A century ago, northern Thailand (or Siam as it was then known) was home to small communities of Westerners, many of them British diplomats and foresters (like Reginald Le May and Reginald Campbell) or American missionaries (like Lucy Starling and Mary Lou O’Brien). Though few in number, they left behind a considerable written legacy. The writing is invariably personal and often vivid, describing their hopes and aspirations, the challenges they faced in their work and daily lives, and their atta...
Applying the same deep-focus as James Shapiro's "1599: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare," Dutton concentrates on three days in the playwright's calendar, bringing to life every building, street, lane, village, town and inn Shakespeare would have passed, as well as the people he could have met en route. Both a travelogue and work of visual archaeology, the book is lavishly illustrated in full colour and is a valuable contribution to Shakespeariana, of appeal both to lovers of Shakespeare eager f...
The Little Story Of A Big City Girl What Will It Be Like When Moving Down To A Countryside
by Laticia Shogren
Jewish writers have long had a sense of place in the United States, and interpretations of American geography have appeared in Jewish American literature from the colonial era forward. But troublingly, scholarship on Jewish American literary history often limits itself to an immigrant model, situating the Jewish American literary canon firmly and inescapably among the immigrant authors and early environments of the early twentieth century. In A Hundred Acres of America, Michael Hoberman combines...
Published to coincide with the 21st Edinburgh International Book Festival, this work includes not only native Edinburgh authors but others on whom the city had a profound influence.
On the morning of November 20, 1820, in the Pacific Ocean, an enraged sperm whale rammed the Nantucket whaler Essex. As the boat began to sink, her crew of thirty had time only to collect some bread and water before pulling away in three frail open boats. Without charts, alone on the open seas, and thousands of miles from any known land, the sailors began their terrifying journey of survival. Ninety days later, after much suffering and death by starvation, intense heat, and dehydration, only eig...
Relates the tale of the author's journey of more than six hundred dangerous miles on the Niger River from Mali's Old Segou to Timbuktu, enduring tropical storms and the heat of the Sahara to fulfill her goal of buying the freedom of two Bella slave girls.
The Aran Islands (Oxford Paperbacks) (Green Integer Books, #77)
by J. M. Synge
The Aran Islands of Aranmor, Inishmaan, and Inishere lie thirty miles from Galway, and so attracted J M Synge that he returned to them time and again. He recounts here his travels and encounters on the islands, telling of magic wells, poteen drinkers, fishing expeditions in currachs, and stories told him by the solemn Pat Dirane, of islanders fallen victim to the druids and the fairies. Synge developed a great and reciprocated affection for these fine-featured people, for the ungovernable eyes a...
Tangier in the 1960s and '70s was a fabled place. This edge city, the 'Interzone', became muse and escapist's dream for artists, writers, millionaires and socialites, who wrote, painted, partied and experienced life with an intensity and freedom that they never could back home. Into this louche and cosmopolitan world came John Hopkins, a young writer who became a part of the bohemian Tangier crowd with its core of Beats that included William Burroughs, Paul and Jane Bowles and Brion Gysin, as we...
Walter De Maria's "Lightning Field" is 400 stainless steel poles, positioned 220 feet apart, in the desert of central New Mexico. Over the course of several visits, it becomes, for Raicovich, a site for confounding and revealing perceptions of time, space, duration, and light; how changeable they are, while staying the same. From At the Lightning Field:Chaos and coincidences of history: Edward Lorenz was a meteorologist at MIT in the early 1960s. Looking for a devil in the detail of meteorolog...
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...
Ernest Hemingway, the Nobel Prize-winning author, was known as much for his prose as for his travels to exotic locales, his gusto and charm created excitement wherever he went. In Ernest's Way, we follow Cristen around the globe to the places he lived, wrote, fought, drank, fished, ran with the bulls and held court with T.S. Elliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein and many other influential writers, artists and intellectuals of the 20th century. In fresh and lively prose, C...
Love and marriage brought American anthropologist Elizabeth Enslin to a world she never planned to make her own: a life among Brahman in-laws in a remote village in the plains of Nepal. As she faced the challenges of married life, birth, and childrearing in a foreign culture, she discovered as much about human resilience, and the capacity for courage, as she did about herself. While the Gods Were Sleeping: A Journey Through Love and Rebellion in Nepal tells a compelling story of a woman transfor...
Lose yourself in the definitive collection of glorious travel sketches by our century's best loved voyager and real-life family member of The Durrells in Corfu. 'Depicts the brio of Durrell's existence with intoxicating vividness.' New York Times 'Much more than just a chronicle of his travels ... Reveals Durrell's honesty, outspokenness, warmth, and extreme sensitivity to people and to the beauty of nature ... Unusual and fascinating.' Library Journal 'Excellent, vigorous, exciting, unselfc...
