Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

Reviewing a real classic adventure narrative!   Title: Sailing Alone Around the World Author: Joshua Slocum; read by Alan Sklar Publication Info: Tantor Media, 2006. 7hrs 45 min. Originally published 1899. Source: Library digital resources Publisher's Blurb: Joshua Slocum’s autobiographical account of his solo trip around the world is one of the most remarkable – and entertaining – travel narratives of all time. Setting off alone from Boston aboard the thirty-six-foot wooden sloop  Spray  in April 1895, Captain Slocum went on to join the ranks of the world’s great circumnavigators – Magellan, Drake, and Cook. But by circling the globe without crew or consorts, Slocum would outdo them all: his three-year solo voyage of more than 46,000 miles remains unmatched in maritime history for its courage, skill, and determination. Sailing Alone around the World  recounts Slocum’s wonderful adventures: hair-raising encounters with pirates off Gibraltar and savage Indi...

  Title: My Old Man and the Sea Author: David Hays and Daniel Hays Publisher: Algonquin Books, 1995, 231 pages. Source: Daly City Public Library Associates booksale Publisher's Summary: A story of adventure on a small boat, for fathers, for sons, and for those who love them. On this voyage the father relinquishes control, the son becomes the captain, and before long they are utterly alone, with only the huge waves of Cape Horn, a compass, a sextant, a pet cat, and the tiny boat they've built together. "The account of the passage, related in alternating sections by father and son, will be read with delight 100 years from now."--William F. Buckley, The New York Times Book Review, front page; "A must read for sailors of the sea and of the heart."--Eco Traveler.  
   My Review:  I really enjoyed this book, and in some ways it's hard to know exactly why. I'm not a sailor, and will never be one (can you say motion sickness?), and many of the detail...

  Two covers, because the image of the one I read--on the left--is so small. Plus, I think the other  cover is nicer :) Title: Glory in a Camel's Eye: A Perilous Trek Through the Greatest African Desert Author: Jeffrey Tayler Publisher: Houghton Mifflen Harcourt, 2003. 245 pages. Source: Library Publisher's Summary:  Hailed by Bill Bryson and the New York Times Book Review as an emerging master of travel writing, Tayler penetrates one of the most forbidding regions on Earth. Journeying along routes little altered since the Middle Ages, he uses his linguistic and observational gifts to illuminate a venerable, enigmatic culture of nomads and mystics. Though no stranger to privation (having journeyed across Siberia and up the Congo for his earlier books), Tayler is unprepared for the physical challenges that await him in a Sahara dessicated by eight years of unprecedented drought. He travels across a landscape of nightmares - charred earth, blinding sky, choking g...