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The Maine Woods
By Henry David Thoreau, Edward Hoagland. 1988
"What a wilderness walk for a man to take alone!...Here was traveling of the old heroic kind over the unaltered…
face of nature." Henry David Thoreau Over a period of three years, Thoreau made three trips to the largely unexplored woods of Maine. He climbed mountains, paddled a canoe by moonlight, and dined on cedar beer, hemlock tea and moose lips. Taking notes constantly, Thoreau was just as likely to turn his observant eye to the habits and languages of the Abnaki Indians or the arduous life of the logger as he was to the workings of nature. He acutely observed the rivers, lakes, mountains, wolves, moose, and stars in the dark sky. He also told of nights sitting by the campfire, and of meeting men who communicated with each other by writing on the trunks of trees. In The Maine Woods, Thoreau captured a wilder side of America and revealed his own adventurous spirit.No Vulgar Hotel: The Desire and Pursuit of Venice
By Judith Martin, Eric Denker. 2007
"Add No Vulgar Hotel to the list of books you must read before you come to Venice."--Donna Leon This is…
the definitive book for managing an incurable passion for a decaying, water-logged village. Whether you already have a raging case of Venetophilia or are among the fifteen million people who yearly put themselves in danger of contracting it, here is where you get your fix of Venetian wit, history, practicality, and enchantment.Desert Soul: JM Journeys
By Isabelle Eberhardt. 1904
INTRODUCED BY WILLIAM ATKINS, author of The Immeasurable World 'I am merely an eccentric, a dreamer who wishes to live…
far from the civilized world, as a free nomad.'Isabelle Eberhardt's writing chronicles, in passionate prose, her travels in French colonial North Africa at the turn of the 20th century. Often dressed in male clothing and assuming a man's name, she worked as a war correspondent, married a Muslim non-commissioned officer, converted to Islam and survived an assassination attempt, all before dying in a flash flood at the age of 27.Desert Soul brings together her 'Wanderings' and 'The Daily Journals', detailing the ecstatic highs and the depressive lows of her short but unique and extraordinary life.An Eye on the Hebrides: An Illustrated Journey
By Mairi Hedderwick. 2021
Mairi Hedderwick embarks on a six-month-long journey to 40 islands from Arran to Lewis, recounting her pilgrimage around the archipelago…
of the Western Isles with which she has had a lifelong love affair. Filled with wit and wisdom that is matched by her spell-binding illustrations, Mairi Hedderwick portrays the islands in all their diversity, with swift and perceptive cameos of everyday life drawn with humour and affection alongside gorgeous landscapes which capture the truly magical beauty of the Hebrides.Desert Soul: JM Journeys
By Isabelle Eberhardt. 1904
INTRODUCED BY WILLIAM ATKINS, author of The Immeasurable World 'I am merely an eccentric, a dreamer who wishes to live…
far from the civilized world, as a free nomad.'Isabelle Eberhardt's writing chronicles, in passionate prose, her travels in French colonial North Africa at the turn of the 20th century. Often dressed in male clothing and assuming a man's name, she worked as a war correspondent, married a Muslim non-commissioned officer, converted to Islam and survived an assassination attempt, all before dying in a flash flood at the age of 27.Desert Soul brings together her 'Wanderings' and 'The Daily Journals', detailing the ecstatic highs and the depressive lows of her short but unique and extraordinary life.Rebel with a Clause: Tales and Tips from a Roving Grammarian
By Ellen Jovin. 2021
For fans of Mary Norris and Benjamin Dreyer, an unconventional guide to the English language drawn from the cross-country adventures…
of an itinerant grammarian.When Ellen Jovin first walked outside her Manhattan apartment building and set up a folding table with a GRAMMAR TABLE sign, it took about thirty seconds to get her first visitor. Everyone had a question for her. Grammar Table was such a hit—attracting the attention of the New York Times, NPR, and CBS Evening News—that Jovin soon took it on the road, traveling across the US to answer questions from writers, lawyers, editors, businesspeople, students, bickering couples, and anyone else who uses words in this world.In Rebel with a Clause, Jovin tackles what is most on people’s minds, grammatically speaking—from the Oxford comma to the places prepositions can go, the likely lifespan of whom, semicolonphobia, and more.Punctuated with linguistic debates from tiny towns to our largest cities, this grammar romp will delight anyone wishing to polish their prose or revel in our age-old, universal fascination with language.The superb classic memoir from a dazzlingly eccentric and endlessly fascinating author and feminist icon - a woman very much…
ahead of her time - including her time spent on the glorious island of Skiathos'A happy, hilarious book' Daily ExpressNancy Spain was one of the most celebrated - and notorious - writers and broadcasters of the 50s and 60s. Witty, controversial and brilliant, she lived openly as a lesbian (sharing a household with her two lovers and their various children) and was frequently litigated against for her newspaper columns - Evelyn Waugh successfully sued her for libel... twice.Nancy Spain had a deep love of the Mediterranean. So it was no surprise when, in the 1960s, she decided to build a place of her own on the Greek island of Skiathos. With an impractical nature surpassed only by her passion for the project, and despite many obstacles, she gloriously succeeded. This classic memoir is infused with all Spain's chaotic brilliance, zest for life and single-minded pursuit of a life worth living.Perfect for fans of A PLACE IN THE SUN and ESCAPE TO THE COUNTRY'Full of fun, and that zest of intelligence that never left her' Sunday TimesShips In The Desert (SFWP Literary Awards)
By Jeff Fearnside. 2022
In this linked essay collection, award-winning author Jeff Fearnside analyzes his four years as an educator on the Great Silk…
Road, primarily in Kazakhstan. Peeling back the layers of culture, environment, and history that define the country and its people, Fearnside creates a compelling narrative about this faraway land and soon realizes how the local, personal stories are, in fact, global stories. Fearnside sees firsthand the unnatural disaster of the Aral Sea— a man-made environmental crisis that has devastated the region and impacts the entire world. He examines the sometimes controversial ethics of Western missionaries, and reflects on personal and social change once he returns to the States. Ships in the Desert explores universal issues of religious bigotry, cultural intolerance, environmental degradation, and how a battle over water rights led to a catastrophe that is now being repeated around the world.Outlandish: Walking Europe's Unlikely Landscapes
By Nick Hunt. 2021
A dazzling plunge into the four strangest landscapes scattered across Europe.In Outlandish, acclaimed travel writer Nick Hunt takes us across…
landscapes that should not be there, wildernesses found in Europe yet seemingly belonging to far-off continents: a patch of Arctic tundra in Scotland; the continent's largest surviving remnant of primeval forest in Poland and Belarus; Europe's only true desert in Spain; and the fathomless grassland steppes of Hungary.From snow-capped mountain range to dense green forest, desert ravines to threadbare, yellow open grassland, these anomalies transport us to faraway regions of the world. More like pockets of Africa, Asia, the Poles or North America, they make our own continent seem larger, stranger and more filled with secrets.Against the rapid climate breakdown of deserts, steppes and primeval jungles across the world, this book discovers the outlandish environments so much closer to home - along with their abundant wildlife: reindeer; bison; ibex; wolves and herds of wild horses. Blending sublime travel writing, nature writing and history - by way of Paleolithic cave art, reindeer nomads, desert wanderers, shamans, Slavic forest gods, European bison, Wild West fantasists, eco-activists, horseback archers, Big Grey Men and other unlikely spirits of place - these desolate and rich environments show us that the strange has always been near.(P)2021 Hodder & Stoughon LimitedDispatches from the Gilded Age is a collection of essays by Julia Reed, one of America's greatest chroniclers.In the middle…
of the night on March 11, 1980, the phone rang in Julia Reed’s Georgetown dorm. It was her boss at Newsweek, where she was an intern. He told her to get in her car and drive to her alma mater, the Madeira School. Her former headmistress, Jean Harris, had just shot Dr. Herman Tarnower, The Scarsdale Diet Doctor. Julia didn’t flinch. She dressed, drove to Madeira, got the story, and her first byline and the new American Gilded Age was off and running.The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first was a time in which the high and the low bubbled furiously together and Julia was there with her sharp eye, keen wit, and uproariously clear-eyed way of seeing the world to chronicle this truly spectacular era. Dispatches from the Gilded Age is Julia at her best as she profiles Andre Leon Talley, Sister Helen Prejean, President George and Laura Bush, Madeleine Albright, and others. Readers will travel to Africa and Cuba with Julia, dine at Le Bernardin, savor steaks at Doe’s Eat Place, consider the fashions of the day, get the recipes for her hot cheese olives and end up with the ride of their lives through Julia’s beloved South. With a foreword by Roy Blount, Jr. and edited by Julia's longtime assistant, Everett Bexley.Gone to New York: Adventures in the City
By Ian Frazier. 2005
Death and Survival in Glacier National Park: True Tales of Tragedy, Courage, and Misadventure
By C. W. Guthrie, Ann Fagre, Dan Farge. 2017
Sheer cliffs, avalanches, turbulent rivers, cold lakes, severe weather, grizzly bears - these are just a few of the ways…
you can die while visiting Glacier National Park. Since 1910 when the park was established, 296 people have perished within Glacier's boundaries, and many more somehow survived close calls with death. Death and Survival in Glacier National Park recounts their true tales, as well as stories of the brave and often heroic search-and-rescue professionals who put their lives on the line so that others might live. Written by local Glacier National Park experts. Jam-packed with gripping stories of courage and survival against all odds. Featuring the most complete chronology of all 296 deaths in Glacier National Park, including names, ages, locations, and causes.The Henry Miller Reader (Essay Index Reprint Ser.)
By Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell. 1969
A collection of works spanning the entire career of great 20th-century American writer Henry Miller, edited and introduced by Lawrence…
Durrell. In 1958, when Henry Miller was elected to membership in the American Institute of Arts and Letters, the citation described him as: "The veteran author of many books whose originality and richness of technique are matched by the variety and daring of his subject matter. His boldness of approach and intense curiosity concerning man and nature are unequalled in the prose literature of our times." It is most fitting that this anthology of "the best" of Henry Miller should have been assembled by one of the first among Miller’s contemporaries to recognize his genius, the eminent British writer Lawrence Durrell. Drawing material from a dozen different books Durrell has traced the main line and principal themes of the "single, endless autobiography" which is Henry Miller’s life work. "I suspect," writes Durrell in his Introduction, "that Miller’s final place will be among those towering anomalies of authorship like Whitman or Blake who have left us, not simply works of art, but a corpus of ideas which motivate and influence a whole cultural pattern." Earlier, H. L. Mencken had said, "his is one of the most beautiful prose styles today," and the late Sir Herbert Read had written that "what makes Miller distinctive among modern writers is his ability to combine, without confusion, the aesthetic and prophetic functions." Included are stories, "portraits" of persons and places, philosophical essays, and aphorisms. For each selection Miller himself prepared a brief commentary which fits the piece into its place in his life story. This framework is supplemented by a chronology from Miller’s birth in 1891 up to the spring of 1959, a bibliography, and, as an appendix, an open letter to the Supreme Court of Norway written in protest of the ban on Sexus, a part of which appears in this volume.The World is Moving Around Me
By Dany Laferrière, David Homel, Michaëlle Jean. 2013
On January 12 2010 novelist Dany Laferri re had just ordered dinner at a Port-au-Prince restaurant with…
a friend when the earthquake struck He survived some three hundred thousand others did not The quake caused widespread destruction and left over one million homeless This moving and revelatory book is an eyewitness account of the quake and its aftermath In a series of vignettes Laferri re reveals the shock rage and grief experienced by those around him the acts of heroism he witnessed and his own sense of survivor guilt At one point his nephew astonished at still being alive asks his uncle not to write about this this being too horrible to give up so easily to those who were not there But as a writer Laferri re can t make such a promise Still the question is raised to whom does this disaster belong Who gets to talk and write about it In this way this book is not only the chronicle of a natural disaster it is also a personal meditation about the responsibility and power of the written word in a manner that echoes certain post-Holocaust books Includes a foreword by Micha lle Jean UN special envoy to Haiti and the former Governor General of Canada Dany Laferri re was born in Port-au-Prince Haiti in 1953 He is the author of fourteen novels including Heading South and How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired His awards include the Prix M dicis and the Governor General s Literary Award He lives in Montreal QuebecThe Road to Little Dribbling
By Bill Bryson. 2015
Bill Bryson returns to his internationally beloved topic, Britain, with his first travel book in fifteen years. In 1995, Bill…
Bryson went on a trip around Britain to celebrate the green and kindly island that had become his home. The hilarious book he wrote about that journey, Notes from a Small Island, became one of the most loved books of recent decades. Now, in this hotly anticipated new travel book, his first in fifteen years and sure to be greeted as the funniest book of the decade, Bryson sets out on a brand-new journey, on a route he dubs the Bryson Line, from Bognor Regis on the south coast to Cape Wrath on the northernmost tip of Scotland. Once again, he will guide us through all that's best and worst about Britain today--while doing that incredibly rare thing of making us laugh out loud in public. A New York Times BestsellerVery Charleston: A Celebration of History, Culture, and Lowcountry Charm
By Diana Hollingsworth Gessler. 2003
Cobblestone streets leading to perfectly preserved historic homes. Intricate wrought-iron gates opening to lush, fragrant gardens. A skyline of steeples…
and a river harbor bustling with schooners and sailboats. Charleston is one of America's most charming cities. In vibrant watercolors and detailed sketches, artist Diana Gessler captures the beauty and riches that make Charleston so unique: White Point Gardens, the Spoleto Festival, Rainbow Row, Waterfront Park, Fort Moultrie, the beaches of Sullivan's Island, sumptuous Lowcountry cuisine, and handmade sweetgrass baskets. Full of fascinating details--on everything from the art of early entertaining, the city's inspired architectural and garden designs, and George Washington's Southern tour to famous Charlestonians and the flags of Sumter--Very Charleston celebrates the city, the Lowcountry, the people, and our history. Hand-lettered and full color throughout, Very Charleston includes maps, an index, and a handy appendix of sites. With her cheerful illustrations and love for discovering little-known facts, Diana Gessler has created both an entertaining guide and an irresistible keepsake for visitors and Charlestonians alike.Very New Orleans: A Celebration of History, Culture, and Cajun Country Charm
By Diana Hollingsworth Gessler. 2006
The exquisite antebellum mansions of the Garden District. Giant oaks stretching across boulevards and back in time to before the…
Civil War. The decadence of Bourbon Street. The vibrant sounds of jazz, blues, and Cajun music coming from every doorway or right from the street. Lacy iron balconies that wrap around the historic buildings of the French Quarter. A leisurely meal under a canopy of wisteria. In vibrant watercolors and detailed sketches, artist Diana Gessler captures the unique charm that makes New Orleans alluring: Mardi Gras, the Cabildo, Jackson Square, the Court of the Two Sisters, St. Louis Cemetery, the Jazz Festival, the River Road Plantations, the Cajun country, sumptuous Creole cuisine, and Audubon’s Aquarium of the Americas. In fascinating detail—on everything from the making of Mardi Gras, Napolean’s death mask, the city’s inspired architectural and garden designs, and favorite author hangouts to famous New Orleanians and Aunt Sally’s Creole pralines—Very New Orleans celebrates the city, the Cajun country, the people, and our historyEveryone tells you marriage is hard but no one tells you what to do about it At age thirty-four…
Jo Piazza got her romantic-comedy ending when she met the man of her dreams on a boat in the Gal pagos Islands and was engaged three months later But before long Jo found herself riddled with questions How do you make a marriage work in a world where you no longer need to be married How does an independent strong-willed feminist become someone s partner all the time In the tradition of writers such as Nora Ephron and Elizabeth Gilbert award-winning journalist and nationally bestselling author Jo Piazza writes a provocative memoir of a real first year of marriage that will forever change the way we look at matrimony A travel editor constantly on the move Jo journeys to twenty countries on five continents to figure out what modern marriage means Throughout this stunning funny warm and wise personal narrative she gleans wisdom from matrilineal tribeswomen French ladies who lunch Orthodox Jewish moms Swedish stay-at-home dads polygamous warriors and Dutch prostitutes Written with refreshing candor elegant prose astute reporting and hilarious insight into the human psyche How to Be Married offers an honest portrait of an utterly charming couple When life throws more at them than they ever expected a terrifying health diagnosis sick parents to care for unemployment they ultimately create a fresh understanding of what it means to be equal partners during the good and bad times Through their journey they reveal a framework that will help the rest of us keep our marriages strong from engagement into the newlywed years and beyondTraveling While Married: How To Take A Trip With Your Spouse And Come Back Together
By Mary-Lou Weisman. 2003
Ah travel! New scenery, exciting adventures, time alone with a loved one. Truth is, travel can make or break a…
relationship. Just negotiating when to leave for the airport can be tricky: she insists on arriving hours ahead of flight time, he likes the excitement of a photo finish. But as Mary-Lou Weisman sees it, "The inevitable rage with which we begin each trip only helps us to better appreciate the good times that lie ahead." Or maybe not. When people have jet lag, can't speak the language, figure out the money, or maintain intestinal regularity, they get cranky. And since they don't know anybody else in Kyoto to take it out on, they take it out on each other. Alas, couples therapy is rarely available on vacation, which is why we need this hilarious and truthful take on travel and togetherness. Using her own misadventures--from honeymoon through Elderhostel--Weisman exposes all the gender landmines: Destinations: He wants to outrun molten lava down a volcano, she prefers raking gravel in a Buddhist monastery. Motivations: She longs for a change of scenery, he hopes for a change of self. Preparations: She keeps a file of required sights, he won't be bullied by travel guides. Accommodations: She divides every hotel room in half so he'll know on which side of the bed to throw his wet towel. Inclinations: She shops a country, he eats it. This is the real skinny on what happens when Mars and Venus hit the road. With a sly wink, a comic nod, and just the right amount of optimism, Weisman shows us that despite the shortcomings of one's beloved, harmonious travel is possible.French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France
By Richard Goodman. 2005
A story about dirt--and about sun, water, work, elation, and defeat. And about the sublime pleasure of having a little…
piece of French land all to oneself to till. Richard Goodman saw the ad in the paper: "SOUTHERN FRANCE: Stone house in Village near Nimes/Avignon/Uzes. 4 BR, 2 baths, fireplace, books, desk, bikes. Perfect for writing, painting, exploring & experiencing la France profonde. $450 mo. plus utilities." And, with his girlfriend, he left New York City to spend a year in Southern France. The village was small--no shops, no gas station, no post office, only a café and a school. St. Sebastien de Caisson was home to farmers and vintners. Every evening Goodman watched the villagers congregate and longed to be a part of their camaraderie. But they weren't interested in him: he was just another American, come to visit and soon to leave. So Goodman laced up his work boots and ventured out into the vineyards to work among them. He met them first as a hired worker, and then as a farmer of his own small plot of land. French Dirt is a love story between a man and his garden. It's about plowing, planting, watering, and tending. It's about cabbage, tomatoes, parsley, and eggplant. Most of all, it's about the growing friendship between an American outsider and a close-knit community of French farmers. "There's a genuine sweetness about the way the cucumbers and tomatoes bridge the divide of nationality."--The New York Times Book Review "One of the most charming, perceptive and subtle books ever written about the French by an American."--San Francisco Chronicle