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Black desert adventure journal quests12/16/2023 ![]() ![]() But the book that sticks with me most is more recent: Caroline Van Hemert’s 2019 memoir, The Sun Is a Compass, about a months-long, 4,000-mile adventure taken by Van Hemert and her husband. Over the last century, icons like John Muir, John McPhee, and Jon Krakauer have all written about Alaska’s beauty, its severity, and its seductive isolation. “The only way for that ghost to begin to be expelled was for the ship to be revealed.” -Elizabeth Hightower Allenīuy the Book Alaska: The Sun Is a Compass: My 4,000-Mile Journey into the Alaskan Wilds, by Caroline Van Hemert (2019) (Photo: Courtesy Little, Brown Spark) ![]() “ Clotilda was a ghost that haunted three communities-the descendants of those transported into slavery in her hold, the descendants of their fellow Africans who sold them, and the descendants of their American enslavers,” Raines writes. His story weaves together his own obsession with finding the ship and the stories of the people it carried. Then, in April 2018, using old maps and journals, charter captain Ben Raines found the wreck under the murk of the Mobile River delta. Those enslaved people would go on, after Emancipation, to found a community known as Africatown, and their stories would be told in various chronicles, including Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon. In 1860, 50 years after the Atlantic slave trade was abolished, the schooner Clotilda stole into Alabama’s Mobile Bay carrying 110 kidnapped West Africans from Benin. Alabama: The Last Slave Ship, by Ben Raines (2022) (Photo: Courtesy Simon & Schuster) We hope it takes you places, whether out in the wild or burrowed happily in your favorite chair. The resulting collection is wide, immersive, and above all readable. Instead, we canvassed our editors, contributors, and readers with a simpler question: What book would you stuff in your backpack if you were headed to Maine? Or California? Or Missouri or South Carolina or even Washington, D.C.? And because we couldn’t help ourselves, we also slipped in bonus picks for a few states. ![]() In compiling this list, we weren’t looking for another batch of Classics with a capital C, though our selections do include a few. Whether you’re rolling on a road trip or hunkered down under your tent’s rain fly, you need a worthy paperback companion. There’s almost nothing better than cracking open a book right where the action takes place-reading Cheryl Strayed’s Wild on the Pacific Crest Trail or Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm beside the Atlantic seas that claimed the fishing boat Andrea Gail. ![]()
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