|
Armchair Travel February 2021
|
|
|
|
|
The Girl Explorers : The Untold Story of the Globetrotting Women Who trekked, Flew, and Fought Their Way Around the World
by Jayne Zanglein
"Don't take women when you go exploring!" In 1932, Roy Chapman Andrews, the president of the Explorers Club, told hundreds of female students at Barnard College that women and exploration could never mix. He obviously didn't know a thing about either. The Girl Explorers is the inspirational and untold story of the women who broke apart the stuffy men's club and founded the Society of Woman Geographers, and how some key members paved the way for women scientists by scaling mountains, exploring the seas, flying across the Atlantic, and recording the world through film, sculpture, and art.
|
|
|
Moon U.S. Civil Rights Trail: A Traveler's Guide to the People, Places, and Events That Made the Movement
by Deborah D. Douglas
Get to know the voices, stories, music, and flavors that shape and celebrate Black America both then and now. Take a seat at a lunch counter where sit-ins took place or dig in to heaping plates of soul food and barbecue. Spend the day at museums that connect our present to the past or spend the night in the birthplace of the blues. Award-winning journalist Deborah Douglas offers her valuable perspective and knowledge, including suggestions for engaging with local communities by supporting Black-owned businesses.
|
|
|
Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World
by Andrea Pitzer
In Icebound, Andrea Pitzer masterfully combines a gripping tale of survival with a sweeping history of the great Age of Exploration-a time of hope, adventure, and seemingly unlimited geographic frontiers. At the story's center is William Barents, one of the 16th century's greatest navigators whose larger-than-life ambitions and obsessive quest to chart a path through the deepest, most remote regions of the Arctic ended in both tragedy and glory.
|
|
| Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is by Gretel EhrlichWhat it is: A follow-up to the acclaimed 1985 book The Solace of Open Spaces, this poetic memoir details Gretel Ehrlich's meditative observations about her ranch in Wyoming and the places she's visited, including California, Greenland, Japan, Sweden, and Zimbabwe.
What's inside: Ehrlich thoughtfully contemplates ranch life, grief and loss, animals and nature, climate change, and more.
Reviewers say: "Erlich’s memories, rendered in rich, lyrical language, make for a moving ode to a changing planet" (Publishers Weekly). |
|
| How to Be a Family: The Year I Dragged My Kids Around the World to Find a New Way... by Dan KoisWhat it's about: A dad humorously details the year his stressed Northern Virginia family gave up regular life for three months each in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, and small-town Kansas.
The family: journalist and podcast host Dan, lawyer Alia, and their daughters, 11-year-old Lyra and nine-year-old Harper.
Read this next: For a more nature-inspired family travel memoir, try Michael Lanza's Before They're Gone. |
|
| A Year in Provence by Peter MayleWhat it is: a classic travelogue first published in 1989 by English writer Peter Mayle, who vividly describes his and his wife's experiences after they moved into a 200-year-old French farmhouse with a vineyard
What's inside: In chapters named after the months of the year, Mayle offers humorous and keen observations on expatriate life, locals, and the culture of Provence as well as mouthwatering descriptions of food.
Read this next: other books by Mayle; Duck Season by David McAninch; Dirt by Bill Buford; Carol Drinkwater's The Olive Farm; John Baxter's A Year in Paris; L'Appart by David Lebovitz. |
|
| The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World's Happiest Country by Helen RussellWhat it's about: Moving to Denmark for her husband's new job with Lego, English journalist Helen Russell chronicles their first year in the country that's statistically the happiest on Earth, pondering what makes the Danish so content.
Who it's for: those who want a chatty look at life in Denmark or those who'd enjoy a lighthearted look at a British expat abroad.
Read this next: Michael Booth's The Almost Nearly Perfect People, an enjoyable travelogue covering all the Scandinavian countries. |
|
|
We Came, We Saw, We Left: A Family Gap Year
by Charles J. Wheelan
What would happen if you quit your life for a year? In a pre-COVID-19 world, the Wheelan family decided to find out; leaving behind work, school, and even the family dogs to travel the world on a modest budget. Equal parts "how-to" and "how-not-to", and with an eye toward a world emerging from a pandemic, We Came, We Saw, We Left is the insightful and often hilarious account of one family's gap-year experiment.
|
|
Contact your librarian for more great books!
|
|
|
|
|
|