Journeys Home: Inspiring Stories, plus Tips and Strategies to Find Your Family History

[Narrated by Various Readers]

Addressing the explosive growth in ancestral travel, this compelling narrative combines intriguing tales of discovery with tips on how to begin your own explorations. Actor and award-winning travel writer Andrew McCarthy's featured story recounts his quest to uncover his family's Irish history, while twenty-five other prominent writers tell their own heartfelt stories of connection. Spanning the globe, these stories offer personal takes on journeying home, whether the authors are actively seeking long-lost relatives, meeting up with seldom-seen family members, or perhaps just visiting the old country to get a feel for their roots. A foreword by the Genographic Project's Spencer Wells sets the scene.

[Includes a bonus PDF with photos: Journeys Home]

Andrew McCarthy is a writer, actor, and director. He is an editor-at-large at National Geographic Traveler and has written for the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Bon Appétit, Afar, and others. His book The Longest Journey Home was named a best book of 2012 by the Financial Times (London). He has won six Lowell Thomas Awards, and the Society of American Travel Writers named him Travel Journalist of the Year in 2010. He made his acting debut at nineteen and has appeared in dozens of films, including Pretty in Pink, St. Elmo's Fire, and The Joy Luck Club. He lives in New York.

Joyce Maynard first came to national attention with the publication of her New York Times cover story ''An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life'' in 1973, when she was a freshman at Yale. Since then, she has been a reporter and columnist for the New York Times, a syndicated newspaper columnist whose ''Domestic Affairs'' column appeared in more than fifty papers nationwide, and a regular contributor to NPR. Her writing has also been published in national magazines, including O, The Oprah Magazine; Newsweek; the New York Times magazine; Forbes; Salon; San Francisco magazine, USA Weekly; and many more. She has appeared on Good Morning America, Today, CNN, Hardball with Chris Matthews, Charlie Rose, on Fresh Air. Her novel The Usual Rules - a story about surviving loss - has been a favorite of book club audiences of all ages and was chosen by the American Library Association as one of the ten best books for young readers for 2003. Joyce also runs the Lake Atitlan Writing Workshop in Guatemala, founded in 2002.

Pico Iyer is a British-born essayist and novelist long based in both California and Japan. He is the author of numerous books about crossing cultures, among them Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, and The Global Soul. An essayist for Time since 1986, he also publishes regularly in Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and many other publications across the globe.

Diane Johnson is an American-born novelist and essayist. A two-time finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in three different genres essay, biography, and fiction she is the author of a dozen novels, including Le Divorce, Le Mariage, and L Affaire. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and splits her time between San Francisco and Paris.