http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ledyard

A coming of age/finding of manliness written by the hilarious Matthew Polly. As a college student he found himself lacking in manliness and decided to go all out to fix that problem. He left Princeton and hopped on plane to China to learn Kung fu from the legendary Shaolin monks without even knowing whether or not Shaolin was.

It is one of my favorite books of all time. If you find Martial arts, or China interesting, and you have a good sense of humor this book can’t be beaten.

“The Conquest of New Spain” by Bernal Diaz

Here’s the description from Amazon. “Vivid, powerful and absorbing, this is a first-person account of one of the most startling military episodes in history: the overthrow of Montezuma’s doomed Aztec Empire by the ruthless Hernan Cortes and his band of adventurers. Bernal Diaz del Castillo, himself a soldier under Cortes, presents a fascinatingly detailed description of the Spanish landing in Mexico in 1520 and their amazement at the city, the exploitation of the natives for gold and other treasures, the expulsion and flight of the Spaniards, their regrouping and eventual capture of the Aztec capital.”

Roy Chapman Andrews, the celebrated explorer who discovered the first velociraptor skeleton in the Gobi Desert, was also a shameless self-promoter. Gallenkamp (Maya: The Riddle and Rediscovery of a Lost Civilization), in association with the American Museum of Natural History, which sponsored Andrews’s 1922-1930 Mongolia expeditions, delivers a fair but unambitious portrait of this inspired traveler. Henry Fairfield Osborn, Andrews’s longtime friend and mentor, once wrote to him, “You alone of all the men I know have a full measure of optimism; everyone else tells me things that cannot be done.” In his lifetime, Andrews’s optimism led him to the remotest regions on the globe and into the fray of world events, from WWI and civil war in Central and eastern Asia to the religious controversy over evolution. Before Andrews abandoned the Gobi in 1932 because of mounting anti-imperialism by the Chinese, the desert yielded to him a wealth of fossils: the first-ever protoceratops, oviraptor as well as the velociraptor and the modern world’s first glimpse of dinosaur eggs. Gallencamp relies heavily on Andrews’s own sensational writings and some secondary sources, but little that would allow us to view Andrews other than through his own eyes. It is telling, though, how much of Andrews’s story is taken up by his cultivation of celebrity at home and how little of it by science. For Andrews, science was a means to an end; it gave purpose to his wanderlust. As for what drove him, Gallenkamp does not probe too deeply behind his subject’s own mythmaking, but that is not his goal. This is a page-turning adventure story, and as such, it’s a good one.

Fore a real adventure, read “Lost City of Z,” which made the list, but also two that didnt, but should have…

7 years in Tibet

Jupiters Travels

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4277

RyanE

Those of us using e-readers find the electronic versions much more convenient, as well as cheaper.

RyanE