Following the original steps of pioneering naturalists, Gail Fishman profiles thirteen men who explored North America's southeastern wilderness between 1715 and the 1940s, including John James Audubon, Mark Catesby, John and William Bartram, John Muir, and Alvan Wentworth Chapman. The book is also Fishman's personal travelogue as she experiences the landscape through their eyes and describes the changes that have occurred along the region's trails and streams.

Bicycling Through Paradise is a collection of twenty historically themed cycling tours broken into 10-mile segments centered around Cincinnati, Ohio. Written by two longtime cyclists--one a professor of history and one an architect--the book is an affectionate, intimate, and provocative reading of the local landscape and history from the perspectives of cycling and Cincinnati enthusiasts. Tours, navigated by Smythe and Hanlon, take cyclers past Native American sites, early settler homesteads, and locations made know through recent Ohio change-makers as navigated by the authors. With extensive details on routes and sites along the way, tours between 20 and 80 miles in length are designed for all levels of cyclists, and even the armchair explorer. Riders and readers will visit towns called Edenton, Loveland, Felicity, and Utopia. Along the journey, they'll encounter an abandoned Shaker village near the Whitewater Forest and a tiny dairy house called "Harmony Hill," the oldest standing structure in Clermont County, Ohio. They'll also take in the view from the top of a 2,000-year-old, 75-foot tall, conical Indian mound at Miamisburg. Riders can follow the Little Miami Scenic Trail and take a detour to a castle on the banks of the Little Miami River. Other sights include a full-scale replica of the tomb of Jesus in Northern Kentucky and the small pleasures of public parks, covered bridges, tree-lined streets, riverside travel, and one-room schoolhouses. And if all this isn't exactly Paradise, well, it's pretty close.

What does it mean to bring progress—schools, electricity, roads, running water—to paradise? Can our consumer culture and desire to “do good” really be good for a community that has survived contentedly for centuries without us? In October 2008, climbing expedition leader and attorney, Jeffrey Rasley, led a trek to a village in a remote valley in the Solu region of Nepal named Basa. His group of three adventurers was only the third group of white people ever seen in this village of subsistence farmers. What he found was a people thoroughly unaffected by Western consumer-culture values. They had no running water, electricity, or anything that moves on wheels. Each family lived in a beautiful, hand-chiseled stone house with a flower garden. Beyond what they already had, it seemed all they wanted was education for the children. He helped them finish a school building already in progress, and then they asked for help getting electricity to their village. Bringing Progress to Paradise describes Rasley’s transformation from adventurer to committed philanthropist. We are attracted to the simpler way of life in these communities, and we are changed by our experience of it. They are attracted to us, because we bring economic benefits. Bringing Progress to Paradise offers Rasley’s critical reflection on the tangled relationship between tourists and locals in “exotic” locales and the effect of Western values on some of the most remote locations on earth.

An account of the violence and repression that defined the murderous Guatemalan civil war of the 1980s. Manz, an anthropologist, spent over two decades studying the Mayan highlands and remote rain forests of Guatemala. In a political portrait of Santa María Tzejá, where highland Maya peasants seeking land settled in the 1970s, Manz describes these villagers' plight as their isolated, lush, but deceptive paradise became one of the centers of the war convulsing the entire country. After their village was viciously sacked in 1982, desperate survivors fled into the surrounding rain forest and eventually to Mexico, and some even further, to the United States, while others stayed behind and fell into the military's hands. Manz follows their flight and eventual return to Santa María Tzejá, where they sought to rebuild their village and their lives. From publisher description.

A light-hearted, uplifting and inspiring account of one couple's fifteen day odyssey through the French and Italian Alps, exploring the Vanoise and Gran Paradiso National Parks. The third book in the Alpine Thru-Hiking collection. Just five days after their demanding four-week adventure around the Matterhorn, Esther and Dan set out into the wilderness once again. Their goal is simple, to enjoy a peaceful walking holiday in the Alps. However, as usual, the moment their shoes hit the trail their plans go straight out of the window and the adventure takes on a life of its own. Driven by an inexplicable thirst to always look beyond the next summit, their initially sedate hike from refuge-to-refuge soon becomes an expedition across blizzard-ridden 3000-metre passes, tumultuous boulder fields and snow-packed glaciers, turning each day into a unique pilgrimage through some of the most remote and stunning Alpine scenery they've ever seen. Sleeping in everything from luxury hotels to snow-covered storm-shelters and abandoned tree houses, their quest to lose themselves in the heart of the Alps becomes far more than a search for nice views and exciting stories. It's about rediscovering the solitude of the hills and the calm of the night sky, miles from civilisation and the chaos of the modern world. A perfect book for anyone who wants to experience the awe-inspiring magic of Europe's most beautiful wilderness.

In the 1930s, the Federal Writers' Project paid Stetson Kennedy and Zora Neale Hurston, along with other lesser-known writers, to create driving tours of Florida. The FWP and the State of Florida jointly published the results as Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State. In Backroads of Paradise, Cathy Salustri retraces the routes these writers traveled, bringing a modern eye to the historic tours.