Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide To The Art of Long-Term World Travel
By: Rolf Potts
Ballantine Books; 1st edition (December 24, 2002)
224 pages

Who does not dream of travel? Not a vacation for a week or two. I mean leaving it all behind. Just walking away from it all one day. (You take your family with you if you have one – let’s not be ridiculous.) Maybe you move to Argentina for a year. Maybe two years. Or, maybe Australia. If Vagabonding does not inspire you to go, and help you plan the trip, nothing will.

Two of my favorite quotes:

The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we’re too poor to buy our freedom.

Thus, the purest way to see a culture is simply to accept and experience it as it is now even if you have to put up with satellite dishes in Kazakhstan, cyber cafés in Malawi, and fast food restaurants in Belize. After all, as Thomas Merton retorted when asked if he’d seen the “real Asia” during his trip to India, “It’s all real as far as I can see.”

Buy this book.

304 pages

I love Steven Mansfield, and Mansfield’s Book Of Manly Men was worth the read. In it, Mansfield walks us through 4 crucial tenants of manhood using examples of great historical figures. This book simultaneously inspires one to go on an adventure, blow something up, and defend that which is right.

Two of my favorite quotes:

Honorable men refuse to wallow in the small and the bitter. Honorable men refuse to hate life because something once went wrong. Honorable men don’t build monuments to their disappointments, nor do they let others brand them and curse them to their destruction. Honorable men seek out the highest definition of their lives, the nobler meaning granted by heritage, by their ancestors’ dreams and their parents’ hopes. Honorable men cry out to God until curses are broken and a grander purpose is achieved. Honorable men don’t settle for lives of regret.

Let’s be blunt. Men need to bark at the moon. Men need to blow something up. Men need to push themselves into a zone they don’t control—that in fact isn’t actually a zone. Men need to go in pursuit. They need a quest.

Buy this book.