Collected from the list of 100 Best Adventure Books as ranked by National Geographic Adventure
Rank | Title | Author | Year | |||
· |
1 |
The Worst Journey in the World |
Apsley Cherry-Garrard |
1922 |
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· |
2 |
Journals |
Meriwether Lewis & William Clark |
1814 |
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· |
3 |
Wind, Sand & Stars |
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry |
1940 |
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· |
4 |
Exploration of the Colorado River |
John Wesley Powell |
1875 |
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· |
5 |
Arabian Sands |
Wilfred Thesiger |
1959 |
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· |
6 |
Annapurna |
Maurice Herzog |
1952 |
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· |
7 |
Desert Solitaire |
Edward Abbey |
1968 |
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· |
8 |
West With the Night |
Beryl Markham |
1942 |
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· |
9 |
Into Thin Air |
Jon Krakauer |
1997 |
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· |
10 |
The Travels of Marco Polo |
Marco Polo |
1298 |
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· |
11 |
Farthest North |
Fridtjof Nansen |
1897 |
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· |
12 |
The Snow Leopard |
Peter Matthiessen |
1978 |
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· |
13 |
Roughing It |
Mark Twain |
1872 |
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· |
14 |
Two Years Before the Mast |
Richard Henry Dana |
1840 |
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· |
15 |
South |
Ernest Shackleton |
1919 |
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· |
16 |
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush |
Eric Newby |
1958 |
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· |
17 |
Kon-Tiki |
Thor Heyerdahl |
1950 |
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· |
18 |
Travels in West Africa |
Mary Kingsley |
1897 |
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· |
19 |
The Spirit of St. Louis |
Charles Lindbergh |
1953 |
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· |
20 |
Seven Years in Tibet |
Heinrich Harrer |
1953 |
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· |
21 |
Journals |
James Cook |
1779 |
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· |
22 |
Home of the Blizzard |
Douglas Mawson |
1915 |
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23 |
The Voyage of the Beagle |
Charles Darwin |
1839 |
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· |
24 |
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom |
T.E. Lawrence |
1926 |
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· |
25 |
Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa |
Mungo Park |
1799 |
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· |
26 |
The Right Stuff |
Tom Wolfe |
1979 |
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· |
27 |
Sailing Alone Around the World |
Joshua Slocum |
1900 |
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· |
28 |
The Mountain of My Fear and Deborah: A Wilderness Narrative |
David Roberts |
1970 |
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· |
29 |
First Footsteps in East Africa |
Richard Burton |
1856 |
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· |
30 |
The Perfect Storm |
Sebastian Junger |
1997 |
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· |
31 |
The Oregon Trail |
Francis Parkman |
1849 |
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· |
32 |
Through the Dark Continent |
Henry M. Stanley |
1878 |
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· |
33 |
A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains |
Isabella L. Bird |
1879 |
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· |
34 |
In the Land of White Death |
Valerian Albanov |
1917 |
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· |
35 |
Endurance |
F.A. Worsley |
1931 |
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· |
36 |
Scrambles Amongst the Alps |
Edward Whymper |
1871 |
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· |
37 |
Out of Africa |
Isak Dinesen |
1937 |
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· |
38 |
Scott's Last Expedition: The Journals |
Robert Falcon Scott |
1913 |
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· |
39 |
Everest: The West Ridge |
Thomas Hornbein |
1965 |
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· |
40 |
Journey Without Maps |
Graham Greene |
1936 |
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· |
41 |
Starlight and Storm |
Gaston Rébuffat |
1954 |
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· |
42 |
My First Summer in the Sierra |
John Muir |
1911 |
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· |
43 |
My Life as an Explorer |
Sven Hedin |
1925 |
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· |
44 |
In Trouble Again |
Redmond O'Hanlon |
1988 |
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· |
45 |
The Man Who Walked Through Time |
Colin Fletcher |
1968 |
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· |
46 |
K2 - the Savage Mountain |
Charles Houston & Robert Bates |
1954 |
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· |
47 |
Gipsy Moth Circles the World |
Francis Chichester |
1967 |
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· |
48 |
Man-Eaters of Kumaon |
Jim Corbett |
1944 |
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· |
49 |
Alone |
Richard Byrd |
1938 |
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· |
50 |
Stranger in the Forest |
Eric Hansen |
1988 |
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· |
51 |
Travels in Arabia Deserta |
Charles M. Doughty |
1888 |
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· |
52 |
The Royal Road to Romance |
Richard Halliburton |
1925 |
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· |
53 |
The Long Walk |
Slavomir Rawicz |
1956 |
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· |
54 |
Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada |
Clarence King |
1872 |
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· |
55 |
My Journey to Lhasa |
Alexandra David-Neel |
1927 |
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56 |
Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile |
John Hanning Speke |
1863 |
|||
· |
57 |
Running the Amazon |
Joe Kane |
1989 |
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· |
58 |
Alive |
Piers Paul Read |
1974 |
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· |
59 |
Principal Navigations |
Richard Hakluyt |
1590 |
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· |
60 |
Incidents of Travel in Yucatan |
John Lloyd Stephens |
1843 |
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· |
61 |
Shipwreck of the Whaleship Essex |
Owen Chase |
1821 |
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· |
62 |
Life in the Far West |
George Fredrick Ruxton |
1849 |
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· |
63 |
My Life as an Explorer |
Roald Amundsen |
1927 |
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· |
64 |
News from Tartary |
Peter Fleming |
1936 |
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· |
65 |
Annapurna: A Woman's Place |
Arlene Blum |
1980 |
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· |
66 |
Mutiny on the Bounty |
William Bligh |
1790 |
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· |
67 |
Adrift |
Stephen Callahan |
1986 |
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· |
68 |
Castaways |
Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca |
1555 |
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· |
69 |
Touching the Void |
Joe Simpson |
1989 |
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· |
70 |
Tracks |
Robyn Davidson |
1980 |
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· |
71 |
The Adventures of Captain Bonneville |
Washington Irving |
1837 |
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· |
72 |
Cooper's Creek |
Alan Moorehead |
1963 |
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· |
73 |
The Fearful Void |
Geoffrey Moorhouse |
1974 |
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· |
74 |
No Picnic on Mount Kenya |
Felice Benuzzi |
1953 |
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· |
75 |
Through the Brazilian Wilderness |
Theodore Roosevelt |
1914 |
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· |
76 |
The Road to Oxiana |
Robert Byron |
1937 |
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· |
77 |
Minus 148° |
Art Davidson |
1969 |
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· |
78 |
Travels in Asia and Africa |
Ibn Battúta |
1354 |
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· |
79 |
Jaguars Ripped My Flesh |
Tim Cahill |
1987 |
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· |
80 |
Journal of a Trapper |
Osborne Russell |
1914 |
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· |
81 |
Full Tilt |
Dervla Murphy |
1965 |
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· |
82 |
Terra Incognita |
Sara Wheeler |
1996 |
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· |
83 |
We Die Alone |
David Howarth |
1955 |
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· |
84 |
Kabloona |
Gontran de Poncins |
1941 |
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· |
85 |
Conquistadors of the Useless |
Lionel Terray |
1961 |
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· |
86 |
Carrying the Fire |
Michael Collins |
1974 |
||
87 |
Adventures in the Wilderness |
William H.H. Murray |
1869 |
|||
· |
88 |
The Mountains of my Life |
Walter Bonatti |
1998 |
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· |
89 |
Great Heart |
James West Davidson & John Rugge |
1988 |
||
· |
90 |
Journal of the Voyage to the Pacific |
Alexander Mackenzie |
1801 |
||
· |
91 |
The Valley of the Assassins |
Freya Stark |
1934 |
||
· |
92 |
The Silent World |
Jacques Cousteau |
1953 |
||
· |
93 |
Alaska Wilderness |
Robert Marshall |
1956 |
||
· |
94 |
Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indians |
George Catlin |
1841 |
||
· |
95 |
I Married Adventure |
Osa Johnson |
1940 |
||
· |
96 |
The Descent of Pierre Saint-Martin |
Norbert Casteret |
1954 |
||
97 |
The Crystal Horizon |
Reinhold Messner |
1982 |
|||
· |
98 |
Narrative of a Journey Across the Rocky Mountains to the Columbia River |
John Kirk Townsend |
1839 |
||
· |
99 |
Grizzly Years |
Doug Peacock |
1990 |
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· |
100 |
One Man's Mountains |
Tom Patey |
1971 |
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