Anthony Doerr has received many awards -- from the New York Public Library, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Library Association. Then came the Rome Prize, one of the most prestigious awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and with it a stipend and a writing studio in Rome for a year. Doerr learned of the award the day he and his wife returned from the hospital with newborn twins.

Exquisitely observed, Four Seasons in Rome describes Doerr's varied adventures in one of the most enchanting cities in the world. He reads Pliny, Dante, and Keats -- the chroniclers of Rome who came before him -- and visits the piazzas, temples, and ancient cisterns they describe. He attends the vigil of a dying Pope John Paul II and takes his twins to the Pantheon in December to wait for snow to fall through the oculus. He and his family are embraced by the butchers, grocers, and bakers of the neighborhood, whose clamor of stories and idiosyncratic child-rearing advice is as compelling as the city itself.

This intimate and revelatory book is a celebration of Rome, a wondrous look at new parenthood, and a fascinating story of a writer's craft -- the process by which he transforms what he sees and experiences into sentences.

Peter Mayne (1908-1979) is to Morocco what Peter Mayle is to Provence or Lawrence Durrell to Greece. This 1953 classic in a new edition captures the very essence of the people and place. Having already learned to appreciate Muslim life when he was in Pakistan, Mayne bought a house in the labyrinthine back streets of Marrakesh. He wanted to settle there, not as a privileged visitor in a hotel or grand villa, but as one of the inhabitants. He learned their language, made friends, took part in their festivals, and wrote their letters. This is not a travel book in the accepted sense of the word - it is a record of personal experience in a region of foreign life well beyond the tourist's eye. Mayne contrives in a deceptively simple prose to disseminate in the air of an English November the spicy odors of North Africa; he has turned, for an hour, smog to shimmering sunlight, woven a texture of extraordinary charm.

'I have come to thank dark places for the light they bring to life.' Thomas Cook has always been drawn to dark places, for the powerful emotions they evoke and for what we can learn from them. These lessons are often unexpected and sometimes profoundly intimate, but they are never straightforward. With his wife and daughter, Cook travels across the globe in search of darkness - from Lourdes to Ghana, from San Francisco to Verdun, from the monumental, mechanised horror of Auschwitz to the intimate personal grief of a shrine to dead infants in Kamukura, Japan. Along the way he reflects on what these sites may teach us, not only about human history, but about our own personal histories. During the course of a lifetime of traveling to some of earth's most tragic shores, from the leper colony on Molokai to ground zero at Hiroshima, he finds not darkness alone, but a light that can illuminate the darkness within each of us. Written in vivid prose, this is at once a personal memoir of exploration (both external and internal), and a strangely heartening look at the radiance that may be found at the very heart of darkness.

This second photo essay from Vicki Couchman provides a frank and honest insight into the many different cultures, tastes, and sights of South America. Each photograph eavesdrops on Couchman's experiences and gives insight into places both on and off the tourist trail. The photographs capture everyday life above and below the Equator in a relaxed and unobtrusive manner. They also give an uncensored account of the common thoughts, feelings, and emotions evoked by long distance travel, as well as the varied adventures and experiences to be had abroad-whether pleasurable or problematic, exhilarating or exhausting. This book is an inspiration to those wanting to take a leap into the unknown, and serves to soften the culture shock of stepping away from the developed world.

At the age of twenty-two, William Dalrymple left his college in Cambridge to travel to the ruins of Kublai Khan’s stately pleasure dome in Xanadu. This is an account of a quest which took him and his companions across the width of Asia, along dusty, forgotten roads, through villages and cities full of unexpected hospitality and wildly improbable escapades, to Coleridge’s Xanadu itself.
At once funny and knowledgeable, In Xanadu is in the finest tradition of British travel writing. Told with an exhilarating blend of eloquence, wit, poetry and delight, it is already established as a classic of its kind.

Kate Nicholls left England to raise her five children in Botswana: an experience that would change each of their lives. Living on a shoestring in a lion conservation camp, Kate home-schools her family while they also learn at first hand about the individual lives of wild lions. Their deep attachment to these magnificent animals is palpable. The setting is exotic but it is also precarious. When the author is subjected to a brutal attack by three men, it threatens to destroy her and her family: post-traumatic stress turns a good mother into a woman who is fragmented and out of control. In this powerfully written, raw and often warmly funny memoir, we witness the devastation of living with a mother whose resilience is almost broken, and how familial structures shift as the children mature and roles change. Under the CamelthornTree addresses head-on the many issues surrounding motherhood, education, independence, and the natural world; and highlights the long-lasting effect of gender violence on secondary victims. Above all, it is an inspiring account of family love, and a powerful beacon of hope for life after trauma.

'Part travelogue, part memoir and wholly engaging' Daily Mail Bestselling author and hugely popular commentator David 'Bumble' Lloyd takes the reader on an unmissable and hilarious tour of the cricketing world as he searches for the perfect pint. After more than 50 years involved with cricket as a player, international, umpire, coach and now commentator, David Lloyd has travelled the world. It's all a long way from his childhood, growing up in a terraced house in post-war Accrington, Lancashire. But cricket has taken him all over the globe, and he has experienced everything from excruciating agony Down Under to the Bollywood glamour of the IPL - he's even risked it all to cross the Pennines into Yorkshire. In Around the World in 80 Pints, Bumble relives some of the most exciting and remarkable periods in his life, showing how his travels have opened up new and exciting avenues for him. The book is packed full of brilliant stories from famous Ashes matches and Roses clashes, sharing the commentary box with Ian Botham and Shane Warne, and much else besides - all told in his idiosyncratic style that has won him so many fans the world over. His previous autobiography, Last in the Tin Bath, was a huge bestseller, and this one is sure to appeal to anyone who shares Bumble's unquenchable love for cricket - and life!

Adventure writer Richard Grant takes on "the most American place on Earth" the enigmatic, beautiful, often derided Mississippi Delta. Richard Grant and his girlfriend were living in a shoebox apartment in New York City when they decided on a whim to buy an old plantation house in the Mississippi Delta. This is their journey of discovery into this strange and wonderful American place. Imagine A Year In Provence with alligators and assassins, or Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil with hunting scenes and swamp-to-table dining. On a remote, isolated strip of land, three miles beyond the tiny community of Pluto, Richard and his girlfriend, Mariah, embark on a new life. They learn to hunt, grow their own food, and fend off alligators, snakes, and varmints galore. They befriend an array of unforgettable local characters, blues legend T-Model Ford, cookbook maven Martha Foose, catfish farmers, eccentric millionaires, and the actor Morgan Freeman. Grant brings an adept, empathetic eye to the fascinating people he meets, capturing the rich, extraordinary culture of the Delta, while tracking its utterly bizarre and criminal extremes. Reporting from all angles as only an outsider can, Grant also delves deeply into the Delta's lingering racial tensions. He finds that de facto segregation continues. Yet even as he observes major structural problems, he encounters many close, loving, and interdependent relationships between black and white families and good reasons for hope. Dispatches from Pluto is a book as unique as the Delta itself. It's lively, entertaining, and funny, containing a travel writer's flair for in-depth reporting alongside insightful reflections on poverty, community, and race. It's also a love story, as the nomadic Grant learns to settle down. He falls not just for his girlfriend but for the beguiling place they now call home. Mississippi, Grant concludes, is the best-kept secret in America.

Like a third of the UK population, Julia has a chronic pain condition. According to her doctors, it can't be cured. She doesn't believe them. She does believe in miracles, though. It's just a question of tracking one down. Julia's search for a cure takes her on a global quest, exploring the boundaries between science, psychology and faith with practitioners on the fringes of conventional, traditional and alternative medicine. Raising vital questions about the modern medical system, Heal Me is also a story about identity in a system skewed against female patients, and the struggle to retain a sense of self under the medical gaze.

With his hands gripping the handlebars and feet on the pedals, Sylvester has given BMX riding new zest as he embraces life to the fullest and lives out his imagination. Sylvester sets an exciting cadence from the start: jumping out of a plane with his BMX bike in hand into the Dubai desert. It s stunts like this that make it easy to understand how this young BMXer from Queens, New York, has redefined the sport on his own terms and become one of the most recognizable faces in the sports world along the way. Inspired by his globally acclaimed digital film series, GO, this book showcases Sylvester s adventures through dynamic photos and video stills of adventures that aren t possible without his bike, which is never far and incorporated into his journey in unexpected ways. Sylvester s fearless mindset is demonstrated during his various travel undertakings: sumo wrestling in Tokyo, fencing at Somerset House in London, and racing Ferraris along the Malibu coast. Nigel Sylvester: GO includes many of Sylvester s friends, such as Super Bowl champion wide receiver Victor Cruz, DJ Khaled, celebrity jeweller Greg Yuna, Steve Aoki, and NBA champion Nick Young, among others. Nigel s story captures his thrilling adventures in cities around the globe from his point of view with unapologetic grace and style.

Not content with walking the Pennine Way as a modern day troubadour, an experience recounted in his bestseller and prize-wining Walking Home, the restless poet has followed up that journey with a walk of the same distance but through the very opposite terrain and direction far from home. In Walking Away Simon Armitage swaps the moorland uplands of the north for the coastal fringes of Britain's south west, once again giving readings every night, but this time through Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, taking poetry into distant communities and tourist hot-spots, busking his way from start to finsh. From the surreal pleasuredome of Minehead Butlins to a smoke-filled roundhouse on the Penwith Peninsula then out to the Isles of Scilly and beyond, Armitage tackles this personal Odyssey with all the poetic reflection and personal wit we've come to expect of one of Britain's best loved and most popular writers.

Winner: Mountain Literature (Non Fiction) The Jon Whyte Award, Banff Mountain Book Competition 2019 Waymaking is an anthology of prose, poetry and artwork by women who are inspired by wild places, adventure and landscape. Published in 1961, Gwen Moffat's Space Below My Feet tells the story of a woman who shirked the conventions of society and chose to live a life in the mountains. Some years later in 1977, Nan Shepherd published The Living Mountain, her prose bringing each contour of the Cairngorm mountains to life. These pioneering women set a precedent for a way of writing about wilderness that isn't about conquering landscapes, reaching higher, harder or faster, but instead about living and breathing alongside them, becoming part of a larger adventure. The artists in this inspired collection continue Gwen and Nan's legacies, redressing the balance of gender in outdoor adventure literature. Their creativity urges us to stop and engage our senses: the smell of rain-soaked heather, wind resonating through a col, the touch of cool rock against skin, and most importantly a taste of restoring mind, body and spirit to a former equanimity. With contributions from adventurers including Alpinist magazine editor Katie Ives, multi-award-winning author Bernadette McDonald, adventurers Sarah Outen and Anna McNuff, renowned filmmaker Jen Randall and many more, Waymaking is an inspiring and pivotal work published in an era when wilderness conservation and gender equality are at the fore.

A city with a reputation to maintain, Melbourne is famous variously for being Australia's coffee capital, the Europe of Australia and consistently ranked amongst the top most liveable cities in the world. CultureShock! Melbourne takes both long- and short-term residents through the city's inner workings. The city offers world-class urban landscapes and experiences, spiced with a uniquely Melburnian spirit: a stroll along the Yarra River surrounded by a glittering skyline and artisanal sandwich in hand, top-drawer entertainment, restaurants helmed by celebrity chefs, or even a simple breakfast of toast with smashed avo' and a flat white at a legendary cafe along a boulevard. Get the most out of your stay in Melbourne with this essential guide to one of the jazziest, most cosmopolitan cities in the world.

After a decade of making documentaries about offbeat characters on the fringes of US society, Louis had the urge to return to America and track down the people who most fascinated him. It would be a reunion tour, but this time without the cameras and the sense of performance being filmed inevitably brings. It would allow him to get closer to people, to discover what really motivated them and what had happened to the assorted dreamers, outlaws and eccentrics since he last saw them. On a journey that took him from the porn sets of Los Angeles to the gangsta rappers of Memphis, from a convention of UFO contactees in Arizona to Northern Idaho for a festive get-together of neo-Nazis, he asked what 'weird people' have to tell us about our own secret natures. Had he learned anything about himself by being among them? Do we choose our beliefs or do our beliefs choose us? Louis Theroux's first book is a hilarious, thought-provoking and at times surreal voyage into the heart of weirdness.

In 1945, Indonesia's declaration of independence promised: 'the details of the transfer of power etc. will be worked out as soon as possible.' Still working on the 'etc.' seven decades later, the world's fourth most populous nation is now enthusiastically democratic and riotously diverse - rich and enchanting but riddled with ineptitude and corruption. Elizabeth Pisani, who first worked in Indonesia 25 years ago as a foreign correspondent, set out in 2011, travelling over 13,000 miles, to rediscover its enduring attraction, and to find the links which bind together this disparate nation. Fearless and funny, and sharply perceptive, she has drawn a compelling, entertaining and deeply informed portrait of a captivating nation.

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.

..".offers a set of unique perspectives on how travel writers have imagined, experienced and represented other people and other places. It shifts attention to the voices and agency of travellers from the Balkans and the ways in which they have experienced and described the sometimes strange and exotic West... Most fascinating the multi-faceted trajectories of expectations, perceptions and imageries which reverse the standard hegemonic gaze from West to East." . Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London

In writings about travel, the Balkans appear most often as a place travelled to. Western accounts of the Balkans revel in the different and the exotic, the violent and the primitive traits that serve (according to many commentators) as a foil to self-congratulatory defi nitions of the West as modern, progressive and rational. However, the Balkans have also long been travelled from. The region's writers have given accounts of their travels in the West and elsewhere, saying something in the process about themselves and their place in the world. The analyses presented here, ranging from those of 16th-century Greek humanists to 19th-century Romanian reformers to 20th-century writers, socialists and 'men-of-the-world', suggest that travellers from the region have also created their own identities through their encounters with Europe. Consequently, this book challenges assumptions of Western discursive hegemony, while at the same time exploring Balkan 'Occidentalisms'.

Whether she is contemplating the history of walking as a cultural and political experience over the past two hundred years ("Wanderlust"), or using the life of photographer Eadweard Muybridge as a lens to discuss the transformations of space and time in late nineteenth-century America ("River of Shadows"), Rebecca Solnit has emerged as an inventive and original writer whose mind is daring in the connections it makes. "A Field Guide to Getting Lost" draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnitas own life to explore the issues of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown. The result is a distinctive, stimulating, and poignant voyage of discovery. BACKCOVER: aA meditation on the pleasures and terrors of getting losta
a"The New Yorker"
aThis indispensable California writeras most personal book yet.a
a"San Francisco Chronicle"
aAn intriguing amalgam of personal memoir, philosophical speculation, natural lore, cultural history, and art criticism . . . a book to set you wandering down strangely fruitful trails of thought.a
a"Los Angeles Times"

"What a beautiful book. I knew it was going to be poetic, but I was knocked over twice by its compelling narrative drive and quiet sense of humor."--Sherman Alexie

Diane Thiel's "The White Horse: A Colombian Journey" takes us on a magically real journey into the Pacific coast rain forests of Colombia. Equal parts travel narrative, ecological essay, historical account, and memoir, this book allows us to experience a reality stranger than fiction.

Two kittens were abandoned in a park. The women who found them were about to head off on a mountain trek and the animal shelter was closed. The cats seemed game so their rescuers brought Bolt and Keel (so named) along for the adventure. It was the first of many. Kayleen VanderRee, an avid photographer, chronicled their trips on Instagram and soon the cats' adventures went viral. Bolt and Keel invites readers to join the cats (and their humans) on a journey through British Columbia's forests, mountains and rivers. With the cats sitting in the bow of a canoe, perched on a shoulder or navigating snowy trails, these images and charming captions capture an exploration of the natural world that any cat-and any cat lover or adventure seeker-would envy.

There are still wild places out there on our crowded planet. Through a series of personal journeys, Dan Richards explores the appeal of far-flung outposts in mountains, tundra, forests, oceans and deserts. Following a route from the Cairngorms of Scotland to the fire-watch lookouts of Washington State; from Iceland's 'Houses of Joy' to the Utah desert; frozen ghost towns in Svalbard to shrines in Japan; Roald Dahl's writing hut to a lighthouse in the North Atlantic, Richards explores landscapes which have inspired writers, artists and musicians, and asks: why are we drawn to wilderness? What can we do to protect them? And what does the future hold for outposts on the edge?

Someone once asked me how much I charge to guide people into the woods. "That's free," I explained. "Anyone can get themselves into the woods. You pay me to get you out." Can anyone really know the northern forest? It is something you feel more in your heart than in your head. You may be able to locate your place on a map, but can you pinpoint the places the forest has hold of your soul? For more than forty years, Maine Guide Earl Brechlin has sought the answers. Through this series of interconnected essays, Brechlin recounts the annual canoe trips to the North Maine Woods he has made with a small group of friends, closing with the death of his twin brother and the group's last trip to spread his brother's ashes in the place he loved best. Often humorous and thrilling at once, the heartfelt narrative is peppered with tidbits of history, woods lore, and sage advice from a seasoned outdoorsman. What shines through is the author's profound love of the natural world and his place in it.

'Short of doing it yourself, the best way of escaping into nature is to read a book like A Walk in the Woods.' New York Times In the company of his friend Stephen Katz (last seen in the bestselling Neither Here nor There), Bill Bryson set off to hike the Appalachian Trail, the longest continuous footpath in the world. Ahead lay almost 2,200 miles of remote mountain wilderness filled with bears, moose, bobcats, rattlesnakes, poisonous plants, disease-bearing tics, the occasional chuckling murderer and - perhaps most alarming of all - people whose favourite pastime is discussing the relative merits of the external-frame backpack. Facing savage weather, merciless insects, unreliable maps and a fickle companion whose profoundest wish was to go to a motel and watch The X-Files, Bryson gamely struggled through the wilderness to achieve a lifetime's ambition - not to die outdoors. A Walk in the Woods is now a major feature film starring Robert Redford, Emma Thompson and Nick Offerman.

Presenting a critical, yet innovative, perspective on the cultural interactions between the "East" and the "West", this book questions the role of travel in the production of knowledge and in the construction of the idea of the "Islamic city". This volume brings together authors from various disciplines, questioning the role of Western travel writing in the production of knowledge about the East, particularly focusing on the cities of the Muslim world. Instead of concentrating on a specific era, chapters span the Medieval and Modern eras in order to present the transformation of both the idea of the "Islamic city" and also the act of traveling and travel writing. Missions to the East, whether initiated by military, religious, economic, scientific, diplomatic or touristic purposes, resulted in a continuous construction, de-construction and re-construction of the "self" and the "other". Including travel accounts, which depicted cities, extending from Europe to Asia and from Africa to Arabia, chapters epitomize the construction of the "Orient" via textual or visual representations. By examining various tools of representation such as drawings, paintings, cartography, and photography in depicting the urban landscape in constant flux, the book emphasizes the role of the mobile individual in defining city space and producing urban culture. Scrutinising the role of travellers in producing the image of the world we know today, this book is recommended for researchers, scholars and students of Middle Eastern Studies, Cultural Studies, Architecture and Urbanism.

The collapse of Communism in eastern Europe viewed through personal experience. Europe Restored is a highly personal account of the fall of the Iron Curtain, written from an unusual viewpoint. Eric Elstob was director of various investment trusts in the City during the years before and after the collapse of Communism, with a special interest in European affairs. But he also travelled as an ordinary tourist in eastern Europe, and this book juxtaposes vividly the vignettes of everyday life that he encountered with his high-levelcontacts in the financial and political world; a discussion of the problems of switching from a command economy to a market economy with the finance minister in the capital one month is set beside a talk with the baker who had just bought his shop in a village the next month. Such daily encounters offer exceptional grass-roots witness to the economic challenges facing the former eastern European countries as they struggle to rejoin the wider European economic and cultural entity. ERIC ELSTOB was vice-chairman of the Foreign and Colonial Group until his retirement in 1995.