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Books > Sport & Leisure > Travel & holiday > Travel writing
Kangchenjunga is the third highest mountain in the world and a notoriously difficult and dangerous mountain to climb. First climbed from the west in 1955 by a British team comprising Joe Brown, George Band, Tony Streather and Norman Hardie, it waited over twenty years for a second ascent. The third ascent, from the north, was made in 1979 by a four-man team including the visionary British alpinist Doug Scott. Completed before his death in 2020, and edited by Catherine Moorehead, Kangchenjunga is Doug Scott's final book. Scott explores the mountain and its varied people - the mountain sits on the border between Nepal and Sikkim in north-east India - before going on to look at Western approaches and early climbing attempts on the mountain. Kangchenjunga was in fact long believed to be the highest mountain in the world, until in the nineteenth century it was demonstrated that Peak XV - Everest - was taller. Out of respect for the beliefs of the Sikkimese, no climber has ever set foot on the very top of Kangchenjunga, the sacred summit. Scott's own relationship with the mountain began in 1978, three years after his first British ascent of Everest with Dougal Haston. The assembled team featured some of the greatest mountaineers in history: Scott, Joe Tasker, Peter Boardman and Georges Bettembourg. The plan was for a stripped-down expedition the following spring - minimal Sherpa support, no radios, largely self-financed. It was the first time a mountain of this scale had been attempted by a new and difficult route without the use of oxygen, and with such a small team. Scott, Tasker and Boardman summited on 16 May 1979, further consolidating their legends in this golden era. Kangchenjunga is Doug Scott's tribute to this sacred mountain, a paean for a Himalayan giant, written by a giant of Himalayan climbing.
Travel writing has, for centuries, composed an essential historical record and wide-ranging literary form, reflecting the rich diversity of travel as a social and cultural practice, metaphorical process, and driver of globalization. This interdisciplinary volume brings together anthropologists, literary scholars, social historians, and other scholars to illuminate travel writing in all its forms. With studies ranging from colonial adventurism to the legacies of the Holocaust, The Long Journey offers a unique dual focus on experience and genre as it applies to three key realms: memory and trauma, confrontations with the Other, and the cultivation of cultural perspective.
International bestseller now in new gift format!
One life sabbatical. Two laps around the world. After being married for a year, Bob Riel and his wife, Lisa, decided to take a chance in life. They took time off from their careers and embarked on a round-the-world journey, intent on having an adventure before starting a family. Then, two-and-a-half years later, when the children hadn't arrived and the travel bug hadn't left, they set out on another voyage to resume their sabbatical experience. During their two journeys, they faced the shock of a terrorist bombing in Egypt, met a Turkish carpet dealer who trained acrobatic pigeons, discussed life with Masai tribesmen, visited a Japanese family whose mother thought she knew them in another lifetime, and watched the sunrise from a boat on the Ganges River and from atop Mount Sinai. Lyrical and humorous, "Two Laps Around the World" is a testament to the possibilities of travel, as Bob and Lisa's explorations also grew into a series of Life Lessons and Global Rules that will inspire reflection. This captivating memoir is certain to arouse wanderlust in every reader.
Moving beyond travelogue, V. S. Naipaul's The Masque of Africa considers the effects of belief (in indigenous animisms, the foreign religions of Christianity and Islam, the cults of leaders and mythical history) upon the progress of African civilization. Beginning in Uganda, at the centre of the continent, Naipaul's journey takes in Ghana and Nigeria, the Ivory Coast and Gabon, and ends, as the country does, in South Africa. Focusing upon the theme of belief - though sometimes the political or economical realities are so overwhelming that they have to be taken into account - Naipaul examines the fragile but enduring quality of the old world of magic. To witness the ubiquity of such ancient ritual, to be given some idea of its power, was to be taken far back to the beginning of things. To reach that beginning was the purpose of this book. 'The quality of Naipaul's writing - simple, concise, engaging - rarely varies . . . Above all, Naipaul's latest African journey is eyewitness reporting at its best' Time
On 30 January 1981 Joe Tasker and Ade Burgess stood at 24,000 feet on the West Ridge of Mount Everest. Below them were their companions, some exhausted, some crippled by illness, all virtually incapacitated. Further progress seemed impossible. Everest the Cruel Way is Joe Tasker's story of an attempt to climb the highest mountain on earth - an attempt which pushed a group of Britain's finest mountaineers to their limits. The goal had been to climb Mount Everest at its hardest: via the infamous West Ridge, without supplementary oxygen and in winter. Tasker's epic account vividly describes experiences that no climber had previously endured. Close up and personal, it is a gripping account of day-to-day life on expedition and of the struggle to live at high altitude. Joe Tasker was one of Britain's best mountaineers. He was a pioneer of lightweight, alpine-style climbing in the Greater Ranges and had a special talent for writing. He died, along with his friend Peter Boardman, high on Everest in 1982 while attempting a new and unclimbed line. Both men were superb mountaineers and talented writers.
Craving an escape from everyday life, Gregor Ewing writes a personal account of his 1,000 mile walk over nine weeks with collie Meg that takes them through the central belt of Scotland, literally following in Robert the Bruce's footsteps. From Kintyre, Arran and Ardrossan north to Ayr through Glasgow to Fort William and Elgin, south to Inverurie, Aberdeen and Dundee, over the Forth to Edinburgh and Berwick upon Tweed then east through Roxburghshire to Bannockburn, Gregor frames his expedition with historical background that follows Robert the Bruce's journey to start a campaign which led to his famous victory seven years later.
'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!
This Fully illustrated book covers Germany in Antarctica from the 1900s to the 1940s, starting with Erich von Drygalsky's 1901 Gauss expedition, then on to the 1939 Schwabenland Expedition which is well covered in the book with many never seen before photographs. Within the pages of this book you will be able to follow the author's detailed research and photos showing how Germans could have escaped war torn Berlin at the end of the war and be able to flee Europe, reaching the relative safety of South America. The author then explores how a phantom convoy of U-boats was used to move Germans not only to South America but also to hidden underground bases in Antarctica and he describes how these well stocked underground complexes were a follow on from the detailed aerial mapping done by the Schwabenland Expedition.
Samuel Pepys walked round London for miles. The 21/2 miles to Whitehall from his house near the Tower of London was accomplished on an almost daily basis, and so many of his professional conversations took place whilst walking that the streets became for him an alternative to his office. With Walking Pepys's London, the reader will come to know life in London from the pavement up and see its streets from the perspective of this renowned diarist. The city was almost as much a character in Pepys's life as his family or friends, and the book draws many parallels between his experience of 17th-century London and the lives of Londoners today. Colliss Harvey's new book reconstructs the sensory and emotional experience of the past, bringing geography, biography and history into one. Full of fascinating details and written with extraordinary sensitivity, Walking Pepys's London is an unmissable exploration into the places that made the greatest English diarist of all time.
The Passenger collects the best new writing, photography, and reportage from around the world. Its aim, to break down barriers and introduce the essence of the place. Packed with essays and investigative journalism; original photography and illustrations; charts, and unusual facts and observations, each volume offers a unique insight into a different culture, and how history has shaped the place into what it is today. Since gaining independence from the UK, Nigeria has been in a state of permanent crisis. Dependence on oil is the glue that has kept together a country deeply divided but obsessed with an ideal of "national unity". But this dependence has eroded institutions, compromised socio-economic development, caused corruption, coup d'etats, and environmental disasters. The arrival of democracy in the 90s failed to bring much improvement. It's estimated that over 100 million Nigerians live under the poverty threshold. Violence is widespread: from the Boko Haram terrorists to the armed secessionist movements and the growing scourge of kidnappings. How to live in a country where the state is absent? In these circumstances, Nigerians bring out all their dynamism, entrepreneurial skills, and their inventiveness. As the generation of generals who governed the country for 60 years dies out, and younger citizens refuse to ignore injustice and violence, the hope is born that a new, vibrant generation will take the country's future into their hands. And, as they are accustomed to doing, fix it.
This book brings together theories of spatiality and mobility with a study of travel writing in the Victorian period to suggest that 'idleness' is an important but neglected condition of subjectivity in that era. Contrary to familiar stereotypes of 'the Victorians' as characterized by speed, work, and mechanized travel, this books asserts a counter-narrative in which certain writers embraced idleness in travel as a radical means to 're-subjectification' and the assertion of a 'late-Romantic' sensibility. Attentive to the historical and literary continuities between 'Romantic' and 'Victorian', the book reconstructs the Victorian discourse on idleness. It draws on an interdisciplinary range of theorists and brings together a fresh selection of accounts viewed through the lens of cultural studies as well as accounts of publication history and author biography. Travel texts from different genres (by writers such as Anna Mary Howitt, Jerome K. Jerome and George Gissing) are brought together as representing the different facets of the spectrum of idleness in the Victorian context.
First published in 2008. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
New Directions is delighted to announce beautiful new editions of these three classic Sebald novels, including his two greatest works, The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. All three novels are distinguished by their translations, every line of which Sebald himself made pitch-perfect, slaving to carry into English all his essential elements: the shadows, the lambent fallings-back, nineteenth-century Germanic undertones, tragic elegiac notes, and his unique, quiet wit.
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
At a fateful travel writing workshop, Barbara, Louise, and Janet knew they had to collaborate. Soon, Wendy joined them, and the new writing group got to work. LOUISE enjoys easy travels, wine, and good food. She takes you deep inside a Hungarian wine cellar and travels from Dawson City in the wild north of Canada, to Guadeloupe and Barbados. JAN adores the sea. She recounts the adventures of flying around Cape Horn, exploring the Galapagos, and learning to jump off a boat near Ireland's wild Aran Islands. WENDY seeks out those places most of us wouldn't dare to visit. She's been to much of Africa and Asia and calls Pakistan her second home. While sick in Malawi, she found refuge in a tea estate. In Germany, the discovered lost Jewish roots. BARBARA, the group's hiker, has traveled through Mali, fed hungry children in Kinshasa, and trekked around Mont Blanc and into the Himalayas for a glimpse into the Dragon Kingdom of Bhutan and the Valley of the Flowers in India. Here, they share adventures and mishaps, frustrations and delights. They invite readers in for intimate reflections on what it means to travel-and why they are so drawn in by the planet's many siren songs.
The New York Times bestselling author of The Geography of Bliss embarks on a rollicking intellectual journey, following in the footsteps of history's greatest thinkers and showing us how each-from Epicurus to Gandhi, Thoreau to Beauvoir-offers practical and spiritual lessons for today's unsettled times. We turn to philosophy for the same reasons we travel: to see the world from a dif ferent perspective, to unearth hidden beauty, and to find new ways of being. We want to learn how to embrace wonder. Face regrets. Sustain hope. Eric Weiner combines his twin passions for philosophy and travel in a globe-trotting pil grimage that uncovers surprising life lessons from great thinkers around the world, from Rousseau to Nietzsche, Confucius to Simone Weil. Traveling by train (the most thoughtful mode of transport), he journeys thousands of miles, making stops in Athens, Delhi, Wyoming, Coney Island, Frankfurt, and points in between to recon nect with philosophy's original purpose: teaching us how to lead wiser, more meaningful lives. From Socrates and ancient Athens to Beauvoir and 20th-century Paris, Weiner's chosen philosophers and places provide important practical and spiritual lessons as we navigate today's chaotic times. In a "delightful" odyssey that "will take you places intellectually and humorously" (San Francisco Book Review), Weiner invites us to voyage alongside him on his life-changing pursuit of wisdom and discovery as he attempts to find answers to our most vital questions. The Socrates Express is "full of valuable lessons...a fun, sharp book that draws readers in with its apparent simplicity and bubble-gum philosophy approach and gradually pulls them in deeper and deeper" (NPR).
From its very first contact with the West, India has been subject to great mystification. India’s long history, the survival of ancient rituals, and its variety of languages and cultures, continues to fascinate. This narrative is intertwined with a newer one that sees the frenetic change of a society at the forefront of innovation. Success stories coexist alongside stories of daily struggle. A large slice of the population still does not have access to drinking water, and agriculture (still the main source of livelihood for most of the 1.3 billion people who live there) is threatened by climate change. India is a country that does not know how to eradicate one of the most infamous forms of classism/racism: the caste system. From the resistance of the Kashmiri people to that of atheists – hated by all religious communities – from the dances of the ‘hijra’ in Koovagam to the success of the female wrestler Vinesh Phogat, learn about the contradictory, terrible and joyful chaos that lies at the heart of India.
First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
This is the first complete English translation of a lively travelogue written by Andronikos aka Nikandros Noukios, a Greek from Corfu, who accompanied a diplomatic mission from Venice to England in the middle of the sixteenth century. He describes some of the great northern Italian cities, gives vivid impressions of picturesque Germany, of sober but enthusiastic Lutheran church services, and of cities on the Rhine. In the Low Countries he visits the commercial centres and in England gives a real sense of the excitement of London and its sights. He rather liked the English (even giving a recipe for beer), and is clearly fascinated by Henry VIII, his attacks on the monasteries and his break with Rome. He then surprisingly joins up with a troop of Greek mercenaries, but finally leaves them and returns to Italy through France with glimpses of Fontainebleau and Francis I. We leave Andronikos after he has visited Rome on his way back to Venice. The book is an almost unknown source for the sixteenth century and will certainly be of interest to historians and students. It is also an important and little-known landmark in the development of Modern Greek literature, especially relevant to the burgeoning modern interest in travel writing. It is accessible and a good read.
In 1869, Hayyim Habshush, a Yemeni Jew, accompanied the European orientalist Joseph Halevy on his archaeological tour of Yemen. Twenty years later, Habshush wrote A Vision of Yemen, a memoir of their travels, that provides a vivid account of daily life, religion, and politics. More than a simple travelogue, it is a work of trickster-tales, thick anthropological descriptions, and reflections on Jewish-Muslim relations. At its heart lies the fractious and intimate relationship between the Yemeni coppersmith and the "enlightened" European scholar and the collision between the cultures each represents. The book thus offers a powerful indigenous response to European Orientalism. This edition is the first English translation of Habshush's writings from the original Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew and includes an accessible historical introduction to the work. The translation maintains Habshush's gripping style and rich portrayal of the diverse communities and cultures of Yemen, offering a potent mixture of artful storytelling and cultural criticism, suffused with humor and empathy. Habshush writes about the daily lives of men and women, rich and poor, Jewish and Muslim, during a turbulent period of war and both Ottoman and European imperialist encroachment. With this translation, Alan Verskin recovers the lost voice of a man passionately committed to his land and people.
First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company. |
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