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Memoirs & Biographies For The Adventurous Man
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items For the adventurous man, a good memoir can remind you that your wandering and off-the-beaten-path ambitions are a gift. These memoirs and biographies have all impacted me personally in one way or another.
“I saw that my life was a vast glowing empt...
This book helped me understand the importance of taking a leap into the unknown, regardless of what that leap is, as Jedidiah Jenkins details in truly exquisite prose just how he biked from Oregon to Patagonia, and more importantly why. It is a book ...
To Shake the Sleeping Self
Phenomenal memoir bordering on travel writing. I read it before I ever picked up a surfboard and loved every minute of it, eventually leading me to spend a month in Mexico surfing all day everyday. Finnegan writes about the ocean like it is a love so...
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
This is a surprisingly candid memoir by the founder of Nike. It is a great mix of entrepreneurship, travel, sports, and just a young guy figuring it out. Very cool look into a different era of commerce at the beginning of modern globalism, but not a ...
Shoe Dog
Obama was elected when I was only 15 and left office when I was 23. I was too young to fully grasp what his presidency was or meant. This book gave me clarity of not only the man and the true role of the president, but also of the times that shaped m...
A Promised Land
All around great memoir. Matty Mac no doubt loves to make punchy one liners, and his book is no exception, but behind that is real depth. Greenlights is fundamentally a story of what it is like to grow up poor, come into money doing something you lik...
Greenlights
This isn’t exactly a memoir, but it is a deeply personal book by a Potawatomi woman who is also a professor and highly educated environmental scientist. She weaves her own indigenous spirituality with her scientific knowledge in what feels like a col...
Braiding Sweetgrass
If you liked Band of Brothers, you’ll like this book. It is about Major Dick Winters of Easy Company. This book is a biography, not a memoir, but it is a good reminder that war heroes have to return home and live a life. A real page-turner and a rela...
Biggest Brother: Life of Major Dick Winters
Another biography on the list about an all around incredible man. The movie was good but read the dang book already. This book reminded me that resilience and survival largely comes down to the stubbornness built into all of us men that all too often...
Unbroken
Into the Wild is a tragic book and a masterful bit of forensic journalism by Krakauer. Anyone with wanderlust can relate to the dream of going on an odyssey, and this is the story of the odyssey gone wrong. But to me it is not so much a cautionary ta...
Into the Wild
Will Smith’s memoir. He really lets it rip and unpacks his whole life from growing up in a dysfunctional home to winning a Grammy to Fresh Prince to being a movie star. Don’t let the whole Chris Rock slap scandal overshadow an amazing story about a m...
Will
Cheryl Strayed tells the story of how her life completely unravels after her mom dies and how she uses hiking the PCT to put it back together again. She writes with raw candor yet lack of self-pity and reveals what it is like to through-hike and what...
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail