The entries in this collection take us to the farthest extremes of travel with tales of danger, disorientation and bemused discomfort; combines reportage, fiction and poetry representing some of the best-known writers of our time.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE

Drawing on the diaries of one woman in eighteenth-century Maine, this intimate history illuminates the medical practices, household economies, religious rivalries, and sexual mores of the New England frontier.

Between 1785 and 1812 a midwife and healer named Martha Ballard kept a diary that recorded her arduous work (in 27 years she attended 816 births) as well as her domestic life in Hallowell, Maine. On the basis of that diary, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich gives us an intimate and densely imagined portrait, not only of the industrious and reticent Martha...