Santa Cruz Public Libraries - Readers' Advisory Adventure Stories Nonfiction Real life adventure stories for adventurous readers. Hand picked by your local librarian. Adventure Stories The Bad Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: and their race to save the world's most precious manuscripts by Hammer, Joshua 025.8 HAM Journalist Hammer (Yokohama Burning) reports on librarian Abdel Kader Haidara and his associates' harrowing ordeal as they rescued 370,000 historical manuscripts from destruction by al-Qaeda-occupied Timbuktu. Hammer sketches Haidara's career amassing manuscripts from Timbuktu's neighboring towns and building his own library, which opened in 2000. Meanwhile, three al-Qaeda operatives, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, Abdel-hamid Abou Zeid, and Iyad Ag Ghali, escalate from kidnapping and drug trafficking to orchestrating a coup with Tuareg rebels against the Malian army and seizing Timbuktu. The militants aim to "turn the clocks back fourteen hundred years" by destroying revered religious shrines and imposing Sharia law, which includes flogging unveiled women and severing the hands of thieves. Fearing for the safety of the manuscripts, Haidara and associates buy up "every trunk in Timbuktu" and pack them off 606 miles south to Bamako, employing a team of teenage couriers. Hammer does a service to Haidara and the Islamic faith by providing the illuminating history of these manuscripts, managing to weave the complicated threads of this recent segment of history into a thrilling story. Agent: Flip Brophy, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. Deep Survival: who lives, who dies and why by Gonzales, Laurence 613.69 GON After her plane crashes, a seventeen-year-old girl spends eleven days walking through the Peruvian jungle. Against all odds, with no food, shelter, or equipment, she gets out. A better-equipped group of adult survivors of the same crash sits down and dies. What makes the difference?Examining such stories of miraculous endurance and tragic death--how people get into trouble and how they get out again (or not)--Deep Survival takes us from the tops of snowy mountains and the depths of oceans to the workings of the brain that control our behavior. Through close analysis of case studies, Laurence Gonzales describes the "stages of survival" and reveals the essence of a survivor--truths that apply not only to surviving in the wild but also to surviving life-threatening illness, relationships, the death of a loved one, running a business during uncertain times, even war.Fascinating for any reader, and absolutely essential for anyone who takes a hike in the woods, this book will change the way we understand ourselves and the great outdoors. Kon-Tiki: across the Pacific by raft by Heyerdahl, Thor 910.9164 HEY "Am going to cross Pacific on a wooden raft to support a theory that the South Sea islands were peopled from Peru. Will you come? ...Reply at once." That is how six brave and inquisitive men came to seek a dangerous path to test a scientific theory. On a primitive raft made of forty-foot balsa logs and named "Kon-Tiki" in honor of a legendary sun king, Heyerdahl and five companions deliberately risked - 1 - their lives to show that the ancient Peruvians could have made the 4,300-mile voyage to the Polynesian islands on a similar craft. On every page of this true chronicle--from the actual building of the raft through all the dangerous and comic adventures on the sea, to the spectacular crash-landing and the native islanders' hula dances--each reader will find a wholesome and spellbinding escape from the twenty-first century. Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship by Kurson, Robert 910.9163 KUR The odds of finding a bona fide pirate ship are quite rare, a fact Robert Kurson (Shadow Divers) points out in the first few pages of this extraordinary adventure. Only one-the Whydah-has ever been positively identified as belonging to pirates. The subjects of Kurson's latest, John Chatterton and John Mattera, are undeterred by such unlikelihood in their conquest to locate the elusive Golden Fleece, the 17th-century ship captained by Joseph Bannister, lost somewhere in the waters near the Dominican Republic. Kurson takes readers on a wild ride alongside these bigger-than-life pirate hunters as they navigate the red tape of maritime code, dead ends, and dwindling resources, as well as rival hunters keen on beating Chatterton and Mattera to the prize. Though this drama would be more than enough, Kurson also examines the many myths surrounding pirates in their golden age, some of which were true (they did keep parrots and used colorful language, but they were also remarkably egalitarian in terms of race and rank-all races were welcomed and every man from the captain to the cook was treated equally, though women were not present unless they were in disguise). Kurson's own enthusiasm, combined with his copious research and an eye for detail, makes for one of the most mind-blowing pirate stories of recent memory, one that even the staunchest landlubber will have a hard time putting down. Agent: Flip Brophy, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Jun.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. Roughing It by Twain, Mark 818 TWA n 1861, young Mark Twain found himself adrift as a newcomer in the Wild West, working as a civil servant, silver prospector, mill worker, and finally a reporter and traveling lecturer. Roughing It is the hilarious record of those early years traveling from Nevada to California to Hawaii, as Twain tried his luck at anything and everything - and usually failed. Twain's encounters with tarantulas and donkeys, vigilantes and volcanoes, even Brigham Young, the Mormon leader, come to life with his inimitable mixture of reporting, social satire, and rollicking tall tales. Amazon review. Running the Amazon by Kane, Joe 918.1 KAN Foaming rapids, tropical fevers, Maoist guerrillas, gun-happy drug lords, short tempers, and even shorter rations were just a few of the perils faced by the author during his 4200-mile kayak-and-raft passage from the source of the Amazon in the Peruvian highlands to the Atlantic Ocean. The only American among the 11-person team that undertook the historic trip, Kane was one of the four who finally completed the grueling voyage. As chronicler of the expedition, he does a fine job of delineating the often prickly personalities of the participants, of capturing the emotional highs and lows of such an undertaking, and of describing the territory along the route. The narrative gets off to a somewhat slow start. When Kane is off the water as a member of the support group, his writing has a second-hand quality. Once he begins paddling his way downriver, however, the narrative excitement begins to build - 2 - and Kane maintains it right to the final pages. Some of the most appealing passages concern events ashore and the people the ever-dwindling group encounters there. There's Roberto, for example, the transvestite restaurant proprietor who, glittering in rhinestones and sequins, lip-syncs Barry Manilow's ""Feelings"" in his fly-blown establishment in a crumbling river town. There is also a mestizo teen-ager named ""Elvis Presley,"" and the band of guerrillas who first fire on the group from the cliffs, then hold them at gunpoint until the travelers buy their freedom with five cans of tuna. The original group is a contentious lot consisting of Poles, Afrikaners, a British woman doctor, and Kane. Frequent arguments erupt concerning group leadership, financial arrangements, and the methods used to generate publicity about the trip. By voyage's end, however, the four remaining members establish deep emotional ties, and the author captures this without ever becoming sentimental. A generally engrossing adventure yarn--one that offers fresh and lively insights into the varying passions that inspire men and women to undertake such a test of stamina and ingenuity. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission. Sex on the Moon: The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in History by Mezrich, Ben 364.1628 MEZ A promising NASA recruit throws everything away for a girl, illustrating the fascinating consequences when science, ambition, and starry-eyed love collide. In bestselling author Mezrich's telling, Thad Roberts, while at the University of Utah, became determined to be an astronaut and threw himself into science courses, He left his wife behind when he was accepted to the elite Johnson Space Center Cooperative Program in Houston, the training ground for NASA scientists. Despite his lack of an engineering background, Roberts excelled in the life sciences department. While cataloguing samples, he noticed the moon rocks NASA categorized as "trash"-samples returned after experiments. Then Roberts met and fell in love with a new recruit, Rebecca, and planned to give her the moon, or at least its profits, by stealing the "used" moon rocks. Roberts devised the heist and arranged an online sale with a mineral collector in Belgium. The suspicious buyer alerted the FBI, which set up a sting, and Roberts was sentenced to eight years in federal prison. Mezrich (The Accidental Billionaires, from which The Social Network was adapted) has perfected his intensely readable brand of nonfiction: talented, often unscrupulous, young people skyrocketing to the top only to tumble back to earth. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster by Krakauer, Jon 796.522 KRA On May 19, 1953, Edmund Hillary and Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay achieved the impossible, becoming the first men to stand on top of Mount Everest. But by May 10, 1996, climbing the 29,000-foot "goddess of the sky" had become almost routine; commercial expeditions now littered Everest's flanks.