Winner Travel: Guides & Essays 2021 Best Book Awards
A modern travel tale—part personal pilgrimage, part political quest—that captures the power of human resilience
"McKiernan sticks his thumb out, and somehow a healthy dose of humanity manages to roll up alongside him. . . . This book is a paean to nuance, decency and possibility." —Colum McCann, National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author of Let the Great World Spin and Apeirogon.
Following the collapse of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy, social activist Ruairí McKiernan questions whether he should join the mounting number of emigrants searching for greater opportunity elsewhere. McKiernan embarks on a hitchhiking odyssey with no money, no itinerary and no idea where he might end up each night. His mission: to give voice to those emerging from one of the most painful periods of economic and social turmoil in Ireland’s history. Engaging, provocative and sincere, Hitching for Hope is a testimony to the spirit of Ireland. It is an inspirational manifesto for hope and healing in troubled times.
Featuring 9 Solas Award-winning stories, including "The Trout Baron" and "Tea in Kabul"!
Diane LeBow's stories, like her life, take you to places and experiences you've probably never imagined. They are passionate, poignant, funny, sometimes tragic, and always unexpected. Share a meal with Corsican rebels in the ragged mountains of this ancient island, meet a black stallion in a blizzard on the Mongolian steppes, assist Afghan women exiled in Tajikistan in writing a Declaration of their Rights for the new Constitution, and savor a love affair with an elegant French Baron.
LeBow gives us peeks behind the curtains into women's and men's lives around the world in our search for answers to universal human questions such as how to experience the best our world offers, ways to balance our desire for love with yearning for freedom and adventure, and longing for a sense of home within ourselves and in our worlds.
Can you combine wanderlust and motherhood? Margo Weinstein did.
For decades, Margo Weinstein escaped her demanding legal practice by kayaking, whitewater rafting, trekking, and climbing in remote regions. Then she had a son and found herself in the kiddie pool on a Disney cruise. Searching for a new path, a jalan-jalan, that could accommodate motherhood and satisfy her wanderlust, she dragged her young son to the other side of the world, moving first to Shanghai and then to Bali.
Adventure seekers and armchair travelers will relish reading Weinstein's exploits as she battles baboons in Zimbabwe and surfaces under a capsized raft in Pakistan. Parents will appreciate her efforts to explore the world with a kid in tow and marvel at her expat life in a villa where a python on the stairs, a scorpion in the outdoor shower, and Hindu offerings ceremonially placed next to the infinity pool and Wi-Fi router are daily realities.
In Stories from Ecuador, one gets a glimpse into Tyrel Nelson’s background as well as his life as an English teacher during the 2007 and 2008 school years. They also become familiar with his host community of Cuenca. Through more than thirty illustrative vignettes, the author sprinkles Spanish, photos, and pieces of his personality to set the table for the audience as they meet the neighbors, nationals, and fellow foreigners who enriched the Minnesotan’s 365 days in South America. On hikes, horseback, buses, and boats, readers follow Nelson to popular destinations, not to mention the hidden hamlets that surround his town.
Starting her journey behind the Iron Curtain in Romania, tracking Spider monkeys in Tikal, following the Green March in Morocco, working on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, riding horses in Umbria, training teachers in Borneo, to living under strict Sharia law in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan, Jo takes us with her on inner and outward explorations in exotic locations. She writes of ways to navigate physical, emotional, and even spiritual risks and pain while traveling to parts of the world few have seen or described.
A vagabond always wants to go elsewhere. Why not, now and then, go back? A solo nostalgia trip, back to Brazil after a quarter-century absence.
Tropical Ecstasy is the narrative of a month-long adventure of discovery and rediscovery: A cruise of the Amazon, hikes into the jungle, and Manaus, the metropolis amidst raw Nature. Then to the Northeast of Brazil, to Olinda, an old colonial capital, and to the modern state capitals on the Atlantic. The ultimate destination is the town of Penedo, where Norman Weeks had lived.
Set authentically in the High Sierra, The Trail is a moving story showing how nature helps us find what's missing in our lives.
More than a hiking novel, The Trail is fused with humor, philosophy, and trail lore. Woven in is a back story detailing the origins of the John Muir Trail: a 211-mile trail spanning the rooftop of the Sierra Nevada from Yosemite Valley to Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the continental United States.
The Idaho Press, in partnership with Ted Kunz, our very own “Two-Wheeled Wanderer,” presents “The Two-Wheeled Wanderer: An Obscure Man in Obscure Places." The 200+ page book includes a compilation of all the TWW dispatches, along with a collection of photos in full color. This modern-day adventure will make you laugh and touch your heart, including his time in Livingstone, Zambia, where he and a host of Idaho Press readers who donated toward the effort, built the Castlewood Laboratory for the students at Libuyu School.
Finalist Travel: Guides & Essays 2021 Best Book Awards
Dance provides a way to travel far beyond the typical tourist experience. By connecting with local people through a shared love of movement, dancers catalyze many unique opportunities. They build cross-cultural friendships with dance as the only shared language, discover ways to train with celebrated teachers, experience cultural immersion key to their personal development, and more. In this anthology, you'll find stories from renowned performers, dance educators, and other avid dance adventurers. Their tales about epic dance adventures across North America, Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa highlight various dance traditions, as well as unique aspects of each country's geography, history, demographics and educational systems. In this way, Dance Adventures celebrates the power of dance to connect us to the best parts of humanity, as well as to the best parts of ourselves.
Finalist Travel: Guides & Essays 2021 Best Book Awards
Three years ago, Lynda Rozell sold her house, quit her job, and began living on the road full-time in an Airstream travel trailer that she tows with a RAM 1500 truck. This book chronicles Lynda’s transformation from her previous life to that of a Tin Can Pilgrim, including her ongoing spiritual growth and the practical skills she has acquired to live in and tow her Airstream trailer. Lynda seeks to live out her Christian faith in her ordinary, everyday life as she travels around the country visiting campgrounds, RV resorts, parks, and religious sites. Through engaging stories, she invites others into the communities she has found on the road and shares the beauty of Creation and spiritual signposts that continue to lead her to radical trust in God.
Finalist Travel: Guides & Essays 2021 Best Book Awards
Postcards Home 2, Adventures Begin with the First Step, is a travel essay composite. Those steps W.D. Mast took over those many years are told in short adventurous stories and shown with vivid, representative photographic imagery and validated with the actual photo postcards he sent while traveling to those wonderful places. This unique compilation including some of the over 1,000 postcards he sent that were kept and returned to him has made Mast's first travel memoir, Postcards Home, an award wining favorite.
Finalist Travel: Guides & Essays 2021 Best Book Awards
A couple of grizzled old geezers leave for a months-long RV trip in February 2020.
But they are about to hit a bump in the road.
Gerri Almand and her husband Michael have been living part-time in their RV for years. She has gone from a reluctant RV wife to a deep appreciator of the open road, so when it comes time for their next trip, she knows she’s ready.
Enter Covid-19.
When the pandemic breaks out, their return home becomes impossible. They must run for their lives to elude the dreaded coronavirus, and they do what any logical senior couple would do…
They sell their home and embrace a full-time RV life.
They spend six weeks in a nudist RV park, chase after Dennis Hopper’s ghost in Taos, deny themselves a Koi fishing expedition in Cripple Creek, learn the art of the ‘wike’ in Leadville, survive a snowstorm outside Colorado Springs, stroll across the London Bridge in Lake Havasu City, and nestle in the desert in southern California as the pandemic rages.
Running from COVID in Our RV Cocoon is the humorous true story of one couple’s paradoxical journey of both losing and finding freedom during Covid-19. It is packed with helpful tips to becoming full-time nomads and offers the complicated truths of what it’s like to live in an RV during a terrifying pandemic.
Finalist Travel: Guides & Essays 2021 Best Book Awards
The Butterfly Bruises is a collection of poems and stories regarding animals, the ocean, miscommunication, childhood, Northeastern versus Southern American culture, family, nature versus technology, and the imagination of the introvert. In these lyrical texts, a couple sleepwalks together, a therapist is imagined as a snake, a manatee befriends a widow, a ghost haunts an old Charleston home, and New York City becomes its own character. Stepping into these pages brings about new worlds—some full of magic, others full of mystery.
Finalist Travel: Guides & Essays 2021 Best Book Awards
A wayward descendant of Mexico's national hero, a femme fatale who recites poems in cantinas, a Tunisian prostitute in Barcelona, a Spanish psychiatrist who fights brave bulls, the wise owner of the world's oldest restaurant. They are just a handful of the characters portrayed in VIDAS: Deep in Mexico and Spain, the first travel memoir to explore Mexico and Spain with the perspective of an American and the knowledge of an insider.
VIDAS: Deep in Mexico and Spain is a passage from adolescence to maturity, a tribute to nature and the open road, an exaltation of love, food and wine, a journey from the tender, mortal flesh to the luminous world of the spirit. It is also travel writing at its best, an evocation of peoples, places and rituals seldom glimpsed by natives or foreigners.
"If you are seventeen, at large in Mexico, seeing new things and learning every hour, any cheap dive, any impulse or encounter is pure as the snows on Popocatepetl, stained by hot ashes."
Think Under the Tuscan Sun meets La Passione. Through heart-warming and humorous stories that unfold across Italy's 20 regions over the span of 15 years, Italy Through the Rear-View Mirror makes a persuasive case for why so many of us fall in love with Italy.
“What can I say: Susan's 'Italy Through the Rear-View Mirror' IS Italy." —Franco Cavalleri, Italian Journalist and Photographer
While pursuing her insatiable passion for Italy, Italy and its inhabitants helped Susan discover the real reason behind a growing attachment to this sun-drenched country. Beneath the obvious beauty and intriguing diversity that we learn about, she knew there was something more profound building her sense of connection to a country she otherwise had no connection with. A rear-view mirror perspective opened Susan's eyes to the underlying role that every-day aspects of the Italian lifestyle—its traditions and rituals, its food, its people and their engaging approach to 'living life in the piazza'—played in cultivating this sense of connection. These were the ties binding it all together for her, and her to it. Travel was the vehicle and Italy the teacher, helping to illuminate how we are all wired for connection, how we crave a sense of belonging, and how simple human encounters can feed our soul.
Italy Through the Rear-View Mirror inspires us to reflect on our own journey, whether it involves travel or not, and in the process learn about our connection to this global community we call humanity. In fragile times, when our capacity to travel may be constrained and our ability to connect feels distant, the message is even more relevant.
