10 Adventure Nonfiction Books That Read Like Fiction

River of the Gods

Candice Millard

For millennia the location of the Nile River’s headwaters was shrouded in mystery. In the 19th century, there was  a frenzy of interest in ancient Egypt. At the same time, European powers sent off waves of explorations intended to map the unknown corners of the globe – and extend their colonial empires.
 
Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke were sent by the Royal Geographical Society to claim the prize for England. Burton spoke twenty-nine languages, and was a decorated soldier.

Lost in the Jungle

Yossi Ghinsberg

Four travelers meet in Bolivia and set off into the heart of the Amazon rainforest, but what begins as a dream adventure quickly deteriorates into a dangerous nightmare, and after weeks of wandering in the dense undergrowth, the four backpackers split up into two groups. But when a terrible rafting accident separates him from his partner, Yossi is forced to survive for weeks alone against one of the wildest backdrops on the planet. Stranded without a knife, map, or survival training, he must improvise shelter and forage for wild fruit to survive. As his feet begin to rot during raging storms, as he loses all sense of direction, and as he begins to lose all hope, he wonders whether he will make it out of the jungle alive.

Expedition Deep Ocean

Josh Young

Humankind has explored every continent on earth, climbed its tallest mountains, and gone into space. But the largest areas of our planet remain largely a mystery: the deep oceans. At over 36,000 feet deep, there areas closest to earth’s core have remained nearly impossible to reach—until now.

Technological innovations, engineering breakthroughs and the derring-do of a team of explorers, led by explorer Victor Vescovo, brought together an audacious global quest to dive to the deepest points of all five oceans for the first time in history.

Latitude

Nicholas Crane

Crane, the former president of the Royal Geographic Society, documents the remarkable expedition undertaken by a group of twelve European adventurer-scientists in the mid-eighteenth century.  The team spent years in South America, scaling volcanoes and traversing jungles before they achieved their goal of establishing the exact shape of the Earth by measuring the length of 1 degree latitude at the equator.

Their endeavors were not limited to this one achievement.  Not only did their discovery open up the possibility for safe, accurate navigation across the seas, they also discovered rubber and quinine.

Blind Descent

James M. Tabor

In 2004, two great scientist-explorers attempted to find the bottom of the world. American Bill Stone took on the vast, deadly Cheve Cave in southern Mexico. Ukrainian Alexander Klimchouk targeted Krubera, a freezing nightmare of a supercave in the war-torn former Soviet republic of Georgia.

Both men spent months almost two vertical miles deep, contending with thousand-foot drops, raging whitewater rivers, monstrous waterfalls, mile-long belly crawls, and the psychological horrors produced by weeks in absolute darkness, beyond all hope of rescue.