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Books > Sport & Leisure > Travel & holiday > Travel writing > General
In this thoughtful, informative account of a journey from Ho Chi
Minh City and the Mekong Delta to Hanoi and Halong Bay, Zoe
Schramm-Evans delves behind the cliche-ridden images of Vietnam to
discover a country poised on the brink of remarkable social and
economic change.
In Alycia Pirmohamed's debut collection, Another Way to Split
Water, a woman's body expands and contracts across the page, fog
uncoils at the fringes of a forest, and water in all its forms
cascades into metaphors of longing and separation just as often as
it signals inheritance, revival, and recuperation. Language unfolds
into unforgettable and arresting imagery, offering a map toward
self-understanding that is deeply rooted in place. These poems are
a lyrical exploration of how ancestral memory reforms and
transforms throughout generations, through stories told and retold,
imagined and reimagined. It is a meditation on womanhood,
belonging, faith, intimacy, and the natural world. 'Pirmohamed is
an immensely gifted poet' - Eduardo C. Corral 'An electric, taut,
and glimmering achievement' - Aria Aber
The Pony Express has a hold on the American imagination wildly out
of proportion to its actual contribution to the history and
development of the West. It lasted less than eighteen
months—about the amount of time it took author Scott Alumbaugh to
plan and ride the route—and utterly failed by every measure of
success attributed to it. The only reason it did not fade out of
public consciousness, as did the far more successful Butterfield
mail, is publicity. In the Pony’s case, a thirty-year campaign of
publicity mounted by Buffalo Bill Cody, who mislead the public by
claiming to have been a Pony Express rider, and lied outright by
claiming to have made the longest Pony Express run. More than
anyone, Buffalo Bill kept the legend alive by including a Pony
Express segment throughout the run of his Wild West show. But while
the Pony Express may be among the least significant developments of
its era, it is the most iconic. One can’t really understand the
Pony Express—what it stood for, what it accomplished, why it came
about at all—without understanding the far more interesting
historical milieu from which it grew: Three wars (Mexican, Utah,
and Paiute); two gold rushes (California and Pike’s Peak); the
overland emigration of hundreds of thousands to Oregon and
California; the exodus of tens of thousands of Mormons to Utah. On
the Pony Express Trail: One Man's Bikepacking Journey to Discover
History from a Different Kind of Saddle recounts the author’s
experience bikepacking the Pony Express Trail over five weeks
during June and July 2021, and uses the trail as a prism through
which to survey a wide spectrum of mid-1800s historical events.
Sixty-two-year-old Alumbaugh rode the Pony Express Bikepacking
Route from St. Joseph, MO to Salt Lake City, UT, over 1,400 miles,
mostly off-road, sometimes through very remote territory. The
narrative follows his day-to-day experiences and impressions: the
challenges, the sites he visited, the country he rode through, and
interactions with the people he met.
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