San Francisco photojournalist Alison Wright, who has traveled the world on assignment for media outlets including National Geographic and the Discovery Channel, was gravely injured in a bus crash in Laos in 2000. She has documented her recovery — which included more than 200 surgeries — in a memoir titled “Learning to Breathe: One Woman’s Journey of Spirit and Survival,” published by Hudson Street Press in 2008. It has since become a best-seller. “I wanted to find a way to give back to the people who had saved my life,” Wright told the Chron. Four years after the crash, she climbed Mount Kailash in Tibet (shown). (Photo credit: Nancy Newton, Courtesy of Alison Wright, via Chronicle)