A stunningly illustrated history of Venice, from its beginnings as 'La Serenissima' – 'the Most Serene Republic' – to the Italian city that continues to enchant visitors today. 'Everything about Venice,' observed Lord Byron, 'is, or was, extraordinary – her aspect is like a dream, and her history is like a romance.' Dream and romance have conditioned myriad encounters with Venice across the centuries, but the city's story embodies another kind of experience altogether – the hard reality of an independent state built on conquest, profit and entitlement and on the toughness and resilience of a free people. Masters of the sea, the Venetians raised an empire through an ethos of service and loyalty to a republic that lasted a thousand years. In this new and beautifully illustrated study of key moments in Venice's history, from its half-legendary founding amid the collapse of the Roman empire to its modern survival as a fragile city of the arts menaced by saturation tourism and rising sea levels, Jonathan Keates shows us just how much this remarkable place has contributed to world culture and explains how it endures as an object of desire and inspiration for so many.

Whether he's looking for wild orangutans on Borneo or diving off the coast of South Africa, Randy Wayne White is one of America's most adventurous travelers. In Last Flight Out, White challenges and charms us with tales of his excursions into the dangerous, into the ludicrous, and - especially - into the heart of humanity.
Randy White is a "mover" and has no time for people who can't keep up. Join him as he dives in the infamous lake called the Bad Blue Hole on the desolate Cat Island in the Bahamas. Search for the perfect hot pepper in Colombia, and closer to home; go raccoon hunting in Pioneer, Ohio, where the hunted almost always outsmart the hunters. Get in the ring with Shine Forbes, an eighty-year-old fighter in prime condition and Ernest Hemingway's former sparring partner, and go on a secret mission to steal back General Manuel Noriega's bar stools. Though he rarely finds what he's looking for - such as the half-human, half-alligator creature known as "Gatorman" - he cultivates his unique ability to revel in the unique and comical situations of each exotic trip.
From a jungle survival school in Panama to a week at a professional wrestler's training camp, White leaves the reader mesmerized by the potential of undiscovered places and the promise of endless adventure in unfamiliar territory. An icon of the new breed of thick-skinned, high endurance travelers, Randy White is the real deal.

For more than ten years, Elizabeth Peavey has been traveling around the state of Maine, and writing about her wide-ranging experiences and discoveries in Down East magazine. This book collects her very best columns and essays. In a light and entertaining style laced with lots of entertaining humor, she weaves a wide-ranging tapestry that will give readers a vivid and fresh view of the state.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the rise of the "Home Tour," with travelers drawn to Scotland, the less explored regions of England and North Wales, and, increasingly, to Ireland. Although an integral part of the United Kingdom from 1800, Ireland represented for many travellers a worryingly unknown entity, politically intractable and unstable, devoutly Catholic, and economically deprived. This book examines British responses to the "Sister Isle" throughout a period of significant cultural and historical change, and examines the varied means through which Ireland was represented for a predominantly British audience.

'Heads up - here's how to run like a pro' The Times 'A fascinating book' Adharanand Finn, author of Running With the Kenyans 'I'm convinced that Shane's insights were were instrumental in me winning the Marathon des Sables for a second time' Elisabet Barnes, coach and athlete 'Shane is the Indiana Jones of the running world' Damian Hall, ultra marathon runner 'You can't but help go out the door for your next run and try to put it all into practice' Nicky Spinks, endurance runner The Lost Art of Running is an opportunity to join running technique analyst coach and movement guru Shane Benzie on his journey across five continents as he trains with and analyses the running style of some of the most gifted athletes on the planet. Part narrative, part practical, this adventure takes you to the foothills of Ethiopia and the 'town of runners'; to the training grounds of world-record-holding marathon runners in Kenya; racing across the Arctic Circle and the mountains of Europe, through the sweltering sands of the Sahara and the hostility of a winter traverse of the Pennine Way, to witness the incredible natural movement of runners in these environments. Along the way, you will learn how to incorporate natural movement techniques into your own running and hear from some of the top athletes that Shane has coached over the years. Whether experienced or just tackling your first few miles, this groundbreaking book will help you discover the lost art of running.

Throughout history, intrepid men and women have related their experiences and perceptions of the world's great cities to bring them alive to those at home. The thirty-eight cities covered in this entertaining anthology of travellers' tales are spread over six continents, ranging from Beijing to Berlin, Cairo to Chicago, Lhasa to London, St Petersburg to Sydney and Rio to Rome. This volume features commentators across the millennia, including the great travellers of ancient times, such as Strabo and Pausanias; those who undertook extensive journeys in the medieval world, not least Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta; courageous women such as Isabella Bird and Freya Stark; and enterprising writers and journalists including Mark Twain and Norman Lewis. We see the world's great cities through the eyes of traders, explorers, soldiers, diplomats, pilgrims and tourists; the experiences of emperors and monarchs sit alongside those of revolutionaries and artists, but also those of ordinary people who found themselves in remarkable situations, like the medieval Chinese abbot who was shown round the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris by the King of France himself. Some of the writers seek to provide a straightforward, accurate description of all they have seen, while others concentrate on their subjective experiences of the city and encounters with the inhabitants. Introduced and contextualized by bestselling historian Peter Furtado, each account provides both a vivid portrait of a distant place and time and an insight into those who journeyed there. The result is a book that delves into the splendours and stories that exist beyond conventional guidebooks and websites.

What types of holidays do Japanese people celebrate? What is the educational system like in Japan? What are Japanese festivals like? What are some of the customs and traditions of the Japanese people? Professor Todd Jay Leonard, writing from the perspective of living and working in Japan, provides in this fascinating book the answers to these and many other questions. Letters Home: Musings of an American Expatriate Living in Japan delivers a firsthand account of daily Japanese life through the eyes and personal experiences of Professor Leonard who has enjoyed an ongoing relationship with Japan and the Japanese people for nearly twenty-five years. This anecdotal book of essays, written in the style of personal letters, offers commentary on a wide range of topics and issues including culture, history, education, language, society, and religion of modern Japan from the point-of-view of an American expatriate who has made Japan his home. The author's friendly, down-to-earth, yet authoritative, style of writing will transport you to modern Japan, where you will learn about the customs and traditions of this most fascinating country. Japan and its people.

Collective Winner of the 2019 Highland Book Prize Under the ravishing light of an Alaskan sky, objects are spilling from the thawing tundra linking a Yup'ik village to its hunter-gatherer past. In the shifting sand dunes of a Scottish shoreline, impressively preserved hearths and homes of Neolithic farmers are uncovered. In a grandmother's disordered mind, memories surface of a long-ago mining accident and a 'mither who was kind'. For this luminous new essay collection, acclaimed author Kathleen Jamie visits archaeological sites and mines her own memories - of her grandparents, of youthful travels - to explore what surfaces and what reconnects us to our past. As always she looks to the natural world for her markers and guides. Most movingly, she considers, as her father dies, and her children leave home, the surfacing of an older, less tethered sense of herself. Surfacing offers a profound sense of time passing and an antidote to all that is instant, ephemeral, unrooted.

Over the course of twenty years of delivering sailboats to far-flung quaysides, John Kretschmer has had innumerable adventures, both humorous and terrifying. in Flirting with Mermaids, he recounts the most memorable of them. He crosses the Western Caribbean with a crew of eccentric Swedes researching ancient Mayan mariners, lands in Aden at the outbreak of civil war, and endures a North Atlantic crossing during which he disocvers the existence of Force 13 winds. Approaching Japan at the end of a particularly trying delivery, he finds himself sailing in "a high impact debris zone," but his resolve is unshaken. "If a piece of rocketship jetsam fell out of the sky and sank [me] after encounters with Hurricane Floyd, General Noriega,a tsunami, an erupting volcano, and Typhoon Roy, then it was meant to be."

Are there any genuinely wild places left in Britain and Ireland? Or have we tarmacked, farmed and built ourselves out of wildness? In his vital, bewitching, inspiring classic, Robert Macfarlane sets out in search of the wildness that remains.

Alexander von Humboldt, sometimes called 'the last man who knew everything', was an extraordinary polymath of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In 1798 he received unprecedented permission from the Spanish Crown to explore its American and Caribbean colonies, which he did from 1799-1804. This is the journal of those explorations, in which he extensively covers the region's topography, geology, fauna and flora, anthropology and comparative linguistics. Volume III sees him recording more information on Venezuela, visiting Cuba where he also writes about local politics and speaks out fervently against the slave trade; he then sails for Colombia. The volume ends with a comprehensive geognostic description of the northern part of South America.

Jon McConal, longtime columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, takes readers on a trip back through 20 years of writing about Texasits history, people, and unusual places. The native Texan writes about a wide variety of subjects including ghosts, cemetaries, celebrations, pets, veterans, and personal stories.

"God bless the United States and God bless New York City" proclaimed a sign as the bus rolled through a small Indiana town. In October 2001, author Bill Markley was traveling by public bus from Pierre, South Dakota, to Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, for a Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity celebration. The day Markley left South Dakota began simply enough, but soon tragedy unfolded when a deranged man of Croatian descent slit the throat of a Greyhound bus driver causing an accident and throwing the nation's bus system into disarray. "American Pilgrim" is an honest account of life on the bus, the characters on the bus, bus culture, and the mood of the American people-reflective, patriotic, and upbeat.In those challenging days after the attacks on 9/11, everyone struggled to make sense of the world; as Markley worked on this story; it grew beyond the story of a simple 3,000-mile bus trip. He recalls many of his life's detours, recounting past events at locations the bus traveled through and people associated with those locations-a rambling personal history of people, places, and things. The trip took on new meaning and became a spiritual journey into the country's past and Markley's past.

Alexander von Humboldt, sometimes called 'the last man who knew everything', was an extraordinary polymath of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In 1798 he received unprecedented permission from the Spanish Crown to explore its American and Caribbean colonies, which he did from 1799-1804. This is the journal of those explorations, in which he extensively covers the region's topography, geology, fauna and flora, anthropology and comparative linguistics. Volume II covers the period in which he undertake a major exploration of the River Orinoco, as far as the borders of Brazil, finishing in Angostura, then the capital of Spanish Guiana.

The subzero temperatures were only one of the dangers explorer Frederick Cook (1865-1940) faced in his attempts to reach the North Pole. During his extraordinary and harrowing journey, he fought off arctic wolves and polar bears, lived through ice storms, almost starved on several occasions, and faced long and lonely hours of isolation. His book relates how he learned from Eskimos how to survive in the Arctic, hunting musk ox to survive, harpooning walruses, and traveling by dog sled. After his journey, he defended himself against the charges of fellow explorer Robert Peary, who claimed that Cook had lied about reaching the Pole. My Attainment of the Pole is not only a great read for any armchair explorer, it is also a controversial work that contributed to a dispute that lasted for decades.

In sy nuutste boek het Dana van sy ware ontmoetings geboekstaaf – ontmoetings met mense, maar soms ook met dinge – die vleispastei, of tuisgemaakte braai-apparate. Die stories het hy aanvanklik op Facebook gepos. Die wat die grootste reaksie gekry het is hierin verwerk. 'n Ware interaktiewe Suid-Afrikaanse boek.

This book concerns the significance of the English Channel in British and French literature from the 1780s onwards: a timely subject given the intense debates in progress about the actual and desired relationships between Britain and mainland Europe. The book addresses contemporary authors who use the Channel as a focus for cultural comment, comparing their approaches to those of earlier writers, from Charlotte Smith and Chateaubriand through Hugo and Dickens to historians and travel writers of the 1950s and 1980s.

In these collected stories, Long explores watery, secluded jungle caves in South America, tackles remote thawing iceflows on Baffin Island, and solos cutting-edge rock climbs over a desert hungry for his failure.

A captivating journey along the iconic River Po and through Italian history, society and culture. 'Delightful... A wonderful cornucopia of history' TLS 'Uncovers the Po's fascinating history' Guardian 'Tobias Jones is the perfect guide' Spectator The Po is the longest river in Italy, travelling for 652 kilometres from one end of the country to the other. It rises by the French border in the Alps and meanders the width of the entire peninsula to the Adriatic Sea in the east. Flowing next to many of Italy's most exquisite cities - Ferrara, Mantova, Parma, Cremona, Pavia and Torino - the river is a part of the national psyche, as iconic to Italy as the Thames is to England or the Mississippi to the USA. For millennia, the Po was a vital trading route and a valuable source of tax revenue, fiercely fought over by rival powers. It was also a moat protecting Italy from invaders from the north, from Hannibal to Holy Roman Emperors. It breached its banks so frequently that its floodplain swamps were homes to outlaws and itinerants, to eccentrics and experimental communities. But as humans radically altered the river's hydrology, those floodplains became important places of major industries and agricultures, the source of bricks, timber, silk, hemp, cement, caviar, mint, flour and risotto rice. Tobias Jones travels the length of the river against the current, gathering stories of battles, writers, cuisines, entertainers, religious minorities and music. Both an ecological lament and a celebration of the resourcefulness and resilience of the people of the Po, the book opens a window onto a stunning, but now neglected, part of Italy.

Shortly after his death in 1957, "The New York Times" obituary of Peter Freuchen noted that "except for Richard E. Byrd, and despite his foreign beginnings, Freuchen was perhaps better known to more people in the United States than any other explorer of our time." During his lifetime, Freuchen's remarkable adventures related in his books, magazine articles, and films, made him a legend. In 1910, Freuchen, along with his friend and business partner, Knud Rasmussen, the renowned polar explorer, founded Thule-a Greenland Inuit trading post and village only 800 miles from the North Pole.

Freuchen lived in Thule for fifteen years, adopting the ways of the natives. He married an Inuit woman, and together they had two children. Freuchen went on many expeditions, quite a few of which he barely survived, suffering frostbite, snow blindness, and starvation. Near the North Pole there is no such thing as an easy and safe outing.

In "Arctic Adventure" Freuchen writes of polar bear hunts, of meeting Eskimos who had resorted to cannibalism during a severe famine, and of the thrill of seeing the sun after three months of winter darkness. Trained as a journalist before he headed north, Freuchen is a fine writer and great storyteller (he won an Oscar for his feature film script of Eskimo). He writes about the Inuit with genuine respect and affection, describing their stoicism amidst hardship, their spiritual beliefs, their ingenious methods of surviving in a harsh environment, their humor and joy in the face of danger and difficulties, and the social politics behind such customs as "wife-trading." While his experiences make this book a page-turner, Freuchen's warmth, self-deprecating wit, writing skill and anthropological observations make this book a literary stand out.

Die laaste reis is Karel Schoeman se “reisbriewe” ? mymeringe, gedagtes en herinneringe van sy laaste drie kort reise na Lesotho saam met Jemina Meko en Mamohau Lekula wat hom die afgelope nege jaar versorg het. Dit behels drie kort verslae oor sy besoeke in die maand voor sy dood en is in die vorm van e-posse aan ’n paar “persoonlike korrespondente” gestuur. Vanselfsprekend staan die tema van afskeid sentraal in die briewe.

Alexander von Humboldt, sometimes called 'the last man who knew everything', was an extraordinary polymath of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In 1798 he received unprecedented permission from the Spanish Crown to explore its American and Caribbean colonies, which he did from 1799-1804. This is the journal of those explorations, in which he extensively covers the region's topography, geology, fauna and flora, anthropology and comparative linguistics. Volume I covers his preparations, stop at Tenerife, landfall at Cuman and journeys inland in what is now Venezuela.