Jamie McDonald

Travel is the only thing you can buy that makes you richerTravel opens our minds to the world; it helps us to embrace risk and uncertainty, overcome challenges and understand the people we meet and the places we visit. But what happens when we arrive home? How do our experiences shape us? The Kindness of Strangers explores what it means to be vulnerable and to be helped by someone we've never met before. Someone who could have walked past, but chose not to. This is a collection of stories by accomplished travellers and adventurous souls like Sarah Outen, Benedict Allen, Ed Stafford and Al Humphreys, who have completed daring journeys through challenging terrain, adventuring from the Calais Jungle to the Amazon, from Land’s End to the Gobi Desert, from New Guinea to Iran and many other places in between. Each has a story to tell of a time when they were vulnerable, when they were in need and a kind stranger came to their rescue. These are stories that make our hearts grow, stories that will restore our faith in the world and remind us that, despite what the media says, the world isn't a scary place – rather, it is filled with Kind Strangers just like us. All royalties go directly to fund Oxfam’s work with refugees.

New York City Yesterday and Today: The Tax Photographs features the little-known, but utterly fascinating tax photographs from The City of New York’s Hall of Records and how those areas look today. The photographs are an interesting page in the history of the city’s municipal workings alone, but are a fascinating look into daily city life in the 1940’s. They were taken to help figure out property tax assessments. Incredibly, city officials employed a team of photographers to go out to all five boroughs and photograph literally every building in the city. The result is tens of thousands of photos of practically every nook and cranny of the streets of New York. Readers will marvel at the changes some neighborhoods have undergone, whereas some parts of the city have remained remarkably unchanged. It’s a remarkable look at the city’s past and present.

No Access New York City is a collection of the hidden places and little-known facts about New York. These are the secret gems of the city and most are completely off limits to the public. Through these pages explore the secret train station below the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, the gold vault at the Federal Reserve, burial sites, tucked away establishments, secret tunnels, and so much more. All of these spots evoke a secret metropolis that is lost in time and harboring deep mysteries! What a fun way to “explore” New York!

At the age of nine, Jamie's family feared he would never walk again. Twenty years later, he set off to run 5,000 miles coast to coast across Canada. When Jamie decides to repay the hospitals that saved his life as a child, he embarks on the biggest challenge of his life: running the equivalent of 200 marathons back-to-back, solo and unsupported, in –40 degree weather, surviving all kinds of injuries and traumas on the road and wearing through 13 pairs of trainers. And he does it all dressed as the superhero, the Flash. Though his journey was both mentally and physically exhausting, it was the astounding acts of kindness and hospitality he encountered along the way that kept him going. Whether they gave him a bed for the night, food for the journey, a donation to his charity or companionship and encouragement during the long days of running, Jamie soon came to realise that every person who helped him towards his goal was a superhero too.