And then on the other side of the bridge is Congo. The instant you cross, you’re hit by a riot of dazzling colors, loud music, drunken border policemen, and women hoisting just about every imaginable kind of fruit and vegetable onto their heads. The soil here is some of the most fertile on the planet. And then there are the minerals, Congo’s seemingly limitless supply of them — gold, diamonds, zinc, nickel, cassiterite, copper, cobalt and coltan, old-school and modern gems. But somehow, for the past 12 years and counting, Congo has been the theater of one of the worst civil wars in modern history, a truly continental disaster that has sucked in many of its neighbors and killed millions of people, a festering wound in the green heart of Africa.

Via The Times on a new book, “Africa’s World War” by Gérard Prunier.

The award-winning and best-selling pictorial now comes in a gift book format! In full color with 888 pages and 217 maps covering 230 countries, The Travel Book Mini invites all kinds of travelers to get out and explore the world.

This new, compact mini edition transforms The Travel Book from essential coffee table tome to constant bedside companion. A definitive pictorial dedicated to travel and the world, The Travel Book Miniprofiles every country on the planet and combines stunning images with entertaining, informative text, both of which are updated for this edition.

In the 1950′s, Alfred Lansing, author of Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, penned 288 of some of the most gripping pages I’ve read. For the uninitiated, the back cover of Lansing’s paperback reads:

In the summer of 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton set off aboard the Endurance bound for the South Atlantic. The goal of his expedition was to cross the Antarctic overland, but more than a year later, and still half a continent away from the intended base, the Endurance was trapped in ice and eventually was crushed. For five months Shackleton and his crew survived on drifting ice packs in one of the most savage regions of the world before they were finally able to set sail again in one of the ship’s lifeboats. Alfred Lansing’s Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage is a white-knuckle account of this astounding odyssey.

Through the diaries of team members and interviews with survivors, Lansing reconstructs the months of terror and hardship the Endurance crew suffered. In October of 1915, there ‘were no helicopters, no Weasels, no Sno-Cats, no suitable planes. Thus their plight was naked and terrifying in its simplicity. If they were to get out–they had to get themselves out.’

This book is actually so much more. In fact, leadership training schools and outdoor survivalist training courses use Ernest Shackleton as a model for how to act and react in times of absolute desperation. And how to come out on top or simply alive. “How Shackleton did indeed get them out without the loss of a single life is at the heart of Lansing’s magnificent true-life adventure tale.” Don’t miss a chance to read this; you won’t put it down until you’re done. And when you are finished, you’ll think twice about the things you complain about when it’s cold outside.

Next up: Mark Twain’s tale of his 1895 journey around the world in Following The Equator.

“We had the whole [world] in front of us with nothing to do but do nothing and be comfortable.”-Mark Twain

For the same reasons I love (and hate) TripAdvisor — another favorite resource of mine — I think I will love World Wikia. Even though it’s important to read a writer’s view on a particular part of the world before traveling to it, I’ve found it even more rewarding to consume the average traveler’s tales, too. If it wasn’t for sites like TripAdvisor and now World Wikia, we could still be following Mr. Twain around the equator.

Check out these pictures of libraries around the world. Click. Sit back. Enjoy.