Most Popular Books by David Roberts

In 1838, Scottish painter David Roberts (1796-1864) embarked on a three-year journey that would shape Europe''s perception of the Middle East. Nurtured on Bible stories and tales of the exotic Orient, Roberts had always dreamed of exploring the Holy Land, though travel there was an arduous, dangerous undertaking. While he set himself the goal of bringing home an accurate visual record, he returned with a portfolio of hand-tinted lithographs that lost nothing of romanticism. His use of light, color, and atmosphere lent an aura of exoticism to his realistic view.

Having escaped an Australian maximum security prison, a disillusioned man loses himself in the slums of Bombay, where he works for a drug kingpin, smuggles arms for a crime lord, and forges bonds with fellow exiles.

The life and death-defying feats of Alex Honnold, a visionary climber of the sort that comes along only once in a generation. Free solo climbing is a high-stakes sport: if you fall, you die. Expert free soloist Alex Honnold isn''t afraid to push the limit; one of the most famous adventure athletes in the world, he has pioneered new routes, won awards, and shattered records. Alone on the Wall recounts the seven most astonishing achievements of Honnold''s extraordinary life and career, brimming with lessons on living fearlessly, taking risks, and maintaining focus even in the face of extreme danger.

Traces the tragedy-marked 1856 journey of three thousand Mormons from Iowa to Utah, explaining how leader Brigham Young disregarded warnings and then convinced his followers that hardships and deaths were part of a higher plan.

This memoir was inspired by the author''s daughter. He would tell her stories about incidents in his life: so she persuaded him to write them down. "You must write all this down, Dad, so they can be read by your grandchildren. And you must get on with it before you die." Some stories are brief, half a page: others are long, twelve pages. It is the sort of book to keep by the bedside and dip into, one story at a time. Some stories cover events that occurred when the author was a small boy growing up in England during the war. Some cover incidents while he and his wife were travelling, in China, Japan, France, in Canada and in other odd places: events that occurred in the neighbourhood in Caulfeild Cove, where he and his wife have lived for fifty two years. There are pieces about Haida Gwaii and some about his experiences practising law. The stories range from the funny to the harrowing.

One of the world''s best-known writers on mountaineering recalls his climbing career and reconsiders the cost of this most perilous sport.

This is Roberts'' quest to reconstruct one of the most amazing and inspirational survival story in history: the tale of how four 18th- century sailors endured six years on a barren Arctic island.

Continues Australian fugitive Lin''s search for love and faith in a Bombay that has come under the rule of a new generation of mafia dons and where Lin becomes trapped by his married soulmate and an increasingly violent mission.

An exuberant, hands-on fly-on-the-wall account that combines the thrill of canyoneering and rock climbing with the intellectual sleuthing of archaeology to explore the Anasazi. David Roberts describes the culture of the Anasazi—the name means “enemy ancestors” in Navajo—who once inhabited the Colorado Plateau and whose modern descendants are the Hopi Indians of Arizona. Archaeologists, Roberts writes, have been puzzling over the Anasazi for more than a century, trying to determine the environmental and cultural stresses that caused their society to collapse 700 years ago. He guides us through controversies in the historical record, among them the haunting question of whether the Anasazi committed acts of cannibalism. Roberts’s book is full of up-to-date thinking on the culture of the ancient people who lived in the harsh desert country of the Southwest.

Moments of Doubt is a collection of 20 essays and articles on mountaineering and adventure by David Roberts, selected from the published works of two decades. It showcases one of the most highly regarded writers in the field.

This seminal work is the first fully to engage human security with power in the international system. It presents global governance not as impartial institutionalism, but as the calculated mismanagement of life, directing biopolitical neoliberal ideology through global networks, undermining the human security of millions. The book responds to recent critiques of the human security concept as incoherent by identifying and prioritizing transnational human populations facing life-ending contingencies en mass. Furthermore, it proposes a realignment of World Bank practices towards mobilizing indigenous provision of water and sanitation in areas with the highest rates of avoidable child mortality. Roberts demonstrates that mainstream IR''s nihilistic domination of security thinking is directly responsible for blocking the realization of greater human security for countless people worldwide, whilst its assumptions and attendant policies perpetuate the dystopia its proponents claim is inevitable. Yet this book presents a viable means of achieving a form of human security so far denied to the most vulnerable people in the world.

The author of international bestseller, Shantaram, takes us on a gripping personal journey of wonder and insight into science, belief, faith and devotion. Drawing on common-sense logic, sacred traditions, inspirations from the natural world and the iconoclastic instruction of his spiritual teacher, Roberts describes the step by step path he followed in search of spiritual connection, one that anyone, of any belief or none, can apply in their own lives. This gripping personal account of the Leap of Faith is a compellingly fresh, new addition to such enduring, spiritually inspiring works as Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Road Less Travelled and The Celestine Prophecy. From the Author: "The Spiritual Path is for anyone searching for meaning and connection, for more answers than questions, and for practical help in resetting the spiritual compass." Gregory David Roberts

Dialectic of Romanticism presents a radical new assessment of the aesthetic and philosophical history and future of modernity. An exploration of the internal critique of modernism treats romanticism (later historicism and post-modernism) as central to the development of European modernism alongside enlightenment, and, like the enlightenment, subject to its own dead-ends and fatalities. An external critique of modernism recovers concepts of civilization and civic aesthetics which are trans-historical -simultaneously modern and classically inspired - and provides a counter both to romantic historicism and enlightened models of progress. Finally, a retrospective critique of modernism analyses what happens to modernism''s romantic-archaic and technological-futurist visions when they are translated from Europe to America. Dialectic of Romanticism argues that out of the European dialectic of romanticism and enlightenment a new dialectic of modernity is emerging in the New World-one which points beyond modernism and postmodernism.

The definitive biography of Everett Ruess, the artist, writer, and eloquent celebrator of the wilderness whose bold solo explorations of the American West and mysterious disappearance in the Utah desert at age twenty have earned him a large and devoted cult following. “Easily one of [Roberts’s] best . . . thoughtful and passionate . . . a compelling portrait of the Ruess myth.”—Outside Wandering alone with burros and pack horses through California and the Southwest for five years in the early 1930s, on voyages lasting as long as ten months, Ruess became friends with photographers Edward Weston and Dorothea Lange, swapped prints with Ansel Adams, took part in a Hopi ceremony, learned to speak Navajo, and was among the first "outsiders" to venture deeply into what was then (and to some extent still is) largely a little-known wilderness. When he vanished without a trace in November 1934, Ruess left behind thousands of pages of journals, letters, and poems, as well as more than a hundred watercolor paintings and blockprint engravings. Everett Ruess is hailed as a paragon of solo exploration, while the mystery of his death remains one of the greatest riddles in the annals of American adventure. David Roberts began probing the life and death of Everett Ruess for National Geographic Adventure magazine in 1998. Finding Everett Ruess is the result of his personal journeys into the remote areas explored by Ruess, his interviews with oldtimers who encountered the young vagabond and with Ruess’s closest living relatives, and his deep immersion in Ruess’s writings and artwork. More than seventy-five years after his vanishing, Ruess stirs the kinds of passion and speculation accorded such legendary doomed American adventurers as Into the Wild’s Chris McCandless and Amelia Earhart.

The dramatic and tragic story of the only successful Native American uprising against the Spanish, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. With the conquest of New Mexico in 1598, Spanish governors, soldiers, and missionaries began their brutal subjugation of the Pueblo Indians in what is today the Southwestern United States. This oppression continued for decades, until, in the summer of 1680, led by a visionary shaman named Pope, the Puebloans revolted. In total secrecy they coordinated an attack, killing 401 settlers and soldiers and routing the rulers in Santa Fe. Every Spaniard was driven from the Pueblo homeland, the only time in North American history that conquering Europeans were thoroughly expelled from Indian territory. Yet today, more than three centuries later, crucial questions about the Pueblo Revolt remain unanswered. How did Pope succeed in his brilliant plot? And what happened in the Pueblo world between 1680 and 1692, when a new Spanish force reconquered the Pueblo peoples with relative ease? David Roberts set out to try to answer these questions and to bring this remarkable historical episode to life. He visited Pueblo villages, talked with Native American and Anglo historians, combed through archives, discovered backcountry ruins, sought out the vivid rock art panels carved and painted by Puebloans contemporary with the events, and pondered the existence of centuries-old Spanish documents never seen by Anglos.

A murder mystery featuring Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne August 1939, the last hot days of a perfect English summer as the certainty of war descends. Newlyweds Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne are determined to spend these last days of peace quietly in their new house in a sleepy Sussex village - a honeymoon of sorts. But fight against it as he might, for Edward it turns out to be a busman''s holiday. When poet Byron Gates is bizarrely murdered after the village fete - executed, in fact, his head chopped off on a wooden block - Edward is asked to investigate. Alas, murder is not yet done with Verity and Edward, for even in the hallowed studios of Broadcasting House, murder dares to rear its ugly head. Before Verity can take up her new foreign posting, there are more deaths and the intrepid couple embark on one of their most dangerous investigations to date. Praise for David Roberts: ''A gripping, richly satisfying whodunit with finely observed characters, sparkling with insouciance and stinging menace'' Peter James ''A really well-crafted and charming mystery story'' Daily Mail ''A perfect example of golden-age mystery traditions with the cobwebs swept away'' Guardian

In 1999, Conrad Anker found the body of George Mallory on Mount Everest, casting an entirely new light on the mystery of the lost explorer. On 8 June 1924, George Leigh Mallory and Andrew ''Sandy'' Irvine were last seen climbing towards the summit of Everest. The clouds closed around them and they were lost to history, leaving the world to wonder whether or not they actually reached the summit - some 29 years before Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay. On 1 May 1999, Conrad Anker, one of the world''s foremost mountaineers, made the momentous discovery - Mallory''s body, lying frozen into the scree at 27,000 feet on Everest''s north face. Recounting this day, the authors go on to assess the clues provided by the body, its position, and the possibility that Mallory had successfully climbed the Second Step, a 90-foot sheer cliff that is the single hardest obstacle on the north face. A remarkable story of a charming and immensely able man, told by an equally talented modern climber.

During the westward settlement, for more than twenty years Apache tribes eluded both US and Mexican armies, and by 1886 an estimated 9,000 armed men were in pursuit. Roberts (Deborah: A Wilderness Narrative) presents a moving account of the end of the Indian Wars in the Southwest. He portrays the great Apache leaders—Cochise, Nana, Juh, Geronimo, the woman warrior Lozen—and U.S. generals George Crock and Nelson Miles. Drawing on contemporary American and Mexican sources, he weaves a somber story of treachery and misunderstanding. After Geronimo''s surrender in 1886, the Apaches were sent to Florida, then to Alabama where many succumbed to malaria, tuberculosis and malnutrition and finally in 1894 to Oklahoma, remaining prisoners of war until 1913. The book is history at its most engrossing. —Publishers Weekly

Famed adventure writer David Roberts retraces the route of the legendary Domínguez-Escalante expedition. In July 1776, Franciscan friars Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante set out from Santa Fe to blaze a pathway to the new Spanish missions in California, across the huge expanse of what would become the American Southwest. In October, in western Utah, ravaged by hunger and cold, the twelve-man team had to turn back. Stymied by the raging Colorado River, killing their horses for food, the men saw an exploring expedition transformed into a fight for survival. In this chronicle of adventure and history, David Roberts retraces the Spaniards’ forgotten route, using Escalante’s diary as his guide. Blending personal narrative with critical analysis, Roberts relives the glories, catastrophes, and courage of this desperate journey.

Describes the tragedies, frustrations, and triumphs of two mountain climbing expeditions in Alaska.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • This gripping and triumphant memoir from the author of The Mountain follows a living legend of extreme mountaineering as he makes his assault on history, one 8,000-meter summit at a time. “From the drama of the peaks, to the struggle of making a living as a professional climber, to the basic how-tos of life at 26,000 feet, No Shortcuts to the Top is fascinating reading.”—Aron Ralston, author of Between a Rock and a Hard Place and subject of the film 127 Hours For eighteen years Ed Viesturs pursued climbing’s holy grail: to stand atop the world’s fourteen 8,000-meter peaks, without the aid of bottled oxygen. But No Shortcuts to the Top is as much about the man who would become the first American to achieve that goal as it is about his stunning quest. As Viesturs recounts the stories of his most harrowing climbs, he reveals a man torn between the flat, safe world he and his loved ones share and the majestic and deadly places where only he can go. A preternaturally cautious climber who once turned back 300 feet from the top of Everest but who would not shrink from a peak (Annapurna) known to claim the life of one climber for every two who reached its summit, Viesturs lives by an unyielding motto, “Reaching the summit is optional. Getting down is mandatory.” It is with this philosophy that he vividly describes fatal errors in judgment made by his fellow climbers as well as a few of his own close calls and gallant rescues. And, for the first time, he details his own pivotal and heroic role in the 1996 Everest disaster made famous in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. In addition to the raw excitement of Viesturs’s odyssey, No Shortcuts to the Top is leavened with many funny moments revealing the camaraderie between climbers. It is more than the first full account of one of the staggering accomplishments of our time; it is a portrait of a brave and devoted family man and his beliefs that shaped this most perilous and magnificent pursuit.

A murder mystery featuring Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne. With Winston Churchill receiving unauthorised information on Britain''s rearmament program, the Foreign Office brings in Lord Edward Corinth to investigate the leaks. However, Edward rapidly abandons the investigation to concentrate on the murder of a Foreign Office official, who might have been one of Churchill''s sources. All too soon, he finds himself entangled in a web of deception threatening the very security of the United Kingdom. All too soon there is a second murder. Setting out for Spain to find the victim''s son, Edward joins his friend Verity Browne, whom he fears is in extreme peril. Verity is reporting on the Civil War and is headed for Guernica, where a source has informed her that an attack will take place. But Edward and Verity arrive in the small town just in time to witness a merciless aerial bombardment on the civilian population. And the danger isn''t over yet, as near-certain death awaits Edward in London, where nothing - not even the woman he loves - is what is seems. Praise for David Roberts: ''Roberts just keeps getting better with each book ... highly recommended for fans of Love in a Cold Climate and Gosford Park'' Publishers Weekly ''A really well-crafted and charming mystery story'' Daily Mail ''A perfect example of golden-age mystery traditions with the cobwebs swept away'' Guardian

This book recounts the eventful history of conquests of the mountain-a story of tragedy and triumph told and pictured by the two men perhaps best qualified in all the world to do so.