Going to Extremes: A Travel Journalist's Tour of the Globe's Most Adventurous Outposts

A nationally-known adventure travel journalist for The Washington Post, National Geographic, The Los Angeles Times, and The Boston Globe, Peter Mandel hunts his stories and photos in the world's far corners, including Antarctica, India, Egypt, Patagonia, the fjords of Norway, the mountain pathways of Japan, and the deserts of Africa.  

The author of ten books, he'll show slides of his most extreme travel assignments — surviving a coup in Ecuador, visiting a ‘city’ of penguins at the South Pole, fishing for piranha on Brazil’s Rio Negro, floating in the Goodyear Blimp, sailing on an Arctic icebreaker, camping in the African bush, and kayaking to the Statue of Liberty — and talk about how adventure travel turns to prose in today's media.     

Mandel's books have been published by Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, HarperCollins and Henry Holt. One of his Boston Globe articles won the 2005 Lowell Thomas gold medal from the Society of American Travel Writers for adventure travel article of the year. Other articles, for The Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun, won Lowell Thomas Awards in 2003, 2006 and 2007.   

In addition to a wide range of libraries, venues where he's presented over the years have included the American School in Paris, The Writer’s Center in Washington, D.C., Cunard's QE2 during an Atlantic crossing, the Eric Carle Museum in Amherst, Mass., The National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., the Learning Connection in Providence, Newport and Needham, Mass., the International School of Luxembourg, and First Class in Bethesda, Md.