'Witty, polished, honest and insightful, The Epic City is likely to become for Calcutta what Suketu Mehta's classic Maximum City is for Mumbai' William Dalrymple, Observer

When Kushanava Choudhury arrived in New Jersey at the age of twelve, he had already migrated halfway around the world four times. After graduating from Princeton, he moved back to Calcutta, the city which his immigrant parents had abandoned. Taking a job at a newspaper, he found the streets of his childhood unchanged. Shouting hawkers still overran the footpaths, fish sellers squatted on bazaar floors; and politics still meant barricades and bus burnings. The Epic City is a soulful, compelling and often hilarious account of this metropolis of fifteen million people that is truly a world unto itself.

Travel is the only thing you can buy that makes you richer Travel opens our minds to the world; it helps us to embrace risk and uncertainty, overcome challenges and understand the people we meet and the places we visit. But what happens when we arrive home? How do our experiences shape us? The Kindness of Strangers explores what it means to be vulnerable and to be helped by someone we've never met before. Someone who could have walked past, but chose not to. This is a collection of stories by accomplished travellers and adventurous souls like Sarah Outen, Benedict Allen, Ed Stafford and Al Humphreys, who have completed daring journeys through challenging terrain, adventuring from the Calais Jungle to the Amazon, from Land's End to the Gobi Desert, from New Guinea to Iran and many other places in between. Each has a story to tell of a time when they were vulnerable, when they were in need and a kind stranger came to their rescue. These are stories that make our hearts grow, stories that will restore our faith in the world and remind us that, despite what the media says, the world isn't a scary place - rather, it is filled with Kind Strangers just like us. All royalties go directly to fund Oxfam's work with refugees.

A gripping tale of exploration, the pursuit of ice-age records, scientific invention and controversy, and revelations about the great Amazon forest In this vivid memoir of a life in science, ecologist Paul Colinvaux takes his readers from the Alaskan tundra to steamy Amazon jungles, from the Galapagos Islands (before tourists had arrived) to the high Andes and the Darien Gap in Panama. He recounts an adventurous tale of exploration in the days before GPS and satellite mapping, and a tale no less exhilarating of his battle to disprove a hypothesis endorsed by most of the scientific community. Colinvaux's grand endeavor, begun in the 1960s, was to find fossil evidence of the ice-age climate and vegetation of the entire American equator, from Pacific to Atlantic. The accomplishment of the task by the author and his colleagues involved finding unknown ancient lakes, lugging drilling equipment through uncharted Amazon jungle, operating hand drills from rubber boats in water 40 meters deep, and inventing a pollen analysis for a land with 80,000 species of plants. Colinvaux's years of arduous travel and research ultimately disproved a hotly defended hypothesis explaining bird distribution peculiarities in the Amazon forest. The story of how he arrived at a new understanding of the Amazon is at once an adventurous saga, an account of science as it is conducted in the field, and a cautionary tale about the temptation to treat a favored hypothesis with a reverence that subverts unbiased research.

Near Mount Etna in Sicily lies Casa Cuseni, a beautiful house built in golden stone - and the home which Daphne Phelps was astonished to find she had inherited in 1947. At the age of 34, war-weary from working as a psychiatric social worker, with barely any Italian and precious little money, she plunged into a fascinating Sicilian world. The many problems to be overcome included not only financial difficulties but local authorities and a house staff who initially felt no loyalty to the new Signorina, but who gradually accepted her as a respected member of their small community. To help make ends meet, for many years Daphne Phelps ran Casa Cuseni as a pension. To her doors came Roald Dahl, Tennessee Williams, Bertrand Russell and the painter Henry Faulkner. But just as important to her life and her story, which she tells in this book, are the Sicilians with whom she shared the love and care of Casa Cuseni: Don Ciccio, the local mafia leader; Vincenzio, general manservant who recited while he served the meals; Beppe, a Don Juan who scented his eyebrows and his moustache to attract the local girls; and, above all, the steadfast cook and housekeeper who lives with Daphne Phelps still,

Bill Bryson has the rare knack of being out of his depth wherever he goes - even (perhaps especially) in the land of his birth. This became all too apparent when, after nearly two decades in England, the world's best-loved travel writer upped sticks with Mrs Bryson, little Jimmy et al. and returned to live in the country he had left as a youth. Of course there were things Bryson missed about Blighty but any sense of loss was countered by the joy of rediscovering some of the forgotten treasures of his childhood: the glories of a New England autumn; the pleasingly comical sight of oneself in shorts; and motel rooms where you can generally count on being awakened in the night by a piercing shriek and the sound of a female voice pleading, 'Put the gun down, Vinnie, I'll do anything you say.' Whether discussing the strange appeal of breakfast pizza or the jaw-slackening direness of American TV, Bill Bryson brings his inimitable brand of bemused wit to bear on that strangest of phenomena - the American way of life.

Raised on its banks and an avid sailor, Caroline Crampton sets out to rediscover the enigmatic pull of the Thames by following its course from the river's source in a small village in Gloucestershire, through the short central stretch beloved of Londoners and tourists alike, to the point where it merges with the North Sea. As she navigates the river's ever-shifting tidal waters, she seeks out the stories behind its unique landmarks, from the vast Victorian pumping stations that carried away the capital's waste and the shiny barrier that holds the sea at bay, to the Napoleonic-era forts that stand on marshy ground as eerie relics of past invasions. In spellbinding prose, she reveals the histories of its empty warehouses and arsenals; its riverbanks layered with Anglo-Saxon treasures; and its shipwrecks, still inhabited by the ghosts of the drowned. The Way to the Sea is at once a fascinating portrait of an iconic stretch of water and a captivating introduction to a new voice in British non-fiction.

For more than fifty years, Ward travelled remote areas of the Far East looking for beautiful flowers and shrubs likely to thrive in western gardens and for new botanical specimens. His discoveries included new kinds of rhododendrons, lilies, gentians, primulas and the legendary Tibetan blue poppy. This is a narrative of his adventures and discoveries in Tibet in 1933, illustrated with his own photographs. Ward conveys the excitement of exploration, the thrill of danger and the rewards of discovery as, in one precarious situation after another, he discovers new plants and seeds.

The Islamic Orient studies the travel accounts of four British travelers during the nineteenth century. Through a critical analysis of these works, the author examines and questions Edward Said's concept of "Orientalism" and "Orientalist" discourse: his argument that the orientalist view had such a strong influence on westerners that they invariably perceived the orient through the lens of orientalism. On the contrary, the author argues, no single factor had an overwhelming influence on them. She shows that westerners often struggled with their own conceptions of the orient, and being away for long periods from their homelands, were in fact able to stand between cultures and view them both as insiders and outsiders. The literary devices used to examine these writings are structure, characterization, satire, landscape description, and word choice, as also the social and political milieu of the writers. The major influences in the author's analysis are Said, Foucault, Abdel-Malek and Marie Louise Pratt.

Originally published in 1908, "Two American Women Journey Through East and South Africa" desribes a trip made by two American women to Uganda and the Transvaal in the hopes of inspiring other Americans to do the same. This fascinating tour of Africa opens the eyes of any traveller, in particular those that enjoy a more comfortable journey. Caroline Kirkland points out that it is possible to see the plains of Africa, rich with zebras, gnus, giraffes, and even lions, from a railway carriage window. Though only claiming to have touched the surface of the vast continent, she describes the African landscape as "dark, mysterious, violent and enchanting."

'An Intrepid Scot' makes an important new contribution to the growing literature on the perceptions of the Islamic world and the 'Orient' in early modern Europe, at the same time as illuminating the attitudes of a Protestant from Northern Europe towards the Catholic South. In this book Edmund Bosworth looks at the life and career of William Lithgow, a tough and opinionated Scots Protestant, who had a seemingly insatiable Wanderlust and who managed to survive various misadventures and near-death experiences in the course of his travels. These took him through a dangerously Catholic Southern Europe to a dangerously Muslim Greece and Istanbul en route for his pilgrimage destination of the Holy Land; on another occasion he went through North Africa and returned circuitously via Central and Eastern Europe; but he was stopped in his tracks whilst endeavouring to reach the court of Prester John in Ethiopia, when he fell into the hands of the Spanish Inquisition and narrowly escaped a horrible death. Lithgow was one of several men of his time who journeyed eastwards, some as far as Persia and India, but unlike many others, he has not been the subject of a special study. Bosworth now places him within the context of the present interest in perceptions of the Islamic world and of the 'Orient' and 'Orientals' in early modern Europe. In addition to the entertainment of the travel narrative, the book shows how one Westerner of the time interpreted the alien East for his readers, and how the Ottoman Empire and its apparently unstoppable might both fascinated and struck fear into the hearts of those outside it.

A book as effervescent and alive as the city itself, "My First New York" features candid accounts of coming to New York by more than fifty remarkable people who have called the city home. The contributors - a mix of actors, artists, comedians, entrepreneurs, musicians, politicians, sports stars, writers, and others - reflect an enormous variety of experiences. Few have arrived with less than filmmaker Jonas Mekas, a concentration-camp survivor on a UN refugee ship; few have swanned in with more than designer Diane von Furstenberg, a princess. And an extraordinary number managed to land in New York just as something historic was happening - the artist Cindy Sherman arrived in the middle of the Summer of Sam; restaurateur Danny Meyer came on the day John Lennon was shot. Arranged chronologically, these moving and memorable true stories combine to form an impressionistic history of New York since the Great Depression. Taken together, their stories are testaments to a larger revelation, one that new arrivals of all stripes and all eras have experienced again and again in New York, regardless of how the city proceeds to treat them: what the songwriter Rufus Wainwright calls having cracked the code of living life to the fullest.

"Fresh and diverting, informative and topical without being slight or ephemeral. This supremely well-edited combination of current affairs, journalism, commentary, and fun facts is perfect for our pause-button moment." -Australian Financial Review, Best Books of the Year Fully illustrated, The Passenger collects the best new writing, photography, art and reportage from around the world. IN THIS VOLUME: Growing Uncertainty in California's Central Valley by Anna Wiener * What Does It Mean to Be a Solution? by Vanessa Hua * Shadows in the Valley by Francisco Cantu. Plus: direct democracy and unsustainable development, the rise of the Land Back movement, LA's cultural renaissance in the face of rampant gentrification, visions of the future, the death of the Californian Dream, the burning of Paradise and much more . . . "Wildfire season had already begun, and, as the car pitched along the road through Kings Canyon, I tried to tamp down a feeling like dread. In California, where the effects of global warming are pervasive and unsubtle, spending time in the forest always makes me feel unspeakably lucky and dizzy with remorse. Families in masks stomped through the Giant Forest to pose for photographs in front of General Sherman, a 275-foot-tall tree. Children licked ice-cream bars by the visitor center. In the parking lot, some of the oldest living trees in the world shaded eight-seat SUVs: Kia Tellurides, Chevy Tahoes, Toyota Sequoias." -From "Growing Uncertainty in California's Central Valley" by Anna Wiener

On 26th April 2014 Huw kayaked away from Anzac Cove at Gallipoli, Turkey, taking the next three months to navigate around the coasts of Greece, Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia, and Croatia. Following this, he spent three months walking the full length of the European Alps, taking on Mont Blanc, at 4810m Europe's highest mountain, in the process. Having left the Alps behind, he biked through Southern France and across Spain before paddling his sea kayak along the coast of Andalucia to Gibraltar and across the Straits of Gibraltar, between the Pillars of Hercules, to North Africa. This was a major achievement, a full traverse of Europe in eight months; 7,500 km from Turkey. However, for Huw, this was only the half-way point. During winter, the coldest and stormiest for many years, Huw continued the journey by bike through Morocco, Algeria and into Tunisia. The ever-worsening situation in the region forced him to abandon his bike in favour of an alternative mode of transport. A wonderful set of coincidences and circumstances saw Huw use an ocean rowboat to row, by night and day, the 1,500 km to Turkey with a young Slovenian adventurer. It was the first time he had ever rowed in his life.For the final month Huw kayaked the last 1,000 km to where it all began along a Turkish coast now awash with the flotsam and jetsam of the worst refugee crisis in Europe since World War II. After 363 days Huw arrived back to Gallipoli, in time for the centenary commemoration of Anzac Day. His incredible journey included many memorable events such as being held on a Turkish military island after inadvertently landing to camp, meeting an amazing one-legged hiker while crossing the Alps and arriving dog-tired and starving by kayak to Africa after local kindnesses beat back British and Spanish political differences over Gibraltar to allow a crossing of the Straits of Gibraltar. Huw took in the extraordinary land and seascapes, the rich and varied cultures and peoples and the current state of many of those countries. This is a fascinating story of endurance, and throughout this epic journey Huw raised funds for the children of war-torn Syria, in the process becoming Save the Children Australia's highest-ever individual fundraiser.

Making Place, Making Self explores new understandings of place and place-making in late modernity, covering key themes of place and space, tourism and mobility, sexual difference and subjectivity. Using a series of individual life stories, it develops a fascinating polyvocal account of leisure and life journeys. These stories focus on journeys made to the North Cape in Norway, the most northern point of mainland Europe, which is both a tourist destination and an evocation of a reliable and secure point of reference, an idea that gives meaning to an individual's life. The theoretical core of the book draws on an inter-weaving of post-Lacanian versions of feminist psycho-analytical thinking with phenomenological and existential thinking, where place-making is linked with self-making and homecoming. By combining such ground-breaking theory with her innovative use of case studies, Inger Birkeland, here, provides a major contribution to the fields of cultural geography, tourism, and feminist studies.

First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Riddoch on the Outer Hebrides is a thought-provoking commentary based on broadcaster Lesley Riddoch's cycle journey through a beautiful island chain facing seismic cultural and economic change. Her experience is described in a typically affectionate but hard-hitting style; with humour, anecdote and a growing sympathy for islanders tired of living at the margins but fearful of closer contact with mainland Scotland.

In his beautifully written prose, Dr Jonathan Reisman - physician, adventure traveller and naturalist - allows readers to navigate their insides like an explorer discovering a new world. Through his offbeat adventures in healthcare and travel, Reisman discovers new perspectives on the body: a trip to the Alaskan Arctic reveals that fat is not the enemy, but the hero; a stint in the Himalayas uncovers the boundary where the brain ends and the mind begins; and eating a sheep's head in Iceland offers a lesson in empathy. By relating his experiences in far-flung lands and among unique cultures back to the body's inner workings, he shows how our organs live inextricably intertwined lives in an internal ecosystem that reflects the natural world around us. Reisman's unique perspective on the natural world and his expert wielding of wit ultimately helps us make sense of our lives, our bodies and our world in a way readers have never before imagined. 'An elegant, elegiac, and deeply enjoyable meander through human anatomy . . . the images Reisman conjures will linger long after you've devoured his delightful prose.' - Nicola Twilley, co-author of Until Proven Safe and co-host of Gastropod podcast

In the run up to the 1987 election Christopher Hope returned to his native South Africa after a twelve-year absence. The nature of that year's whites-only election and the bitter defeat of the liberals led him to write this satirical, evocative portrait of what it looked and felt like growing up in a country gripped by an absurd, racist insanity. Full of exquisite and despairing descriptions, Hope weaves together journalistic commentary and his own personal story as he encounters the bloody battles that have divided his homeland. This is a mordantly witty account of escape, displacement and disillusionment, and a modern classic of journalistic memoir.

"An uncensored road trip through gay American life in the early sixties "Jack Nichols is now known as a founding father of the gay and lesbian liberation movement, editor of GAY (the first gay weekly newspaper), co-founder of the Mattachine Societies of Washington, DC, and Florida, and a warrior who broke ground for gay equality. In his early twenties, however, he was dedicated to romance, ardor, and wanderlust-living the life of a gypsy and making love with abandon. "MORE EXCITING THAN THE WILDEST FICTION. . . . Jack takes his reader on the road with him (Jack often hitchhiking in only T-shirt and jeans) where he encounters, beds down (and sometimes hustles) dozens of attractive 'numbers' who come his way.""- Donn Teal, Author of The Gay Militants: 1971 & 1994""This might be called Jack Nichols' version of Kerouac's beat classic "On the Road." With a variety of companions, and with little money in his pocket, in the early 60s, he drove, hitchhiked, rode buses, and even walked for a couple of long stretches from Washington, DC, to New York and then through West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois. He recalls in considerable detail a variety of individuals with whom he had erotic encounters. The title The Tomcat Chronicles is fully descriptive.""- Vern L. Bullough, PhD, RN, Editor of Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context""Jack Nichols, the gay liberation pioneer, has been a lifelong friend who helped to illuminate my concept of homophobia. Oscar Wilde believed one's life should be a work of art. Jack's life, which has always combined courage, social awareness and sexual passion, is certainly such a work.""- George Weinberg, PhD, Author of Society and the Healthy Homosexual and 13 other books (the psychotherapist credited with coining the term homophobia)""THE VIVID DETAIL AND GRACEFUL PROSE THAT CHARACTERIZE THE WRITING OF JACK NICHOLS open a window into a time long before gay men appeared weekly on tv or before anti-sodomy laws had been banned.""- Rodger Streitmatter, PhD, Author of Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America""The Tomcat Chronicles is a gay pioneer's version of "City of Night."- James T. Sears, PhD, Author of Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South; Editor of the Journal of Gay & Lesbian Issues in Education (from the Foreword)"

Ranging from the early modern to the postcolonial, and dealing mainly with encounters in Europe, the Americas and the Middle East, Perspectives on Travel Writing is a collection of new essays by international scholars that examines some of the various contexts of travel writing, as well as its generic characteristics. Contributions examine the similarities between autobiography and memoir, fiction, and travel writing, and attempt to define travel writing as a genre. Utilising a variety of approaches, the essays display a shared concern with what travel writing does and how it does it. The effects of encounter and border-crossing on gender, 'race', and national identity are considered throughout. The collection begins with a review of some of the problems and issues facing the scholar of travel writing and moves on to a detailed discussion of the qualities of travel writing and its related forms. It then presents in chronological order a number of case studies, before closing with a critical discussion of approaches to the subject. An essay collection with broad historical and geographical coverage, this volume should appeal to students and researchers of travel and travel-related literatures from across the Humanities.

Peter, Matthew, Thomas, John: who were these men and their fellow Apostles? What was their relationship to Jesus? Tom Bissell gives us rich answers to these ancient and surprisingly enigmatic questions in an unusual, erudite and fascinating book. By visiting holy sites around the world, and examining how the Apostles' identities took shape over the course of two millennia, he explores the story of Christianity and its growth from an obscure Jewish sect to the global faith we know today.

The journal of the Lander brothers provides a narrative of one of the most important missions of exploration in the history of West Africa. The editor's introduction contains much new material on the Landers and their journey drawn from hitherto unpublished sources, while an epilogue describes Richard Lander's last expedition to the Niger in 1832-4 and his death at Fernando Po. Originally published in 1965.

This is an account of an American woman's recent travels through North Korea. Throughout her journey, she continually witnessed rundown villages, starving children with hollow eyes, haggard women crawling in the fields for single grains of rice and civilians unloading food aid at the point of bayonets. The author predicts that North Korea's economic reform, which has just started, will progress slowly, but that the country will one day be open to the outside world. It may, however, take another twenty years for this reform to be complete. Small, reluctant changes have already happened though, and this book expresses optimism that one day the North Korean people will end their isolation and join the world's mainstream.

Paris, the City of Light, the city of fine dining, seductive couture and intellectual hauteur, was until fairly recently always accompanied by its shadow: the city of the poor, the outcast, the criminal, the eccentric, the wilfully nonconforming. In The Other Paris, Luc Sante gives us a panoramic view of that second metropolis, whose traces are in the bricks and stones of the contemporary city, and in the culture of France itself. Richly illustrated with over three hundred images, The Other Paris reclaims the city from the modern bon vivants and speculators; scuttling through the knotted streets, through the whorehouses and dance halls, the knock-out shops and hobo shelters of the old city.