Bent Northrop Memorial Library

"Anthony Bourdain saw more of the world than nearly anyone. His travels took him from the hidden pockets of his hometown of New York to a tribal longhouse in Borneo, from cosmopolitan Buenos Aires, Paris, and Shanghai to Tanzania’s utter beauty and the stunning desert solitude of Oman’s Empty Quarter -- and many places beyond. In World Travel, a life of experience is collected into an entertaining, practical, fun and frank travel guide that gives...

Author Tom Bissell discusses what it was like having a Vietnam veteran as a father; addresses the war efforts and the debates over it; recounts his trip to Vietnam, where he and his dad interviewed natives and visited sites where John Bissell fought; and contemplates how the Vietnam War shaped so many soldiers.

Part foreign affairs discourse, part humor, and part twisted self-help guide, this book takes the reader from America to Iceland to India in search of happiness, or, in the crabby author's case, moments of "un-unhappiness." The book uses a mixture of travel, psychology, science and humor to investigate not what happiness is, but where it is. Are people in Switzerland happier because it is the most democratic country in the world? Do citizens of Singapore...

Knowing little of navigation, he set out from San Francisco with his wife and two crew, in a schooner whose defects included a tendency to leak and a refusal to face up to the wind when hove to. Snark took them to Hawaii, and then to the Marquesas and Solomon Islands; everywhere they were overwhelmed with South Seas hospitality. Jack London was able to admire the sailing qualities of Polynesian catamarans and succumb to the pleasures of life ashore,...

Spanning 2,000 miles and traversing six states from Missouri to the Pacific Ocean, the Oregon Trail is the route that made America. In the fifteen years before the Civil War, when 400,000 pioneers used it to emigrate West, the trail united the coasts, doubled the size of the country, and laid the groundwork for the railroads. The trail years also solidified the American character: our plucky determination in the face of adversity, our impetuous cycle...

The author chronicles his year-long experiences living in his house on a Cape Cod beach, and describes his surrounding, migrations of the birds, changing seasons, and more.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835—1910), more commonly known under the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, lecturer, publisher and entrepreneur most famous for his novels "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (1876) and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (1884). First published in 1897, Twain's travel book "Following the Equator - A Journey Around the World" chronicles his 1895 tour of the British Empire when he was 60 years old. Fundamentally...

When thirteen-year-olds Jonah and Chip, who are both adopted, learn they were discovered on a plane that appeared out of nowhere, full of babies with no adults on board, they realize that they have uncovered a mystery involving time travel and two opposing forces, each trying to repair the fabric of time.

The past may seem the safest place to be . . . but it is the most dangerous time to be alive. . . . Jamie Fraser and Claire Randall were torn apart by the Jacobite Rising in 1746, and it took them twenty years to find each other again. Now the American Revolution threatens to do the same. It is 1779 and Claire and Jamie are at last reunited with their daughter, Brianna, her husband, Roger, and their children on Fraser’s Ridge. Having the family...

In January 2003, Nicholas Sparks and his brother Micah set off on a three-week-trip around the world. It was to mark a milestone in their lives, for at 37 and 38 respectively, they were now the only surviving members of their family. As they travel the globe, the intimate story of their family unfolds in the details of the untimely deaths of their parents and only sister. Against the backdrop of the wonders of the world, the Sparks brothers band together...