the warrior arts, he nevertheless escaped and learned the ways of the samurai.

Outfitted with a pair of ratty sand shoes and a knapsack full of trade goods, Eric Hansen set off to cross the rainforest of Borneo, one of the last places on earth largely untouched by Western civilization. For seven months Hansen hunted wild pig, gathered roots, and lived among tribes whose longhouses were still decorated with the headhunting swords of their ancestors, completing one of the great adventures of our time.