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Algren at Sea: Notes from a Sea Diary & Who Lost an American?-Travel Writings
By Nelson Algren. 2008
Nelson Algren's two travel writing books describe his journeys through the seamier sides of great American cities and the international…
social and political landscapes of the mid-1960s. Algren at Sea brings them together in one volume.Notes from a Sea Diary offers one of the most remarkable appraisals of Ernest Hemingway ever written. Aboard the freighter Malayasia Mail, Algren ponders his personal encounter with Hemingway in Cuba and the values inherent in Hemingway's stories as he visits the ports of Pusan, Kowloon, Bombay, and Calcutta.Who Lost an American? is a whirlwind spin through Paris and Playboy clubs, New York publishing and Dublin pubs, Crete and Chicago, as Algren adventures with Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Brendan Behan, and Juliette Gréco.Baseballissimo
By Dave Bidini. 2004
In the spring of 2002, Dave Bidini set off for Nettuno, Italy, with his wife, Janet, and their two small…
children, in search of his favourite summer game, baseball. Nettuno was his destination because this town, south of Rome, has been the baseball capital of Italy since 1944, when the game was introduced by the American GIs who liberated the region. Bidini wanted to spend time in a town where everyone is as nuts about the game as he is, and in Nettuno, they love the game so much that they hand out baseball gloves and bats to children taking their first communion. For six months Bidini followed the fortunes of the Serie B Peones, Nettunese to the core. At the same time he was also learning about his own heritage, having spent his youth vigorously ignoring his Italianness. The result of his summer in Italy is vintage Bidini: a funny, perceptive, and engrossing book that takes readers far beyond the professional sport to the game that people around the world love to play.The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey
By Diane Stuemer. 2002
Ever dream of selling up and running away to sea? Diane Stuemer and her husband, Herbert, were once a typical…
suburban couple entering middle age, with a comfortable home and three boys under twelve. A year later they had sold their business, rented out their house, and were setting out to circumnavigate the globe in a 40-year-old yacht. Their entire sailing experience consisted of six afternoons on the Ottawa River. Over the next four years, squeezed into quarters no bigger than the Stuemers’ old bedroom, the family of five would become seasoned mariners. They would battle deadly storms at sea and evade real-life pirates. Dodge waterspouts and lightning strikes and witness the bombing of the USSCole. See the staggering beauty of Borneo’s rainforest, and its destruction from logging. Be arrested at gunpoint and entertained like visiting royalty. In all, they would visit 34 countries and cover 35,000 nautical miles. Almost everywhere they went, the family made lasting friendships. They learned to trust each other and embrace opportunity, and in Kenya they learned the true meaning of humanity. As Northern Magicpushed onward, many thousands followed the family’s progress in Diane’s dispatches to the Ottawa Citizen, and thousands more turned out to cheer when the amazing Stuemers came home. From the Hardcover edition.Time's Magpie: A Walk in Prague (Crown Journeys)
By Myla Goldberg. 2004
Sometimes a city can be like a bird. Just as the magpie is an inveterate collector, hoarding beautiful eclectic bits…
to line its nest, so Prague retains fragments from bygone regimes and centuries past to create a city of juxtaposition that is alternately exquisite and bizarre. Prague’s personality is expressed as much by its obvious beauty as by its overlooked details. This unforgettable place is brought to life by acclaimed author Myla Goldberg, a former Prague expat, whose first novel, Bee Season, captivated so many with its unique voice and exhilarating prose. Myla Goldberg lived in Prague in 1993, just as the process of Westernization was getting under way, the city straddling a past it wished to shed and a future it was eager to embrace. In 2003, she returned to see what the pursuit of capitalism had wrought and to observe the integral ways in which Prague’s character had endured. In Time’s Magpie, Goldberg explores a city where centuries-old buildings have become receptacles for Western values and a generation defined by the Communist regime coexists with a generation for whom Communism is a rapidly fading memory. Wander through the narrow alleyways and cobblestone streets to places most tourists never see—to a neighborhood eerily transformed by the devastating flood of 2002; to an anachronistic amusement park that is home to a discomfiting array of Technicolor confections; and to the cabinets of curiosity in the Strahov Monastery, where hidden among deceptively modest displays of butterfly specimens and ladies’ fans are creatures that defy the laws of taxidermy. This imaginative, individualistic journey will show you the odd and unique corners of a city often seeking to erase what its very stones will not allow it to forget.A New World Order: Essays (Vintage International)
By Caryl Phillips. 2001
A NEW WORLD ORDER ranges widely across, the Atlantic World that Caryl Phillips has charted in his award winning novels…
and non-fiction during the course of the past twenty years. He begins this collection by establishing his belief that there is a 'new world order' of cultural plurality, one which is being promoted by the increasingly central role of the migrant and the refugee in the modern world. He goes on to reflect on the work of such seminal figures as Derek Walcott, V S Naipaul, J M Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, Steven Spielberg, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Marvin Gaye. Phillips writes ahout the moment when St Kitts, the small island of his birth, became independent and talks about the role and responsibility of being a writer born into a postcolonial world who lives on both sides of the Atlantic. He then turns the spotlight on Britain speculating about his parents' migration in the late fifties, the continued legacy of racism, his own helpless loyalty to Leeds United, and his anxieties at feeling as though he both of, and not of, Britain.Home by Another Way: Notes from the Caribbean
By Robert Benson. 2011
A lovely Caribbean island and its people awaken in author Robert Benson a sense of place and home. The islanders'…
warmth and welcome prompt a new understanding of ideas of beauty, community and spiritual belonging. "We live in a world where such welcome and gentleness and civility are increasingly rare. Most of the conversation between strangers is terse and quick and far too often, it is cold and rude. It can even be that way, more often than we care to admit, among people who are not strangers. And such is the way of the world that we live in that we are almost stunned by welcome whenever it breaks out around us, and we are certainly drawn to the people and to the places where we find such welcome in abundance."The Far Corner: A Mazy Dribble Through North-East Football
By Harry Pearson. 2020
A book in which Wilf Mannion rubs shoulders with The Sunderland Skinhead: recollections of Len Shakleton blight the lives of…
village shoppers: and the appointment of Kevin Keegan as manager of Newcastle is celebrated by a man in a leather stetson, crooning 'For The Good Times' to the accompaniment of a midi organ, THE FAR CORNER is a tale of heroism and human frailty, passion and the perils of eating an egg mayonnaise stottie without staining your trousers.Racing Pigs And Giant Marrows: Travels around the North Country Fairs
By Harry Pearson. 1996
Following his acclaimed book about football in the north-east,THE FAR CORNER, Harry Pearson vowed that his next project would not…
involve hanging around outdoors on days so cold that itinerant dogs had to be detached from lamp-posts by firemen. It would be about the summer: specifically, about a summer of shows and fairs in the north of England.Encompassing such diverse talents as fell-running, tupperware-boxing and rabbit fancying (literally), and containing many more jokes about goats than is legal in the Isle of Man, Racing Pigs and Giant Marrows is without doubt the only book in existence to explain the design faults of earwigs and expose English farmers' fondness for transvestism. Warm, wise and very funny, it confirms increasing suspicions that Harry Pearson is really quite good.A Mountain In Tibet: The Search for Mount Kailas and the Sources of the Great Rivers of Asia
By Charles Allen. 1982
Throughout the East there runs a legend of a great mountain at the centre of the world, where four rivers…
have their source. Charles Allen traces this legend to Western Tibet where there stands Kailas, worshipped by Hindus and Buddhists alike as the home of their gods and the navel of the world. Close by are the sources of four mighty rivers: the sacred Ganges, the Indus, the Sutlej and Tsangpo-Brahmaputra.For centuries Kailas remained an enigma to the outside world. Then a succession of remarkable men took up the challenge of penetrating the hostile, frozen wastelands beyond the Western Himalayas, culminating in the great age of discovery, the final years of the Victorian era.A Mountain in Tibet is an extraordinary story of exploration and high adventure, full of the excitement and colour expected from the author of Plain Tales from the Raj.No Tigers in the Hindu Kush
By Nigel Tranter, Philip Tranter. 1968
Philip Tranter and three friends drove a Land Rover 6,000 miles overland from Scotland to Nuristan to explore some of…
the unknown Central Hindu Kush area. They set out to attempt the second ascent of the monstrous Koh-i-Krebek; to ascend if possible at least one other major unclimbed mountain and to map that previously unmapped terrain. In fact, as well as Krebek they climbed nine other major peaks, named another dozen, and established the existence of a dramatic rock and ice range which they called the Rum Mountains, and christened individually after the Hebridean peaks they resembled in shape and beauty. The story of the expedition is told with an infectious enthusiasm for the glory and challenge of these mysterious peaks.Paris in Love: A Memoir
By Eloisa James. 2012
A New York Times Bestseller. After years of living vicariously through the heroines in her novels, bestselling author Eloisa James…
takes a leap that most of us can only daydream about. She sells her house, leaves her job as a Shakespeare professor, and packs her husband and two protesting children off to Paris. Grand plans are abandoned as she falls under the spell of daily life as a Parisienne exquisite food, long walks by the Seine, reading in bed, displays of effortless chic around every corner, and being reminded of what really matters in a place where people seem to kiss all the time. Against one of the world s most picturesque backdrops, she copes with her Italian husband s notions of quality time; her two hilarious children, ages eleven and fifteen, as they navigate schools not to mention puberty in a foreign language; and her formidable mother-in-law, Marina, who believes dogs should be fed prosciutto and wives should live in the kitchen. An irresistible love letter to a city that will make you want to head there, Paris in Love is also a joyful testament to the pleasures of savouring life.Mean and Lowly Things: Snakes, Science, and Survival in the Congo
By Kate Jackson. 2010
In 2005 Kate Jackson ventured into the remote swamp forests of the northern Congo to collect reptiles and amphibians. Her…
camping equipment was rudimentary, her knowledge of Congolese customs even more so. She knew how to string a net and set a pitfall trap, but she never imagined the physical and cultural difficulties that awaited her. Culled from the mud-spattered pages of her journals, Mean and Lowly Things reads like a fast-paced adventure story. It is Jackson’s unvarnished account of her research on the front lines of the global biodiversity crisis—coping with interminable delays in obtaining permits, learning to outrun advancing army ants, subsisting on a diet of Spam and manioc, and ultimately falling in love with the strangely beautiful flooded forest. The reptile fauna of the Republic of Congo was all but undescribed, and Jackson’s mission was to carry out the most basic study of the amphibians and reptiles of the swamp forest: to create a simple list of the species that exist there—a crucial first step toward efforts to protect them. When the snakes evaded her carefully set traps, Jackson enlisted people from the villages to bring her specimens. She trained her guide to tag frogs and skinks and to fix them in formalin. As her expensive camera rusted and her Western soap melted, Jackson learned what it took to swim with the snakes—and that there’s a right way and a wrong way to get a baby cobra out of a bottle.33 Men: Inside the Miraculous Survival and Dramatic Rescue of the Chilean Miners
By Jonathan Franklin. 2011
Having had unparalleled access to the Chilean mine disaster, award-winning journalist Jonathan Franklin takes readers to the heart of a…
remarkable story of human endurance, survival, and historic heroism. 33 Men is the groundbreaking, authoritative account of the Chilean mine disaster, one of the longest human entrapments in history. Rushing to the scene when the miners were discovered, Franklin obtained a coveted "Rescue Team" pass and reported directly from the front lines of the rescue operation, beyond police controls, for six weeks. Based on more than 110 intimate interviews with the miners, their families, and the rescue team, Franklin's narrative captures the remarkable story of these men and women, in details shocking, beautiful, comedic, and heroic. Gripping and raw with never-before-revealed details, 33 Men is a true story that reads like a thriller.&“Your illustrated guide to the perfect West Coast road trip.&”—C magazine Roll down the windows, turn up the radio, and…
take a drive up the world&’s most magical coastline. It&’s a beautiful and practical travel guide. An illustrated keepsake. An inspiration to get out and visit. And a celebration of the wild, lush, larger-than-life 2,000 miles that run along the edge of the West Coast through California, Oregon, Washington, and Vancouver Island, where you&’ll find everything from stunning vistas and alluring beaches to botanical gardens, nature trails, antiques stores, charming villages, and a handful of great cities along the way. Created by artist and inveterate road-tripper Danielle Kroll, Pacific Coasting covers all the not-to-be-missed stops, while including maps, packing lists and playlists (yes, what to listen to as you&’re driving up to Hearst Castle), and specific guides like Tide Pool Etiquette and Oregon Lighthouses. The result is the offbeat adventure of a lifetime, filled with something new to discover every hour of every day.You Are Here: The Most Scenic Spots on Earth
By Blackwell And Ruth. 2021
This beautifully curated collection of amazing beaches all around the world evokes awe-inspiring, attainable travel adventures.Whether you're planning a getaway…
or just want to visit some of the world's most inspirational outdoor destinations from the comfort of your couch, You Are Here: Beaches is the perfect wanderlust guide.Pairing gorgeous photography with caption and geolocation information, the incredible handpicked locations will inspire anyone looking for their next journey.• YOU ARE THERE—OR COULD BE!: Stunning photography will excite the spirit of adventure. Caption and geolocation information invite you to visit these gorgeous destinations.• WIDE RANGE OF BEACH DESTINATIONS: From powder white drifts to beautiful black sand coves, semi-secret island hideaways to majestic sunset showcases, the handpicked locations offer an inspiring variety of places and journeys—pick your adventure.• ARMCHAIR OR OUT THERE: A gorgeous collection equally suitable for kicking off your next immersive beachside getaway or capturing the beauty of nature to enjoy from the comforts of home.• INSPIRING PHOTOGRAPHY: The beautiful photographs collected here will not just inspire travel, but inspire capturing and sharing photos of your own journey, to these or other amazing places.The End of the Golden Gate: Writers on Loving and (Sometimes) Leaving San Francisco
By Gary Kamiyah. 2021
Capturing an ever-changing San Francisco, 25 acclaimed writers tell their stories of living in one of the most mesmerizing cities…
in the world.Over the last few decades, San Francisco has experienced radical changes with the influence of Silicon Valley, tech companies, and more. Countless articles, blogs, and even movies have tried to capture the complex nature of what San Francisco has become, a place millions of people have loved to call home, and yet are compelled to consider leaving. In this beautifully written collection, writers take on this Bay Area-dweller's eternal conflict: Should I stay or should I go?Including an introduction written by Gary Kamiya and essays from Margaret Cho, W. Kamau Bell, Michelle Tea, Beth Lisick, Daniel Handler, Bonnie Tsui, Stuart Schuffman, Alysia Abbott, Peter Coyote, Alia Volz, Duffy Jennings, John Law, and many more, The End of the Golden Gate is a penetrating journey that illuminates both what makes San Francisco so magnetizing and how it has changed vastly over time, shapeshifting to become something new for each generation of city dwellers.With essays chronicling the impact of the tech-industry invasion and the evolution, gentrification, and radical cost of living that has transformed San Francisco's most beloved neighborhoods, these prescient essayists capture the lasting imprint of the 1960s counterculture movement, as well as the fight to preserve the art, music, and other creative movements that make this forever the city of love.For anyone considering moving to San Francisco, wishing to relive the magic of the city, or anyone experiencing the sadness of leaving the bay—and ultimately, for anyone that needs a reminder of why we stay.Bound to be a long-time staple of San Francisco literature, anyone who has lived in or is currently living in San Francisco will enjoy the rich history of the city within these pages and relive intimate memories of their own.• GIVING BACK TO THE COMMUNITY: A percentage of the proceeds will be given to charities that help those in the bay experiencing homelessness. Every copy purchased offers a small way to help those in need.Travels In A Strange State: Cycling Across the USA
By Josie Dew. 1994
By most people's standards, Josie Dew is hugely adventurous. By American standards, she is completely insane. For Americans drive everywhere:…
through cinemas, restaurants, banks, even trees. But driving past Josie as she pedalled across America was a new and alarming experience.On her eight-month journey Josie experienced it all; race riots in Los Angeles, impossible heat in Death Valley, Sexual Tantric Seminars in Hawaii. From Utah to the Great Lakes, via improbable places like Zzyzx and Squaw Tit, her two-wheeled odyssey brought her into contact with all the wonders and worries of this larger-than-life country.Highly entertaining, richly informative, TRAVELS IN A STRANGE STATE is a personal memoir of an improbable journey, revealing the United States as it is rarely seen - from the seat of a bicycle.Cuba: A Journey Through Modern Cuba
By Stephen Smith. 1997
For a growing number of British holidaymakers, Cuba is a Caribbean paradise, but it is also a land of cutbacks…
and economic instability. Stephen Smith comes to live on the island, and his search for the real Cuba inevitably becomes a search for Fidel Castro too. Before meeting his quarry, Smith travels extensively through the 'land of miracles' in an old American automobile. His highly-personalised account features a bloody initiation into a voodoo-like cult, dining on giant rat, and checking into the Love Hotel. And he goes on manoeuvres in the Everglades with armed, but not especially competent, Cuban exiles dreaming of a second Bay of Pigs. With disarming wit and considerable insight, Stephen Smith investigates a country where communism and voodoo coexist, and where the influence of its leader of forty years continues to throw a long shadow.Noble Ways: Lay-bys in My LIfe (Biography Ser.)
By Roy Noble. 2010
Known throughout Wales for his gentle self-deprecating sense of humour and brilliant TV and radio broadcasts, BBC presenter Roy Noble…
guides us through the "lay-bys" of his life; his warm, loving fifties Brynaman childhood; his college and teaching days; and his ultimate success in that most difficult of careers - showbusiness. A beautiful and entertaining depiction of the life of a truly extraordinary and much loved Welshman who has enriched the daily lives of millions. We meet his family and friends, the ordinary and the rich and famous. We rejoice at his triumphs, laugh at his blunders and cry at his unflinchingly honest depiction of personal tragedy.Chasing Mammon: Travels in Pursuit of Money
By Douglas Kennedy. 1992
Money as a weapon. Money as revenge. Money as a substitute for sex and love. Money as status ... This…
intriguing and extraordinarily well-written book is cheering for those of us who aren't rich, and will go happily to our graves without ever pulling down £300,000 per annum' Simon Hoggart, LITERARY REVIEW'How we chase Mammon defines us. Because, like it or not, we are what we earn,' CHASING MAMMON is the first travel book ever written about the uses of money and the attitudes of the wheelers and dealers in the international marketplace. Douglas Kennedy spent a year loitering with intent in six very disparate financial realms, including the Casablanca bourse (where stocks and bonds are listed on a blackboard), the squeaky-clean Singapore money markets, the Sydney futures market and the first Hungarian stock exchange to open since 1948. From the 'New Age' City folk in London, unsure whether greed really is good for you, to the tireless toilers of Wall Street, Knnedy's encounters with money-makers around the globe make for an exhilarating and quirkily original journey through the modern cash nexus.