A magnificent work of history, biography and adventure.

If the quest for Mount Everest began as a grand imperial gesture, as redemption for an empire of explorers that had lost the race to the Poles, it ended as a mission of regeneration for a country and a people bled white by war. Of the twenty-six British climbers who, on three expedtions (1921-24), walked 400 miles off the map to find and assault the highest mountain on Earth, twenty had seen the worst of the fighting. Six had been severely wounded, two others nearly died of disease at the Front, one was hospitalized twice with shell shock. Three as army surgeons dealt for the duration with the agonies of the dying. Two lost brothers, killed in action. All had endured the slaughter, the coughing of the guns, the bones and barbed wire, the white faces of the dead.

In a monumental work of history and adventure, ten years in the writing, Wade Davis asks not whether George Mallory was the first to reach the summit of Everest, but rather why he kept on climbing on that fateful day. His answer lies in a single phrase uttered by one of the survivors as they retreated from the mountain: "The price of life is death." Mallory walked on because for him, as for all of his generation, death was but "a frail barrier that men crossed, smiling and gallant, every day." As climbers they accepted a degree of risk unimaginable before the war. They were not cavalier, but death was no stranger. They had seen so much of it that it had no hold on them. What mattered was how one lived, the moments of being alive.

For all of them Everest had become an exalted radiance, a sentinel in the sky, a symbol of hope in a world gone mad.

Tapping into the same rich vein of bravery, thirst for knowledge, eccentricity, and pursuit of glory as DK's "Explorers," "Mountaineers" tells the stories of the pioneers who first conquered the heights of this planet.

A lavish visual survey of more than eighty of the world's greatest mountaineers--who they were, where they went, and how their expeditions shaped the course of human history--"Mountaineers" will explore the history of expeditions, from the Alps and other European peaks to Everest and other peaks in Himalayas, and the Andes.

Full of stirring tales and intriguing characters, from the Brits who insisted on hauling cases of vintage champagne up to Everest, to the Italian Duke of the Abruzzi who took ten iron bedsteads up Alaska's Malaspina glacier, "Mountaineers" is full of important scientific discoveries; accounts of great bravery, fellowship, altruism, and good humor in the face of adversity; and a spirit of adventure. AUTHOR INFO:

Established in 1846, The Smithsonian Institution is a world renowned research center, dedicated to public education, national service, and scholarship in the arts, sciences, and history.

Praise for the hardcover edition:
"The 53 stories here, De Porti writes, have been selected for their historical and scientific importance and also for their ''sheer fascination.'' . . . Readers will be fascinated by these journeys."
-- Booklist (starred review)

"Imaginatively designed book . . . richly illustrated with historic photographs, maps and pages that fold out into poster-sized formats."
-- USA Today

One of the most exciting periods of exploration coincided with the invention of photography. As a result, the most important expeditions over the last 160 years were captured and preserved by incredibly dramatic images. Explorers gathers together hundreds of these rare archival photographs plus maps, prints and drawings reproduced on stunning gatefolds.

Text includes a short biography of each explorer, the extraordinary stories of their expeditions and passages from their personal journals. In all, 53 stories are featured. Many are familiar and others less known but deserving of wider recognition. Several women also receive just due for their unequaled bravery and fortitude.

Some of the explorers featured are:

• David Livingstone and the "missionary road"
• Henry Stanley, looking for Livingstone
• Isabella Bird Bishop in China
• Ernest Shackleton in Antarctica
• Timothy O''Sullivan recording the Wild West
• Roald Amundsen, the Northwest Passage and the South Pole
• Gertrude Bell in Iraq
• Maria Reiche in Peru
• Thor Heyerdahl and the Kon-Tiki raft across the Pacific
• Freya Stark, a solitary female explorer of the Middle East
• Nikolai Mikhailovich Przhevalsky, mapmaker to the czar
• Edmund Hillary atop Mount Everest
• Challenger exploring deep space
• Alexandra David-Néel in the heart of Tibet.

Those interested in history and exploration will find Explorers an engaging addition to their library.

In Survival, Jon E. Lewis brings together the greatest tales of adventure seekers and extreme tourists some who might even seem crazy for their feats. Survival gets the reader into the mind of the men who have gone further, deeper, higher, and beyond the bounds of normal endurance. The nearly forty stories are organized by terrain: north and south poles, mountains, oceans and rivers, subterranean landscapes, deserts, jungles, and the air. It s the perfect book for any reader with an insatiable thirst for adventure and exploration.

The myth of Scott of the Antarctic, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, icon of fortitude and courage who perished with his fellow explorers on their return from the South Pole on March 29^th, 1912, is an enduring one, elevated, dismantled and restored during the turbulence of the succeeding century.

Until now, the legend of the doomed Terra Nova expedition has been constructed out of Scott''s own diaries and those of his companions, the sketches of ''Uncle Bill'' Wilson and the celebrated photographs of Herbert Ponting. Yet for the final, fateful months of their journey, the systematic imaging of this extraordinary scientific endeavor was left to Scott himself, trained by Ponting. In the face of extreme climactic conditions and technical challenges at the dawn of photography, Scott achieved an iconic series of images; breathtaking polar panoramas, geographical and geological formations, and action photographs of the explorers and their animals, remarkable for their technical mastery as well as for their poignancy. Lost, fought over, neglected and finally resurrected, Scott''s final photographs are here collected, accurately attributed and catalogued for the first time: a new dimension to the last great expedition of the Heroic Age and a humbling testament to the men whose graves still lie unmarked in the vastness of the Great Alone.

A visually spectacular maritime history of sailing ships and the extraordinary navigators who sailed them to the farthest corners of the globe.

From the mid-15th to mid-19th centuries, the driving force behind world exploration was Europe''s growing passion for the luxuries of life and for discovering the uncharted territories that provided these luxuries. Sailing ships, driven by wind and human muscle, were navigated into every last bay and estuary on earth, searching for spices from the Orient, gold and ivory from Africa, beaver pelts, coffee and gold from the Americas and, finally, the luxurious pelts of sea otters from the Northwest Coast of North America.

Exquisitely illustrated with almost 100 of the author''s paintings and many detailed maps and drawings of sailing ships, Voyages recounts the extraordinary feats of more than 20 daring maritime explorers, including Christopher Columbus, Bartolomeu Dias, Vasco da Gama, John Cabot, Giovanni da Verrazzano, Jacques Cartier, Martin Frobisher, Ferdinand Magellan, Francis Drake and James Cook. In narrating these explorers'' tales, Gordon Miller touches on the great themes of maritime history, including the development of new maritime technologies, the extreme dangers of ships sailing into unknown waters, the rise and fall of the maritime empires, the courage (and often brutality) of life at sea, and the discovery of new continents, cultures and products.

This monumental narrative clarifies, analyzes, and demystifies the tragic ordeal of the Vietnam war. Free of ideological bias, profound in its understanding, and compassionate in its human portrayals, it is filled with fresh revelations drawn from secret documents and from exclusive interviews with the participants - French, American, Vietnamese, Chinese: diplomats, military commanders, high government officials, journalists, nurses, workers, and soldiers. Vietnam: A History puts events and decisions into such sharp focus that we come to understand - and make peace with - a convulsive epoch of our recent history.

There is no saga in Canadian history as full of hardship, catastrophe and mystery as the search for the Northwest Passage. Since the 15th century, the ice-choked Arctic waterway has been sought and travelled by daring men seeking profit, glory or a chance to test themselves against the merciless North. Frances Hern takes us aboard ships with the explorers whose names are memorialized on modern maps of northern Canada: Martin Frobisher, daring privateer in the service of Elizabeth I; Henry Hudson, a navigator who may have driven his crew to mutiny; John Franklin, whose last voyage became an enduring northern mystery; the talented Orkneyman John Rae, a surgeon and surveyor on the trail of Franklin. Also vividly recounted are the gruelling overland treks of Samuel Hearne; the heroic exploits of Roald Amundsen, leader of the first expedition to traverse the passage; and the incredible voyages of Henry Larsen, captain of the RCMP vessel St. Roch.

From the first people to leave Africa to the first to leave the planet, the urge to explore the unknown has driven human progress. DK's "Explorers" tells the story of humanity's explorations, taking the reader into the lives of some of the most intrepid people ever known. Focusing on 50 of the world's greatest explorers, with shorter entries on 60 of their helpers and companions, the book is filled with first-person accounts in the explorers' own words, rare maps, specially commissioned photographs, and artworks re-create history's greatest expeditions. From trade and the search for lands to colonize, to scientific curiosity and missionary zeal, "Explorers" introduces history's most famous trail blazers-people whose courage opened frontiers, turned voids into maps, forged nations, connected cultures, and added to humankind's knowledge of the world by leaps and bounds.

Marine and Pacific war veteran Robert Leckie retells the epic story of the battle of Okinawa from both sides. Strikingly intimate portraits of the Japanese generals, the American soldiers, and their commanding officers brilliantly illuminate those individuals who fought in this bloody confrontation. of photos

"We seemed to have reached that horizon, and the limit of all endurance, to sit with folded hands and listen calmly to the stories of the hills we so longed to see, the hills which had lured and beckoned us for years before this long list of men had ever set foot in the country." Mary T.S. Schaffer

The year 2011 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Old Indian Trails of the Canadian Rockies, one of the best selling books ever published on the mountains of western Canada.

In celebration of this remarkable work of mountain literature, RMB is thrilled to issue a Limited Edition hardcover of Schaffer''s classic. Complete with Janice Sanford Beck''s Foreword and a new selection of archival colour and black and white photos, Old Indian Trails of the Canadian Rockies will most certainly continue to enthral generations of readers, explorers and tourists for another one hundred years.