Title search results
Showing 101 - 120 of 1529 items
Roughing It
By Mark Twain, Hamlin Hill. 1981
A fascinating picture of the American frontier emerges from Twain's fictionalized recollections of his experiences prospecting for gold, speculating in…
timber, and writing for a succession of small Western newspapers during the 1860s.Vanilla Beans And Brodo
By Isabella Dusi. 2001
When Isobel Dusi visited Italy with her Australian husband Lou, little did they imagine that life would change forever. But,…
utterly besotted with the fragrant warmth and good-natured conviviality of Southern Tuscany, they decided to sell up their lives in the big city and move thousands of miles to follow the dream of a life more in keeping with ancient rhythms and time-honoured traditions of the Mediterranean. After months of searching they settled upon Montalcino, an intriguing hilltop medieval village with a reputation for some of the finest wine in Italy. VANILLA BEANS AND BRODO is an account of Isobel's hard-won acceptance into this tempestuous, warm-hearted and proudly independent community, whose voluble passions for home grown wine and Tuscan cuisine, for football and ancient traditions and festivals, puts paid to the myth that life in rural Tuscany is tranquil. Isobel and Lou are gradually transformed into Isabella and Luigi in this charming account of Tuscan village life that really gets to the beating heart of an Italian community - its joys, pleasures, anxieties, but above all, its absorbing eccentricities.Lost and Found
By Geoff Dalglish. 2012
Tackling the goal to walk 25,000 miles -the equivalent of the circumference of the planet - one man shares life-changing…
insights through his personal travel vignettes. Formerly a thrill-seeking journalist, Geoff Dalglish begins his impressive expedition after undergoing a spiritual and ecological awakening at the Findhorn center in Scotland. His deliberate journey from Timbuktu to Antarctica to Hollywood unfolds in vivid and inspiring detail, revealing a wealth of unimaginable experiences while sharing a message about treading lightly on the Earth. From the horrors of bloody civil unrest and death-defying moments at the hands of armed guerilla soldiers to close encounters with the animal kingdom and finding healing balm within spiritual communities, this roller coaster of adventure chronicles a deeper quest for meaning that culminates in the joys of a life lived in simplicity and service.The Third Tower
By Antal Szerb, Len Rix. 1936
In August 1936 a Hungarian writer in his mid-thirties arrives by train in Venice, on a journey overshadowed by the…
coming war and charged with intense personal nostalgia. Aware that he might never again visit this land whose sites and scenes had once exercised a strange and terrifying power over his imagination, he immerses himself in a stream of discoveries, reappraisals and inevitable self-revelations. From Venice, he traces the route taken by the Germanic invaders of old down to Ravenna, to stand, fulfilling a lifelong dream, before the sacred mosaics of San Vitale.This journey into his private past brings Antal Szerb firmly, and at times painfully, up against an explosive present, producing some memorable observations on the social wonders and existential horrors of Mussolini's new Roman Imperium.From the Trade Paperback edition.Cinematic States: Stories We Tell, the American Dreamlife, and How to Understand Everything*
By Gareth Higgins. 2013
A Northern Irish writer explores his adopted homeland through film in this irreverent yet moving journey through each of the…
50 states. Set among a personal backdrop of immigration memoir, he takes on American myths in their most powerful form--the motion picture--by setting out to determine if a Kansas yellow brick road really does lead to the end of the rainbow, and whether it first has to pass through Colorado's Overlook Hotel. Amid the multipurpose woodchippers, friendly exorcists, and faulty motel showers, resurrected baseball players, and miracle-working gardeners, he examines what the stories we tell reveal about American lives and uses this to sum up what he has learned about the promises, failures, and hope that is America.The Terracotta Madonna
By Isabella Dusi. 2014
Set twenty years after VANILLA BEANS & BRODO and ten years after BEL VINO, MARY KNOWS continues the story of…
Australians Isabella and Luigi, who gave up their lives to move to the medieval Montalcino, a village in Tuscany. Isabella tells of a Tuscany that is closer to reality than the mystical dream it is so often portrayed to be. Her true story involves not only her personal struggles in moving and adapting to Montalcino (her reasons for which are a secret that none in the village knows), but also of the curious rituals and traditions within a society that struggles to cope with the modern world.I’m Off Then
By Hape Kerkeling. 2006
I'm Off Then has sold more than three million copies in Germany and has been translated into eleven languages. The…
number of pilgrims along the Camino has increased by 20 percent since the book was published. Hape Kerkeling's spiritual journey has struck a chord.A Residence of Twenty-One Years in the Sandwich Islands: Of the Civil, Religious, and Political History of Those Islands
By Hiram Bingham, Terence Barrow. 1981
The fascinating personal account from one of the first Westerners to live in Hawaii.A Residence of Twenty-One Years in the…
Sandwich Islands, by the Reverend Hiram Bingham, was first printed in New York in 1847. The book provides a panoramic history of Hawaii from before its discovery in 1778 by Captain James Cook up to 1845. Hiram Bingham became Hawaii's most notable missionary, an adviser to kings and queens, and was truly one of Hawaii's most influential historical figures. His work did much to transform old Hawaii into a new Hawaii. He was a child of his time, an ardent advocate of the Calvinistic Christianity of New England. He was unsympathetic to the traditional Hawaiian culture, yet his book tells us an enormous amount about Hawaiians as well as the missionary endeavors of himself and his colleagues.Personally Bingham was a man of great courage in a world of danger. Whaleers and their bottles of grog, the condemnation of those who opposed him, his worries about backsliding chiefs, wayward boy and girl converts, monarchs who liked alcohol-all these were very real problems to Bingham and his colleagues, amusing though they may seem to us today.The Best Travel Writing
By Tim Cahill, Sean O'Reilly, James O'Reilly, Larry Habegger. 2012
The Best Travel Writing, Volume 9 is the latest in the annual Travelers' Tales series launched in 2004 to celebrate…
the world's best travel writing - from Nobel Prize winners to emerging new writers. The points of view and perspectives are global, and themes encompass high adventure, spiritual growth, romance, hilarity and misadventure, service to humanity, and encounters with exotic cuisines and cultures.Zoroaster's Children
By Marius Kociejowski. 2015
Bringing together the best of Marius Kociejowski's travel writing, Zoroaster's Children snags on the borderline between dream and meaning, offering…
unusual glimpses of some of the places, exotic or otherwise, the author has been. Attracted to society's outcasts--as it is these, he argues, which point towards an underground of conformity that will not contain them--Kociejowksi offers in these essays glimpses of locales as diverse and seemingly divergent as Prague, Tunisia, Moscow, Aleppo and Toronto, among others. By turns empathetic and virtuosic, and always on the lookout for the deeper meaning seeded inside language, the essays in Zoroaster's Children evince the deep absorption in a people and a place which are the hallmark of all great travel writers.The Best Women's Travel Writing, Volume 10
By Lavinia Spalding. 2014
Since publishing the original edition of A Woman's World in 1995, Travelers' Tales has been the recognized national leader in…
women's travel literature, and with the launch of the annual series The Best Travel Writing in 2004, the obvious next step was an annual collection of the best women's travel writing of the year. This title is the tenth in that series -- The Best Women's Travel Writing -- presenting stimulating, inspiring, and uplifting adventures from women who have traveled to the ends of the earth to discover new places, peoples, and facets of themselves. The common threads connecting these stories are a female perspective and fresh, compelling storytelling to make the reader laugh, weep, wish she were there, or be glad she wasn't. The points of view and perspectives are global, and the themes are as eclectic as in all of our books, including stories that encompass spiritual growth, hilarity and misadventure, high adventure, romance, solo journeys, stories of service to humanity, family travel, and encounters with exotic cuisine.A Remarkable Curiosity
By Amos Jay Cummings. 2008
In 1873, Amos Jay Cummings, a decorated Civil War veteran and journalist for the New York Sun newspaper, set out…
on a westward journey aboard the newly completed transcontinental railroad. For some time, miners, settlers, and entrepreneurs had already been heading west to make their fortunes, and Cummings made the trip in part to see what all the fuss was about. During his six-month expedition from Kansas to California, Cummings sent extraordinary and engaging accounts of the American West back to his readers in New York. Collected in this volume for the first time are Cummings's portraits of a land and its assortment of characters unlike anything back East. Characters like Pedro Armijo, the New Mexican sheep tycoon who took Denver by storm, and more prominently the Mormon prophet Brigham Young and one of his wives, Ann Eliza Young, who was filing for divorce at the time of Cummings's arrival. Although today he is virtually unknown, during his lifetime Cummings was one of the most famous newspapermen in the United States, in part because of stories like these. Complete with a biographical sketch and historical introduction, A Remarkable Curiosity is an enjoyable read for anybody interested in the American West in the latter half of the nineteenth century.Reclaiming Travel
By Ilan Stavans, Joshua Ellison. 2015
Based on a controversial opinion piece originally published in the New York Times, Reclaiming Travel is a provocative meditation on…
the meaning of travel from ancient times to the twenty-first century. Ilan Stavans and Joshua Ellison seek to understand why we travel and what has come to be missing from our contemporary understanding of travel. Engaging with canonical and contemporary texts, they explore the differences between travel and tourism, the relationship between travel and memory, the genre of travel writing, and the power of mapmaking, Stavans and Ellison call for a rethinking of the art of travel, which they define as a transformative quest that gives us deeper access to ourselves.Tourism, Stavans and Ellison argue, is inauthentic, choreographed, sterile, shallow, and rooted in colonialism. They critique theme parks and kitsch tourism, such as the shantytown hotels in South Africa where guests stay in shacks made of corrugated metal and cardboard yet have plenty of food, water and space. Tourists, they assert, are merely content with escapism, thrill seeking, or obsessively snapping photographs. Resisting simple moralizing, the authors also remind us that people don't divide neatly into crude categories like travelers and tourists. They provoke us to reflect on the opportunities and perils in our own habits.In this powerful manifesto, Stavans and Ellison argue that travel should be an art through which our restlessness finds expression--a search for meaning not only in our own lives but also in the lives of others. It is not about the destination; rather, travel is about loss, disorientation, and discovering our place in the universe.In Xanadu
By William Dalrymple. 1989
William Dalrymple's award-winning first book: his classic, fiercely intelligent and wonderfully entertaining account of his journey across Marco Polo's 700-year-old…
route from Jerusalem to Xanadu, the summer palace of Kubla Khan. At the age of twenty-two, Dalrymple left his college in Cambridge to travel to the ruins of Kubla Khan's stately pleasure dome in Xanadu. As he and his companions travel across the width of Asia--crossing through Acre, Aleppo, Tabriz, Tashkurgan, and other mysterious and sometimes hellish places--they encounter dusty, forgotten roads, unexpected hospitality, and difficult challenges. Stylish, witty, and knowledgeable about everything from the dreaded order of Assassins to the hidden origins of the Three Magi, this is travel writing at its best.Libation
By Deirdre Heekin. 2009
For many years, Deirdre Heekin has been creating an unusual, revitalist wine archive of rare and traditional Italian varietals at…
Osteria Pane e Salute, the nationally celebrated restaurant and wine bar she shares with her chef husband, Caleb Barber. Self-taught in the world of Italian wines, she is known for her fine-tuned work with scent and taste and her ability to pair wines and food in unexpected yet terroir-driven ways. InLibation, a Bitter Alchemy,, a series of linked personal essays, Heekin explores the curious development of her nose and palate, her intuitive education and relationship with wine and spirits, and her arduous attempts to make liqueurs and wine from the fruits of her own land in northern New England. The essays follow her as she unearths ruby-toned wines given up by the ghosts of long-gone wine makers from the red soil of Italy, her adoptive land; as she embarks on a complicated pilgrimage to the home of one of the world's oldest cocktails, Sazerac, in Katrina-soaked New Orleans; as she attempts a midsummer crafting of a brandy made from inherited roses, the results of an old Sicilian recipe she found in a dusty bookstore in Naples. Musing on spirits from Campari to alkermes, Heekin's writing is as intoxicating, rich, and carefully crafted as the wines, liquors, and locales she loves.The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing
By Judith Hamera, Alfred Bendixen. 2009
Travel writing has always been intimately linked with the construction of American identity. Occupying the space between fact and fiction,…
it exposes cultural fault lines and reveals the changing desires and anxieties of both the traveller and the reading public. These specially-commissioned essays trace the journeys taken by writers from the pre-revolutionary period right up to the present. They examine a wide range of responses to the problems posed by landscapes found both at home and abroad, from the Mississippi and the Southwest to Europe and the Holy Land. Throughout, the contributors focus on the role played by travel writing in the definition and formulation of national identity, and consider the experiences of minority writers as well as canonical authors. This Companion forms an invaluable guide for students approaching this new, important and exciting subject for the first time.Zero Days
By Barbara Egbert. 2008
In April 2004, Barbara Egbert and Gary Chambers and their precocious 10-year-old daughter Mary embarked on a 2,650-mile hike from…
Mexico to Canada along the famed Pacific Crest Trail. This the well-told tale of their epic adventure, which required love, perseverance, and the careful rationing of toilet paper. Six months later, Mary would become the youngest person ever to successfully walk the entire trail.The trio weathered the heat of the Mojave, the jagged peaks of the Sierra, the rain of Oregon, and the final cold stretch through the Northern Cascades. They discovered which family values, from love and equality to thrift and cleanliness, could withstand a long, narrow trail and 137 nights together in a 6-by-8-foot tent. Filled with tidbits of wisdom, practical advice, and humor, this story will both entertain and inspire readers to dream about and plan their own epic journey.Walking the Nile
By Levison Wood. 2015
Now a major Channel 4 series.His journey is 4,250 miles long.He is walking every step of the way, camping in…
the wild, foraging for food, fending for himself against multiple dangers.He is passing through rainforest, savannah, swamp, desert and lush delta oasis.He will cross seven, very different countries.No one has ever made this journey on foot.In this detailed, thoughtful, inspiring and dramatic book, recounting Levison Wood's walk the length of the Nile, he will uncover the history of the Nile, yet through the people he meets and who will help him with his journey, he will come face to face with the great story of a modern Africa emerging out of the past. Exploration and Africa are two of his great passions - they drive him on and motivate his inquisitiveness and resolution not to fail, yet the challenges of the terrain, the climate, the animals, the people and his own psychological resolution will throw at him are immense.The dangers are very real, but so is the motivation for this ex-army officer. If he can overcome the mental and physical challenges, he will be walking into history...Breakfast at the Exit Cafe
By Merilyn Simonds, Wayne Grady. 2010
What begins as a road trip through America soon becomes a journey of discovery into themselves and into the heart…
of the next-door neighbour they thought they knew. For Wayne Grady, the thrill of landscape and history is tempered by memories of racism and his own family roots. Merilyn Simonds, her ear tuned for the offbeat, finds curious echoes of the ex-pat promised land she grew up with. Together they travel against the tide of American history, following in the literary tire tracks of John Steinbeck, William Least Heat Moon, and Francis Trollope.Grady and Simonds experience the splendors of the Mojave Desert, the Grand Canyon, the Mississippi River, and the bayou's of Louisiana and the Outer Banks and contemplate the impact of geography on culture and of culture on landscape. They observe America from the outside, yet feel strangely at home.Part travelogue, part exploration, part mid-winter love story told with wit and acuity by one of Canada's most engaging literary couples, Breakfast at the Exit Cafe is a journey into the reality behind the cultural myth that is America.White Planet
By Leslie Anthony. 2010
Writer and adventurer Leslie Anthony has spent his life on two planks, racing down hills, searching for the next perfect…
ride. His real baptism, however, began in the early nineties when Alaska emerged as the ski world's Next Big Thing. Steep faces and vast tracks of powder snow, were captured on film and beamed to audiences around the world. The result was a freeskiing revolution.With insight and humor, White Planet, traces an arc through the new ski culture, in a rock 'n' roll adventure that follows a diaspora to far-flung corners of the globe. Along the way, Anthony introduces many of the daredevils, visionaries and entrepreneurs who are bringing the sport to such unexpected places as Mexico, China, Lebanon and India.