Travel Audiobooks | LoveReading

A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast

Dorthe Nors's first nonfiction book chronicles a year she spent traveling along the North Sea coast-from Skagen at the northern tip of Denmark to the Frisian Islands in the Wadden Sea. In fourteen expansive essays, Nors traces the history, geography, and culture of the places she visits while reflecting on her childhood and her family and ancestors[ ties to the region as well as her decision to move there from Copenhagen. She writes about the ritual burning of witch effigies on Midsummer's Eve; the environmental activist who opposed a chemical factory in the 1950s; the quiet fishing villages that surfers transformed into an area known as Cold Hawaii starting in the 1970s. She connects wind turbines to Viking ships, thirteenth-century church frescoes to her mother's unrealized dreams. She describes strong waves, sand drifts, storm surges, shipwrecks, and other instances of nature asserting its power over human attempts to ignore or control it. Through a deep, personal engagement with this singular landscape, A Line in the World accesses the universal. Its ultimate subjects are civilization, belonging, and change: changes within one person's life, changes occurring in various communities today, and change as the only constant of life on Earth.

Dorthe Nors (Author), Ann Richardson (Narrator)

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A Midlife Cyclist: My two-wheel journey to heal a broken mind and find joy

'Masses of heart... frank and funny' Melanie Sykes 'Gritty and glorious' Ruth Field, author of Run Fat B!tch Run 'A truly inspiring tale' William Pullen, author of Run for Your Life 'Thrillingly honest and hopeful' Jools Walker, author of Back in the Frame ***************************************** Includes an exclusive interview with the author. Rachel is a cyclist. But she was never meant to be. After gaining mental strength and healing through running, she thought she was free. Her depression alleviated, she came off antidepressants, winning races and collecting medals at marathons. But when an injury stopped the only thing helping to quiet the voices in her brain, Rachel found out what she is truly made of. As body dysmorphia began to grip her in earnest, she knew she had to find a different way to kick her mental health demons for the sake of her sanity. So, she went down to her cellar, heaved out her old bike, and started pedalling. Like her life depended on it. A Midlife Cyclist is a tale of two wheels, across the Yorkshire Dales, Vietnam, Costa Rica and beyond, and a rider in search of peace.

Rachel Ann Cullen (Author), Kat Rose-Martin, Rachel Ann Cullen (Narrator)

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A Month in Siena

Brought to you by Penguin. Shortly after completing his searing work of non-fiction, The Return, Hisham Matar set off for Siena, a city he had never visited before. His plan was to see the paintings of the Sienese school, to immerse himself in the work of artists he admired perhaps above all others. This month in Siena would be an extraordinary period in the life of this writer: an immersion in art, a consideration of grief and violence, an intimate encounter with the city and its inhabitants. Hisham Matar's short book is the story of how art can console and disturb in equal measure. It is a profoundly moving contemplation of the relationship between art and the human condition.

Hisham Matar (Author), Hisham Matar (Narrator)

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A Paris All Your Own: Bestselling Women Writers on the City of Light

A collection of all-new Paris-themed essays written by some of the biggest names in women’s fiction, including Paula McLain, Therese Anne Fowler, Maggie Shipstead, and Lauren Willig, edited by Eleanor Brown, the New York Times bestselling author of The Weird Sisters and The Light of Paris. “My time in Paris,” says New York Times–bestselling author Paula McLain (The Paris Wife), “was like no one else’s ever.” For each of the eighteen bestselling authors in this warm, inspiring, and charming collection of personal essays on the City of Light, nothing could be more true. While all of the women writers featured here have written books connected to Paris, their personal stories of the city are wildly different. Meg Waite Clayton (The Race for Paris) and M. J. Rose (The Book of Lost Fragrances) share the romantic secrets that have made Paris the destination for lovers for hundreds of years. Susan Vreeland (The Girl in Hyacinth Blue) and J. Courtney Sullivan (The Engagements) peek behind the stereotype of snobbish Parisians to show us the genuine kindness of real people. From book club favorites Paula McLain, Therese Anne Fowler (Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald), and anthology editor Eleanor Brown (The Light of Paris) to mystery writer Cara Black (Murder in the Marais), historical author Lauren Willig (The Secret History of the Pink Carnation), and memoirist Julie Powell (Julie and Julia), these Parisian memoirs range from laugh-out-loud funny to wistfully romantic to thoughtfully somber and reflective. Perfect for armchair travelers and veterans of Parisian pilgrimages alike, readers will delight in these brand-new tales from their most beloved authors. Read by Kimberly Farr, Cassandra Campbell, Susan Denaker, Emily Rankin, and Alana Kerr Collins

Eleanor Brown (Author), Various, Various Narrators (Narrator)

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A Place Like No Other: Discovering the Secrets of Serengeti

With its rich biodiversity, astounding wildlife, and breathtaking animal migrations, Serengeti is like no other ecosystem on the planet. A Place like No Other is Anthony Sinclair's firsthand account of how he and other scientists discovered the biological principles that regulate life in Serengeti and how they rule all of the natural world. When Sinclair first began studying this spectacular ecosystem in 1965, a host of questions confronted him. What environmental features make its annual migration possible? What determines the size of animal populations and the stunning diversity of species? What factors enable Serengeti to endure over time? In the five decades that followed, Sinclair and others sought answers. What they learned is that seven principles of regulation govern all natural processes in the Serengeti ecosystem. Sinclair shows how these principles can help us to understand and overcome the challenges facing Serengeti today, and how they can be used to repair damaged habitats throughout the world. Blending vivid storytelling with invaluable scientific insights from Sinclair's pioneering fieldwork in Africa, A Place like No Other reveals how Serengeti holds timely lessons for the restoration and conservation of our vital ecosystems.

Anthony R. E. Sinclair (Author), Shaun Grindell (Narrator)

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A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons

"I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla," writes Robert Sapolsky in this witty and riveting chronicle of a scientist's coming-of-age in remote Africa. An exhilarating account of Sapolsky's twenty-one-year study of a troop of rambunctious baboons in Kenya, A Primate's Memoir interweaves serious scientific observations with wry commentary about the challenges and pleasures of living in the wilds of the Serengeti—for man and beast alike. Over two decades, Sapolsky survives culinary atrocities, gunpoint encounters, and a surreal kidnapping, while witnessing the encroachment of the tourist mentality on the farthest vestiges of unspoiled Africa. As he conducts unprecedented physiological research on wild primates, he becomes evermore enamored of his subjects—unique and compelling characters in their own right—and he returns to them summer after summer, until tragedy finally prevents him. By turns hilarious and poignant, A Primate's Memoir is a magnum opus from one of our foremost science writers.

Robert M. Sapolsky (Author), Mike Chamberlain (Narrator)

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A Quest for the Hidden Lands: Synchronicity, Serendipity, Spirituality

My budding career as a literary scholar was suddenly hijacked by a singular seemingly random event. It was 1976 when I tiptoed into a tiny Buddhist shrine room in a farmhouse nestled into the Black Mountains of Wales and there beheld a Tibetan master, the 16th Karmapa, sitting on a throne performing a ceremony known as The Black Hat. My mind came to an immediate stop, suspended. It felt familiar, like the secret garden of childhood. I can still remember every detail like it was yesterday: Karmapa occupies the throne completely. He has a spiritual dignity that makes it his rightful seat, just as the lion proclaims his natural dominion. The force of his presence alone brings a hushed silence to the room. It feels like it has expanded into a cathedral. Two monks blow long Tibetan horns in a haunting wail so loud and long it startles thought patterns, blowing them away like clouds. The Karmapa slowly opens the Black Hat-box, takes the black silk crown in his hand, and puts it on his head holding it down with one hand. With the other hand he fingers a crystal rosary moving it deftly, twirling the beads around three times. The horns continue while he gazes with eyes that seem to dissolve the fiction of time and the boundaries of space. Time is standing still. That glimpse into enlightened mind became embedded like a seed and grew into a quest over the next decades to find the key places on our planet called the Hidden Lands. The legend came alive while I was living in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas. I met Tibetans who had been to the supreme Hidden Land of Pemako while escaping from the Chinese invasion of Tibet. They made it sound like the ‘promised land’ with streams flowing with milky water. There were certain plants that could induce enlightenment. Why did it take decades to get there? What made the right ingredients emerge to penetrate this sacred sanctuary? And the big question: Who hid it and why?

Norma Levine (Author), Norma Levine (Narrator)

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A Road Running Southward: Following John Muir's Journey through an Endangered Land

In 1867, John Muir set out on foot to explore the botanical wonders of the South, keeping a detailed journal of his adventures as he traipsed from Kentucky southward to Florida. One hundred and fifty years later, on a similar whim, veteran Atlanta reporter Dan Chapman recreated Muir's journey to see for himself how nature has fared since Muir's time. Channeling Muir, he uses humor, keen observation, and a deep love of place to celebrate the South's natural riches. Each chapter touches upon a local ecological problem-moving between John Muir's vivid descriptions of a lush botanical paradise and the myriad environmental problems facing the South today. Along the way he talks to locals with deep ties to the land-scientists, hunters, politicians, and even a Muir impersonator-who describe the changes they've witnessed and what it will take to accommodate a fast-growing population without destroying the natural beauty and a cherished connection to nature. A Road Running Southward is part travelogue, part environmental cri de coeur, and paints a picture of a South under siege. It is a passionate appeal, a call to action to save one of the loveliest and most biodiverse regions of the world by understanding what we have to lose if we do nothing.

Dan Chapman (Author), Eric Altheide (Narrator)

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A Russian Journal

Steinbeck and Capa's account of their journey through Cold War Russia is a classic piece of reportage and travel writing. Just after the Iron Curtain fell on Eastern Europe, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Steinbeck and acclaimed war photographer Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union to report for the New York Herald Tribune. This rare opportunity took the famous travelers not only to Moscow and Stalingrad - now Volgograd - but through the countryside of the Ukraine and the Caucasus. Hailed by the New York Times as "superb" when it first appeared in 1948, A Russian Journal is the distillation of their journey and remains a remarkable memoir and unique historical document. What they saw and movingly recorded in words and on film was what Steinbeck called "the great other side there ... the private life of the Russian people." Unlike other Western reporting about Russia at the time, A Russian Journal is free of ideological obsessions. Rather, Steinbeck and Capa recorded the grim realities of factory workers, government clerks, and peasants, as they emerged from the rubble of World War II-represented here in Capa's stirring photographs alongside Steinbeck's masterful prose. Through it all, we are given intimate glimpses of two artists at the height of their powers, answering their need to document human struggle. This edition features an introduction by Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw.

John Steinbeck (Author), Richard Poe (Narrator)

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A Russian Journal

Brought to you by Penguin. Just after the iron curtain fell on Eastern Europe John Steinbeck and acclaimed war photographer, Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union to report for the New York Herald Tribune. This rare opportunity took the famous travellers not only to Moscow and Stalingrad - now Volgograd - but through the countryside of the Ukraine and the Caucasus. A RUSSIAN JOURNAL is the distillation of their journey and remains a remarkable memoir and unique historical document. Steinbeck and Capa recorded the grim realities of factory workers, government clerks, and peasants, as they emerged from the rubble of World War II. This is an intimate glimpse of two artists at the height of their powers, answering their need to document human struggle. © John Steinbeck 1948 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

John Steinbeck (Author), Richard Poe (Narrator)

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A Season for That: Lost and Found in the Other Southern France

An American food writer moves his family of unlikely expats to the French countryside, where the locals upend everything he knows about cooking and winemaking, in this delightful memoir from a winner of the James Beard M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. Steve Hoffman is a perfectly comfortable middle-aged Minnesotan man who has always been desperately, pretentiously in love with France, more specifically with the idea of France. To follow that love, he and his family move, nearly at random, to a small, rural, scratchy-hot village in the south of the country, and he immediately thinks he's made a terrible mistake. Life here is not holding your cigarette chest-high while walking to the cafe and pulling off the trick of pretending to be French, it's getting into fights with your wife because you won't break character and introduce your very American family to the locals, who can smell you and your perfect city-French from a mile away. But through cooking what the local grocer tells him to cook, he feels more of this place. A neighbor leads him into the world of winemaking, where he learns not as a pedantic oenophile, but bodily, as a grape picker and winemaker's apprentice. Along the way, he lets go of the abstract ideas he'd held about France, discovering instead the beauty of a culture that is one with its landscape, and of becoming one with that culture. It's a story told in transporting writing, humor, and delicious detail.

Steve Hoffman (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful

In medieval times, a pilgrimage gave the average Joe his only break from the daily grind. For Gideon Lewis-Kraus, it promises a different kind of escape. Determined to avoid the kind of constraint that kept his father, a gay rabbi, closeted until midlife, he has moved to anything-goes Berlin. But the surfeit of freedom there has begun to paralyze him, and when a friend extends a drunken invitation to join him on an ancient pilgrimage route across Spain, he grabs his sneakers, glad of the chance to be committed to something and someone. Irreverent, moving, hilarious, and thought-provoking, A Sense of Direction is Lewis-Kraus's dazzling riff on the perpetual war between discipline and desire, and its attendant casualties. Across three pilgrimages and many hundreds of miles - the thousand-year-old Camino de Santiago, a solo circuit of eighty-eight Buddhist temples on the Japanese island of Shikoku, and, together with his father and brother, an annual mass migration to the tomb of a famous Hasidic mystic in the Ukraine - he completes an idiosyncratic odyssey to the heart of a family mystery and a human dilemma: How do we come to terms with what has been and what is - and find a way forward, with purpose?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus (Author), Erik Singer (Narrator)

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