Borat has got it all wrong. Kazakhstan is far more interesting and entertaining than he'd have us believe. In fact it's probably the most surprising country on earth, and certainly one of the most tolerant.The only thing most people know about Kazakhstan is that it is homeland to Borat - and he isn't even real. Actually this vast place - the last unknown inhabited country in the world - is far more surprising and entertaining. For one thing, it is as varied as Europe, combining stupendous wealth, grinding poverty, exotic traditions and a mad dash for modernity.Crisscrossing a vanished land, Christopher Robbins finds Eminem by a shrinking Aral Sea, goes eagle-hunting, visits the scene of Dostoyevsky's doomed first love, takes up residence beside one-time neighbour Leon Trotsky and visits some of the most beautiful, unspoilt places on earth.

For over twenty years, people turned to A. A. Gill's columns every Sunday - for his fearlessness, his perception, and the laughter-and-tear-provoking one-liners - but mostly because he was the best. 'By miles the most brilliant journalist of our age', as Lynn Barber put it. This is the definitive collection of a voice that was silenced too early but that can still make us look at the world in new and surprising ways. In the words of Andrew Marr, A.. A. Gill was 'a golden writer'. There was nothing that he couldn't illuminate with his dazzling prose. Wherever he was - at home or abroad - he found the human story, brought it to vivid life, and rendered it with fierce honesty and bracing compassion. And he was just as truthful about himself. There have been various collections of A. A. Gill's journalism - individual compilations of his restaurant and TV criticism, of his travel writing and his extraordinary feature articles. This book showcasesthe very best of his work: the peerlessly funny criticism, the extraordinarily knowledgeable food writing, assignments throughout the world, and reflections on life, love, and death. Drawn from a range of publications, including the Sunday Times, Vanity Fair, Tatler and Australian Gourmet Traveller, The Ivy Cookbook and his books on England and America, it is by turns hilarious, uplifting, controversial, unflinching, sad, funny and furious.

Shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year Non-Fiction Award 2020 'Chappell is a gifted storyteller' - Observer In 2015 Emily Chappell embarked on a formidable new bike race: The Transcontinental. 4,000km across Europe, unassisted, in the shortest time possible. On her first attempt she made it only halfway, waking up suddenly on her back in a field, floored by the physical and mental exertion. A year later she entered the race again - and won. Where There's a Will takes us into Emily Chappell's race, grinding up mountain passes and charging down the other side; snatching twenty minutes' sleep on the outskirts of a village before jumping back on the bike to surge ahead for another day; feeding in bursts and navigating on the go. We experience the crippling self-doubt of the ultra distance racer, the confusing intensity of winning and the desperation of losing a dear friend who understood all of this.

A luminous exploration of exile - the people who have experienced it, and the places they inhabit - from the award-winning travel writer and author of The Immeasurable World and The Moor. 'Breathtakingly good . . . Exiles is completely sui generis.' EDMUND DE WAAL 'Atkins spins a marvellous tapestry of colourful tales, beautifully weaving history and travel accounts.' ANDREA WULF, author of The Invention of Nature 'A volume for our times.' SARA WHEELER, THE SPECTATOR 'A fascinating study of exile and its effects.' OBSERVER This is the story of three unheralded nineteenth-century dissidents, whose lives were profoundly shaped by the winds of empire, nationalism and autocracy that continue to blow strongly today: Louise Michel, a leader of the radical socialist government known as the Paris Commune; Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo, an enemy of British colonialism in Zululand; and Lev Shternberg, a militant campaigner against Russian tsarism. In Exiles, William Atkins travels to their islands of banishment - Michel's New Caledonia in the South Pacific, Dinuzulu's St Helena in the South Atlantic, and Shternberg's Sakhalin off the Siberian coast - in a bid to understand how exile shaped them and the people among whom they were exiled. In doing so he illuminates the solidarities that emerged between the exiled subject, on the one hand, and the colonised subject, on the other. Rendering these figures and the places they were forced to occupy in shimmering detail, Atkins reveals deeply human truths about displacement, colonialism and what it means to have and to lose a home. Occupying the fertile zone where history, biography and travel writing meet, Exiles is a masterpiece of imaginative empathy. '[Atkins] is humane, humble, and empathetic . . . beautiful and moving.' ILYA KAMINSKY, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa 'An incredible, brilliant act of retrieval.' PHILIP HOARE, author of Albert & the Whale 'A finely crafted and lyrical meditation.' TLS 'Gracefully written . . . Brilliant.' THE ECONOMIST 'Rarely has a book been more timely.' HISTORY TODAY *** Read The Moor and The Immeasureable World for more award-winning writing from William Atkins

The Slender-billed Curlew, Numenius tenuirostris, 'the slim beak of the new moon', is one of the world's rarest birds. It once bred in Siberia and wintered in the Mediterranean basin, passing through the wetlands and estuaries of Italy, Greece, the Balkans and Central Asia. Today the Slender-billed Curlew exists as a rumour, a ghost species surrounded by unconfirmed sightings and speculation. The only certainty is that it now stands on the brink of extinction. Birds are key environmental indicators. Their health or hardship has a message for us about the planet, and our future. What does the fate of the Slender-billed Curlew mean for us, and for the natural world? What happened to it, and why? In Orison for a Curlew Horatio Clare journeys through a fractured Europe in search of the Slender-billed Curlew, following the bird's migratory path on an odyssey that takes us into the lives of the men and women who have fought to save the landscapes to which the bird belongs. This is a story of beauty, triumph, and the struggles of conservation. It is a homage to a bird which may never be seen again.

Lose yourself in this vivid travelogue evoking the historic Mediterranean island of Sicily by the king of travel writing and real-life family member of The Durrells in Corfu. 'A magician.' The Times Despite decades spent poetically chronicling Mediterranean life in Rhodes, Cyprus and Corfu, celebrated travel writer Lawrence Durrell had never set foot on the largest island: Sicily. For years, his friend Martine begged him to visit her on this sun-kissed paradise, but it took her sudden death to finally bring him to its shores - and he is not disappointed. Joining an eccentric tour group, Durrell immerses himself in the island's spectacular archaeological remains, and becomes dizzy with Sicily's rich history: its mysterious myths and meanings. Featuring unpublished poems and illustrated with elegant engravings. Sicilian Carousel is a gem that ranks with Durrell's finest work. 'Readers who have been to Sicily will love this book. Readers who have not been to Sicily will love this book.' Paul Fussell 'Like long letters from a civilized and very funny friend - the prose as luminous as the Mediterranean air he loves.' Time

The Best Travel Writing, Volume 11 is the latest in the annual Travelers' Tales series launched in 2004 to celebrate the world's best travel writing from Nobel Prize winners to emerging new writers. The points of view and perspectives are global, and themes encompass high adventure, spiritual growth, romance, hilarity and misadventure, service to humanity, and encounters with exotic cuisines and cultures. Includes winners from the annual Solas Awards for Best Travel Writing. Introduction by Rolf Potts In The Best Travel Writing, Volume 11, readers will: Piece together the puzzle of life in rural Cambodia Reawaken the joy of travel on a bus ride through Mexico Reexamine war memories with former soldiers in Vietnam Learn the ropes and the art of sailing with a "good captain" on the Pacific Find a true soul sister in the highlands of Ecuador Follow Vincent van Gogh's footsteps in France Survive (or not) a home invasion in Brazil...and much more

One November morning, Tom Jeffreys set off from Euston Station with a gnarled old walking stick in his hand and an overloaded rucksack. His aim was to walk the 119 miles from London to Birmingham along the proposed route of HS2. Needless to say, he failed. Over the course of ten days of walking, Jeffreys meets conservationists and museum directors, ery farmers and suicidal retirees. From a rapidly changing London, through interminable suburbia, and out into the English countryside, Jeffreys goes wild camping in Perivale, ees murderous horses in Oxfordshire, and gets lost in a land ll site in Buckinghamshire. Signal Failure weaves together poetry and politics, history, philosophy and personal observation to form an extended exploration of people and place, nature, society, and the future. In part, Signal Failure is the story of the author's multiple shortcomings - his inability to understand the city he lives in, to forge a meaningful relationship with his home-county hometown, to emulate those great nature writers he admires so much, to put up a tent or read a map.It is also a wide-ranging critique of humanity's most urgent failures: of capitalism, of community, of the city and the suburbs, of architecture and agriculture, of bureaucratic democracy, and, in the end, of our age-old failure to nd our place in the world we live in.

Explore the deserts, mountains and souks of the Middle East, with best-selling author and artist David Bellamy. Following on from David's highly acclaimed Arctic Light, this book provides an intriguing and often entertaining insight into South Arabia and the Swahili Coast, Jordan, Lebanon and Oman. It describes the history, culture, customs and geography of the region and the daily life of its inhabitants, as viewed through the eyes of a world-renowned watercolour artist and life-long adventurer. Filled with personal anecdotes and humour, David Bellamy's unique account shines a light on the Middle East and highlights the incredible beauty and fascinating culture of this much-neglected region. David's stunning artwork, that he painted during his various expeditions, features throughout the book and captures perfectly the diverse and majestic nature of the region. Watercolourists will be inspired by the author's awe-inspiring ability to depict sweeping vistas and create a sense of space in his paintings, and to capture the very essence of a place through his art.

'The most bizarre and delicious of travel books' Observer Julian Green was born to American parents in Paris in 1900, and spent most of his life in the French capital. Paris is an extraordinary, lyrical love letter to the city, taking the reader on an imaginative journey around its secret stairways, courtyards, alleys and hidden places. Whether evoking the cool of a deserted church on a hot summer's day, remembering Notre Dame in a winter storm in 1940, describing chestnut trees lit up at night like 'Japanese lanterns' or lamenting the passing of street cries and old buildings, his book is filled with unforgettable imagery. It is a meditation on getting lost and wasting time, and on what it truly means to know a city. 'Truthful, unpretentious and haunting' The Times Literary Supplement

When a wildfire destroyed her home and worldly possessions in the hills above Los Angeles, it didn't take Megan Edwards long to recognize an opportunity. It took her husband a little longer ("Give me five minutes to grieve!"), but they were both soon planning to make the most of their sudden "stufflessness" and hit the road. They did so a few months later in a freshly built four-wheel-drive motorhome that was even more unusual because of the office in the back instead of a bedroom. This all happened back when "Internet" had not yet entered the lexicon but "email" had. The mobile office would allow Edwards to file stories with the newspapers she wrote for by cell phone. That was the idea, at least. At the beginning of 1994, cell service was patchy, unreliable, and expensive. They also thought they'd be traveling for six months or so, when, they believed, they'd settle down and get back to normal. But five years and thousands of miles later, they were still on the road. In that time, they'd watched the Internet grow from a mysterious fad prized by people in remote locales into an unstoppable universal phenomenon. They started a website, RoadTripAmerica.com, to share road tripping tips and ideas. Slowly, their dream of being "at work, at home, and on the road, all at the same grand time" became a reality. This edition marks the twentieth anniversary of Edwards's memoir, which was first released in 1999. At its heart a story of making lemonade when life gives you lemons, this memoir is also a riveting and at times hilarious look at the early years of the World Wide Web. With a new introduction by the author and a foreword by Chris Epting, enjoy an armchair adventure across North America when the Internet was young. This edition also includes 22 photos dating from when the author lived on the road.

A brilliantly illuminating portrait of Bombay and its people-a book as vast, diverse, and rich in experience, incident, and sensation as the city itself-from an award-winning Indian-American fiction writer and journalist.
A native of Bombay, Suketu Mehta gives us a true insider's view of this stunning city, bringing to his account a rare level of insight, detail, and intimacy. He approaches the city from unexpected angles-taking us into the criminal underworld of rival Muslim and Hindu gangs who wrest control of the city's byzantine political and commercial systems . . . following the life of a bar dancer who chose the only life available to her after a childhood of poverty and abuse . . . opening the doors onto the fantastic, hierarchical inner sanctums of Bollywood . . . delving into the stories of the countless people who come from the villages in search of a better life and end up living on the sidewalks-the essential saga of a great city endlessly played out.
Through it all-as each individual story unfolds-we hear Mehta's own story: of the mixture of love, frustration, fascination, and intense identification he feels for and with Bombay, as he tries to find home again after twenty-one years abroad. And he makes clear that Bombay-the world's largest city-is a harbinger of the vast megalopolises that will redefine the very idea of "the city" in the near future.
Candid, impassioned, funny, and heartrending, "Maximum City is a revelation of an ancient and ever-changing world.

"From the Hardcover edition.

Since the 1700s, various ethnic and immigrant groups have been shifting and negotiating their place in New York City. Hope Cooke also struggled to find a 'correlation of space' and 'sense of belonging' when she returned to the city after spending her adult life living in a place in the Himalayas, the Queen of Sikkim (a tiny kingdom near Nepal). Abroad for so long, she returned with an urgent need to rediscover this city, to 'find her way home'. It was not always a comfortable journey for Cooke: 'On the days I felt secure, Manhattan's maelstrom was pure energy. On shaky days, the boundlessness made me yearn for limits, or, failing that, at least a vantage point'. The book that has emerged is an entertaining and integrated account of New York City's social history, architecture, physical space, and culture. Starting with the American Indian settlements and the early days when the southern-most tip of Manhattan held little more than a bleak outpost of Dutch fur traders, Cooke tracks the economic development and journeys north, from the Village's beginnings as a refuge from dreaded summer fevers to the present day Dominican enclave of Washington Heights. Written for armchair enthusiasts and walkabout adventurers, this book travels fourteen of the city's distinct and significant neighborhoods. Cooke's guide will make a historical sleuth out of local residents and tourists alike. Her off-the-beaten-path insights and witty observations help decode the urban landscape and reveal how social changes have reworked the city's terrain. Enhancing the narrative are 140 illustrations, including old engravings, maps, and current photographs. Author note: Hope Cooke is a writer and urban historian. She has lectured widely on New York history, directed the walking tours program at the Museum of the City of New York, and written a weekly column for the "New York Daily News". Her essays, short stories, and reviews have appeared in such popular periodicals as "Redbook", "Travel and Leisure", "The New York Times", and "The Chicago Sun Times". Among her previously published books is her acclaimed autobiography, "Time Change".

The strike of 1994 took a lot out of Major League Baseball. For the first time, a World Series was cancelled, something that hadn't even happened during World War II. When play resumed, people stayed away from the ballparks in droves, and attendance was at an all-time low.

Then, in the summer of 1998, balls started flying out of the ballparks in St. Louis and Chicago. Suddenly baseball was fun again. The Great Home Run Derby between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa resulted in both men breaking Roger Maris's 37-year-old record of 61 home runs in a single season. When the season was over, McGwire had hit 70 home runs and Sosa 66, and the New York Yankees had won the first of three consecutive World Series championships.

Among the fans in the ballparks that summer were two recent graduates of Stanford University who had decided that before launching into their careers they would indulge themselves in one of the ultimate baseball fantasies: to see a game in all thirty ballparks of Major League Baseball. To make matters interesting, they decided to view these thirty games and visit the thirty stadiums in less than forty days.

This is the chronicle of that adventure, the story of their experiences at the ballparks and at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, the Louisville Slugger Museum, and the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa. Each chapter offers a fan's-eye view of the stadiums and a description of their experiences at the ballparks -- Kaval and Null even give advice on what not to miss at each stadium. The notoriety the authors gained while making this pilgrimage earned them special treatment by representatives of the host teams, ballpark officials, and concessionaires.

These storiesfocus on all that is good and enjoyable in Major League Baseball. And they are illustrated throughout with photographs from The Summer That Saved Baseball.

The river Tigris is in danger. It has been the lifeblood of ancient Mesopotamia and modern Iraq, but geopolitics and climate change have left the birthplace of civilisation at risk of becoming uninhabitable. In 2021, adventurer Leon McCarron travelled by boat along the full length of the river, in search of hope. From the source, where Assyrian kings had their images carved into stone, McCarron and his small team journeyed through the Turkish mountains, across north-east Syria and into the heart of Iraq. Passing by historic cities like Diyarbakir, Mosul and Baghdad, McCarron kept the company of fishermen and farmers, but also artists, activists and archaeologists who rely on the flow of the river. Occasionally harassed by militias, often helped by soldiers, McCarron rode his luck in areas still troubled by ISIS and relied on the generosity of a network of strangers to reach the Persian Gulf. Wounded Tigris is the story of what humanity stands to lose with the death of a great river, and what can be done to try to save it.

One writer's quest to locate herself within the wet, wild, and diversely human cultural heritage that has shaped her

'An inspiring, life-affirming story' Reader's Digest Philip and Caroline Jones, a middle-aged couple living in Edinburgh, found themselves facing redundancy and an uncertain future. Until they received some advice from a complete stranger in a pub. Their response was to sell everything in order to move to Venice, in search of a better, simpler life. They were wrong about the 'simpler' bit... To Venice with Love recounts how they arrived in Venice with ten pieces of luggage, no job, no friends and no long-term place to stay. From struggling with the language to battling bureaucracy; the terror of teaching English to Italian teenagers, the company of a modestly friendly cat... and finally, from debugging financial systems on an Edinburgh industrial estate, to building an ordinary life in an extraordinary city, To Venice with Love is a love-letter to a city that changed their lives. It's a story told through the history, music, art, architecture (and, of course, the food) of La Serenissima.

In the new Russia, even dictatorship is a reality show. Professional killers with the souls of artists, would-be theater directors turned Kremlin puppet-masters, suicidal supermodels, Hell's Angels who hallucinate themselves as holy warriors, and oligarch revolutionaries: welcome to the glittering, surreal heart of twenty-first-century Russia. It is a world erupting with new money and new power, changing so fast it breaks all sense of reality, home to a form of dictatorship--far subtler than twentieth-century strains--that is rapidly rising to challenge the West. When British producer Peter Pomerantsev plunges into the booming Russian TV industry, he gains access to every nook and corrupt cranny of the country. He is brought to smoky rooms for meetings with propaganda gurus running the nerve-center of the Russian media machine, and visits Siberian mafia-towns and the salons of the international super-rich in London and the US. As the Putin regime becomes more aggressive, Pomerantsev finds himself drawn further into the system. Dazzling yet piercingly insightful, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible is an unforgettable voyage into a country spinning from decadence into madness.

Hailed as a masterpiece of American travel writing, Blue Highways is an unforgettable journey along our nation's backroads. William Least Heat-Moon set out with little more than the need to put home behind him and a sense of curiosity about those little towns that get on the map -- if they get on at all -- only because some cartographer has a blank space to fill: Remote, Oregon; Simplicity, Virginia; New Freedom, Pennsylvania; New Hope, Tennessee; Why, Arizona; Whynot, Mississippi. His adventures, his discoveries, and his recollections of the extraordinary people he encountered along the way amount to a revelation of the true American experience.

Delhi claims a noble history as the site of at least seven capitals dating from before the time of Alexander the Great. The glorious Mogul Empire brought great riches to the city and to Agra, where the world-famous Taj Mahal has excited awe in visitors for over 380 years. This Traveller's Reader is an indispensable and fascinating companion for the traveller who wants to understand the history of both cities, and who seeks the true spirit of the places. Delhi & Agra is a topographical anthology that explores the cities' sites of interest and recreates the key events, customs and lives of the past, drawing on diaries, letters, memoirs and commentaries written by residents and visitors over the course of 600 years. Extracts include Tamerlane's account of the sack of Delhi in 1398; descriptions of Shah Jahan building the Taj Mahal; recollections of Jesuits and mullahs debating the relative merits of their religions before the great Mogul emperor, Akbar; reports of cruelty and creativity, of addiction to drink and drugs; descriptions of elephant fights, suttee, the life of the bazaar and vice-regal banquets; and eyewitness accounts of the Indian Mutiny from both sides, and of the bloody aftermath of Partition. A great variety of topics are covered, vividly conveying an impression of how it would have been to live in, or visit, both cities from the recent past to hundreds of years ago.

From Jeffrey Gettleman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist, comes a passionate, revealing story about finding love and finding a calling, set against one of the most turbulent regions in the world. A seasoned war correspondent, Jeffrey Gettleman has covered every major conflict over the past twenty years, from Afghanistan to Iraq to the Congo. For the past decade, he has served as the East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times, fulfilling a teenage dream. At nineteen, Gettleman fell in love, twice. On a do-it-yourself community service trip in college, he went to East Africa-a terrifying, exciting, dreamlike part of the world in the throes of change that imprinted itself on his imagination and on his heart. But around that same time he also fell in love with a fellow Cornell student-the brightest, classiest, most principled woman he'd ever met. To say they were opposites was an understatement. She became a criminal lawyer in America; he hungered to return to Africa. For the next decade he would be torn between these two abiding passions. A sensually rendered coming-of-age story in the tradition of Barbarian Days, Love, Africa is a tale of passion, violence, far-flung adventure, tortuous long-distance relationships, screwing up, forgiveness, parenthood, and happiness that explores the power of finding yourself in the most unexpected of places.