Beyond Belief is a book about one of the more important and unsettling issues of our time. But it is not a book of opinion. It is, in the Naipaul way, a very rich and human book, full of people and their stories: stories of family, both broken and whole; of religion and nation; and of the constant struggle to create a world of virtue and prosperity in equal measure. Islam is an Arab religion, and it makes imperial Arabizing demands on its converts. In this way it is more than a private faith; and it can become a neurosis. What has this Arab Islam done to the histories of the non-Arab Islamic states: Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia? How do the converted peoples view their past - and their future? In a follow-up to Among the Believers, his classic account of his travels through these countries, V. S. Naipaul returns, after a gap of seventeen years, to find out how and what the converted preach. 'Peerless . . . the human encounters are described minutely, superbly, picking up inconsistencies in people's tales, catching the uncertainties and the nuances . . . there is a candour to his writing, a constant precision at its heart' - Sunday Times

Discover Europe with the 'Only In' Guides! These ground breaking city guides are for independent cultural travellers wishing to escape the crowds and understand cities from different and unusual perspectives. Unique locations, hidden corners and unusual objects. A comprehensive illustrated guide to more than 80 fascinating and unusual historical sites in Germany's second-largest city - Prehistoric stones, wartime air raid shelters, hidden cellars, unexpected sanctuaries, and eccentric museums. Tracking the history from Charlemagne's Hammaburg and the Hanseatic League to the Third Reich and the Federal State of Hamburg. Includes sites such as; John Lennon's doorway, a floating church, the English sewers, and the unicorn of the deep

This agenda-setting volume on travel and drama in early modern England provides new insights into Renaissance stage practice, performance history, and theatre's transnational exchanges. It advances our understanding of theatre history, drama's generic conventions, and what constitutes plays about travel at a time when the professional theatre was rapidly developing and England was attempting to announce its presence within a global economy. Recent critical studies have shown that the reach of early modern travel was global in scope, and its cultural consequences more important than narratives that are dominated by the Atlantic world suggest. This collection of essays by world-leading scholars redefines the field by expanding the canon of recognized plays concerned with travel. Re-assessing the parameters of the genre, the chapters offer fresh perspectives on how these plays communicated with their audiences and readers.

Rockwell Kent is one of America's most famous graphic artists. He was also an avid traveler. Kent was especially fascinated by remote Arctic lands and often stayed for extended periods of time to paint, write, and become acquainted with the local inhabitants. Between 1918 and 1935, he wrote and illustrated several popular books about his travels. Voyaging, originally published in 1924, is the engaging story of Kent's sailing voyage to Tierra del Fuego. Kent is a charming writer and keen observer of both the land and its people. The book is beautifully and generously illustrated with Kent's distinctive woodcuts.
The first edition was published to great critical acclaim. New Republic wrote, "the land lives. A land where roses are as big as sun-flowers, where gales gnaw against bleak cliffs . . . At the end of the earth, there is the paradox of the dwarf and the giant." The Nation said, "Kent has caught the wild beauty of this ominous region -- iron crags ringed with the froth of blown surf, wind-tortured trees, distant peaks incrusted with dazzling snow; but out of the very heart of this bewildering beauty emanates a sense of unseen presences appallingly, implacably hostile to man."

INTRODUCED BY PAUL KINGSNORTH, Booker-shortlisted author of The Wake 'I thought that there were two rules in life - never count the cost, and never do anything unless you can do it wholeheartedly. Now is the time to live.' Artist and wanderer Everett Ruess left home at the age of sixteen to immerse himself in the harsh desert landscapes of the American Southwest. With only his donkeys for company, driven by an insatiable longing for beauty and experience, he ventured ever further from civilisation and into the wilderness of Navajo country. In 1934, at the age of twenty, he vanished without trace in Utah, a disappearance that remains unsolved to this day. Through letters, diary excerpts and poems - charting not only his rugged adventures and his exquisite nature writing but his progression as a writer, and into adulthood - and with commentary by W. L. Rusho, A Vagabond for Beauty tells his remarkable story.

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.

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.

** NOW A MAJOR MOVIE STARRING ZAC EFRON, RUSSELL CROWE AND BILL MURRAY THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 'An extraordinary story.' - Daily Mail 'An unforgettable, wild ride from start to finish.' - John Bruning 'The astounding true story - from the streets of Manhattan to the jungles of Vietnam.' - Thomas Kelly IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME. As a result of a rowdy night in his local New York bar, ex-Marine and merchant seaman "Chick" Donohue volunteers for a legendary mission. He will sneak into Vietnam to track down his buddies in combat to bring them a cold beer and supportive messages from home. It'll be the greatest beer run ever! Now, decades on from 1968, this is the remarkable true story of how he actually did it. Armed with Irish luck and a backpack full of alcohol, Chick works his passage to Vietnam, lands in Qui Nhon and begins to carry out his quest, tracking down the disbelieving soldiers one by one. But things quickly go awry, and as he talks his way through checkpoints and unwittingly into dangerous situations, Chick sees a lot more of the war than he ever planned - spending a terrifying time in the Demilitarized Zone, and getting caught up in Saigon during the Tet Offensive. With indomitable spirit, Chick survives on his wits, but what he finds in Vietnam comes as a shock. By the end of his epic adventure, battered and exhausted, Chick finds himself questioning why his friends were ever led into the war in the first place.

'A total joy' Laura Kay, author of The Split 'Hilarious and unexpectedly moving' Richard Roper, author of Something to Live For 'Brilliantly written, properly funny and poignant, and such a great takedown of the more absurd aspects of life in the 21st century.' Tom Ellen, author of All About Us 'A delightful and unique take on travel writing.' Katy Wix, author of Delicacy The setting: Europe. A continent overrun by tourism, where tapas-crawlers cross paths with machine-gun-wielding cops, graffiti tour guides collide with anti-gentrification protestors and, in one classy mountain retreat, a bored patissier teaches mindful croissant-making to a bereaved luggage designer. Witness to this outlandish international spectacle is Mark, comically self-conscious and often thoroughly disturbed by modern life. In his 30s and working as a copywriter for an online travel company despite never having personally ventured further than France, Mark is determined to make up for lost time by embarking on the kind of freewheeling summer expedition he's always dreamed of. And even if his revered older cousin Paris is unable to join him on the trip, he's determined not to let that hold him back. Mark can always email the mysteriously absent Paris about the homes and experiences he has along the way, in intricate and often hilarious detail. Described by The Times as 'one of the finest comic minds of Generation Y', award-winning comedian Liam Williams brings his inimitable mix of humour and pathos to his unforgettable debut novel.

Following his election to Parliament, George Nathaniel Curzon (1859-1925) embarked on extensive travels and research in Asia, spending several months in Persia in 1889-90. Later viceroy of India, Curzon believed that growing Russian influence in Asia threatened Britain's interests, and that Persia was an important buffer state. Highly regarded upon publication in 1892, this illustrated two-volume work is a mix of history, geography, travel narrative, and social and political analysis. Intended to educate readers at home as to Persia's strategic significance, the work reflects its author's staunch support for British imperialism. Volume 2 covers Curzon's travels from Tehran down to the Persian Gulf, and gives an overview of Persia's southern and eastern provinces. As well as discussing Persepolis and other ruins, Curzon covers Persian trade and industry, as well as Russian and British policy towards the country. His Problems of the Far East (1894) is also reissued in this series.

This is a remarkable account of a thrilling journey on foot from the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro to the Indian Ocean. Rick Ridgeway, one of the world's foremost mountaineers and adventurers, offers us a rare view of East Africa as it is today, and how it once was before the incursion of European civilisation, before the balance of its primal wilderness was destroyed.

It has been described as the greatest epic voyage in modern Irish history.

Tim Severin and his companions built a boat using only techniques and materials available in the sixth-century A.D., when St Brendan was supposed to have sailed to America. The vessel comprised forty-nine ox hides stitched together in a patchwork and stretched over a wooden frame. This leather skin was only a quarter of an inch thick. Yet Severin and his crew sailed Brendan from Brandon Creek in Dingle to Newfoundland, surviving storms and a puncture from pack ice. The Brendan Voyage is Tim Severin s dramatic account of their journey. This new edition of a book already translated into twenty-seven languages introduces a new generation of readers to an enduring classic.

Tim Severin didn t prove St Brendan reached America, only that he could have, that it was possible. Brilliantly written, The Brendan Voyage conveys unforgettably the sensation of being in a small, open boat in the vastness of the North Atlantic, visited by inquisitive whales, reaching mist-shrouded landfalls, and receiving a welcome from seafaring folk wherever the crew touched land."

***Shortlisted for the Great Outdoors Book of the Year*** Surviving in the wild takes a great deal of strength. Often faced with frozen tundra, sweltering deserts, humid jungles, perilous mountains and fast-flowing rivers, Megan Hine is no stranger to perilous conditions. Whilst leading expeditions and bushcraft survival courses and in her work on television shows such as Bear Gryll's Mission Survive and Running Wild, she has explored the corners of the globe in pursuit of adventure. Faced with the toughest of conditions: bad weather; lack of food and being in the presence of predators, is the ultimate test of character and often the biggest challenge to overcome is in the head. In these situations, the human brain is simultaneously the greatest asset and biggest liability. Not everyone is suited to the great outdoors and when danger calls many aren't as well-equipped to survive, no amount of top of the range kit will save you if you don't have the right frame of mind. Here Megan Hine examines the human ability and instinct for survival, showing us how others have developed the attitudes and attributes to thrive in the most dangerous situations, and how those same attitudes and attributes help them confront problems and obstacles at work and at home. Being chased through the jungle by armed opium farm guards, abseiling past bears and lighting fires with tampons, Megan has seen and done it all. In Mind of a Survivor she takes you along for a series of life-and-death adventures and shows you what happens to people when they are pushed to their limits. Inspirational rather than instructional, Megan examines the human ability and instinct for survival sharing the life tools that she uses and showing how they can as easily be applied to more domestic everyday life - from careers to relationships, from overcoming adversity to decision making. Filled with her own experiences, Mind of a Survivor is packed full of adventure and can help people survive in any situation and cope with whatever life throws at them.

Year after year the family returns to the lake. The children, barefoot and free, explore its sun-drenched wilderness... The summer Bruce turns ten seems, at first, like any other: swimming out to the raft, watching the gulls, frogs and herons, catching crayfish. But just when he thinks that life is perfect, everything begins to change, and over the course of two months both the harshness of the adult world and the patterns of the natural reveal themselves.Barefoot at the Lake is not only a beautifully written boy's-eye view of the animals, humans and landscape of his youth, it is also delightfully funny, with a moving wisdom at its heart.

'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.

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 sunlight and calm of the French Riviera have been a magnet for writers since the fourteenth century. The Cote d'Azur has provided the inspiration and setting for some of the greatest literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The French Riviera: A Literary Guide for Travellers is a reader's journey along this fabled coast, from Hyeres and Saint-Tropez in the west to the Italian border in the east, introducing the lives and work of writers who passed this way, from distinguished Nobel laureates to new authors who found their voices there. Ted Jones's encyclopaedic work covers them all: writers such as Graham Greene and W. Somerset Maugham, who spent much of their lives there; F. Scott Fitzgerald and Guy de Maupassant, whose work it dominates; and the countless writers who simply lingered there, including Louisa M. Alcott, Hans Christian Anderson, J.G. Ballard, Samuel Beckett, Arnold Bennett, William Boyd, Bertholt Brecht, Anthony Burgess, Albert Camus, Bruce Chatwin, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Ian Fleming, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, D.H. Lawrence, A.A.Milne, Vladimir Nabokov, Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Plath, Jean-Paul Sartre, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Louis Stevenson, Anton Tchekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Evelyn Waugh, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, P.G. Wodehouse, Virginia Woolf and W.B. Yeats - and many others.

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

HEARING BIRDS FLY is Louisa Waugh's passionately written account of her time in a remote Mongolian village. Frustrated by the increasingly bland character of the capital city of Ulan Bator, she yearned for the real Mongolia and got the chance when she was summoned by the village head to go to Tsengel far away in the west, near the Kazakh border. Her story completely transports the reader to feel the glacial cold and to see the wonders of the Seven Kings as they steadily emerge from the horizon.

Through her we sense their trials as well as their joys, rivalries and even hostilities, many of which the author shared or knew about. Her time in the village was marked by coming to terms with the harshness of climate and also by how she faced up to new feelings towards the treatment of animals, death, solitude and real loneliness, and the constant struggle to censor her reactions as an outsider. Above all, Louisa Waugh involves us with the locals' lives in such a way that we come to know them and care for their fates.
 

'In 1973 [Matthiessen] journeyed with George Schaller, a field biologist, to Crystal Mountain in the Himalayas, to study the wild blue sheep of the region called bharal. They also hoped to see the rare snow leopard, an almost mythical creature which Schaller once glimpsed on a previous visit. Matthiessen is a student of Zen Buddhism and for him this was as much an inner journey as a field trip. He succeeds well in blending the spiritual with the earthly and his book is an evocative account of a remote and timeless place and its people' Sunday Times

Maps fascinate us. They chart our understanding of the world and they log our progress, but above all they tell our stories. From the early sketches of philosophers and explorers through to Google Maps and beyond, Simon Garfield examines how maps both relate and realign our history. With a historical sweep ranging from Ptolemy to Twitter, Garfield explores the legendary, impassable (and non-existent) mountains of Kong, the role of cartography in combatting cholera, the 17th-century Dutch craze for Atlases, the Norse discovery of America, how a Venetian monk mapped the world from his cell and the Muppets' knack of instant map-travel. Along the way are pocket maps of dragons, Mars, murders and more, with plenty of illustrations and prints to signpost the route. From the bestselling and widely-adored author of Just My Type, On The Map is a witty and irrepressible examination of where we've been, how we got there and where we're going.

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.