Greg Mortenson married his wife six days after they met. He entrusted his fate to warring tribal leaders in Afghanistan, men who would be shooting at each other if he were not there. He has witnessed extreme poverty and fierce brutality, yet considers himself an eternal optimist and believes that paradise is on Earth.

When Jerry Stark was 28, he had been working on the General Motors assembly line in Kansas City for four years. The job was not resembling anything like a long-term plan, and Stark was unhappy. "I had no desire to work on the assembly line the rest of my life," he says. "It was just a job. I wanted something different." 

Nearing midnight, the city blanketed in snow, I barrel through the dark streets of Moscow in a brand-new black Mercedes, the passenger of a wealthy Russian businessman determined to show me the high-flying shape of post-Soviet life. It’s December 1992. “I used to be followed by the KGB,” he says. “Now 12 of them work for me.” He laughs proudly, and hands me his new cell phone. “Go ahead, call your fiancée in Finland.” As I punch in the number, a blizzard of white swirling around us, I make out the glow of a red star above the Kremlin.

Twenty years ago, I took my chance to live and work in London. Armed with a precious year-long research pass to the British Library, I visited its main Reading Room, housed inside the British Museum, nearly every day. This was heaven for a writer: I would enter the Reading Room’s massive, high-domed circular space lined with books, hear the hushed sounds of movement, breathe in the sweet and musty smells of the room’s long-stored tomes, and let a magnificent rush of history wash over me.

When Mats Dummel fell, there was a big noise in Finland. Headlines, debate, a court verdict of high treason. He had passed letters from Denmark to a Russian 'friend,' and was found guily in 1982 of spying for the Soviets. He lost his TV reporting job, his family, his apartment. He went to prison in 1984 for four months. He didn't know what hit him.

Whimsically idiosyncratic, Mark Twain’s 19-room red brick Victorian mansion was, by the author’s own account, the site of his happiest and most productive years. Completed in 1874 and designed for Twain, wife Livy and their three daughters, the house is topped by asymmetrical chimneys, gables and  towers. Much like the author’s writing, it is experimental and modern, both outside and in. Among its progressive features: seven bathrooms with flush toilets and one of the first telephones installed in a private home.