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Books > Travel > Travel writing
First Published in 1968. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor &
Francis, an informa company.
Hundreds of hardy people have tried to carve a living in the
Alaskan bush, but few have succeeded as consistently as Heimo
Korth. Originally from Wisconsin, Heimo traveled to the Arctic
wilderness in his feverous twenties. Now, more than three decades
later, Heimo lives with his wife and two daughters approximately
200 miles from civilization -- a sustainable, nomadic life bounded
by the migrating caribou, the dangers of swollen rivers, and by the
very exigencies of daily existence.
In "The Final Frontiersman," Heimo's cousin James Campbell
chronicles the Korth family's amazing experience, their adventures,
and the tragedy that continues to shape their lives. With a deft
voice and in spectacular, at times unimaginable detail, Campbell
invites us into Heimo's heartland and home. The Korths wait
patiently for a small plane to deliver their provisions, listen to
distant chatter on the radio, and go sledding at 44 below zero --
all the while cultivating their hard-learned survival skills that
stand between them and a terrible fate.
Awe-inspiring and memorable, "The Final Frontiersman" reads like a
rustic version of the American Dream and reveals for the first time
a life undreamed by most of us: amid encroaching environmental
pressures, apart from the herd, and alone in a stunning wilderness
that for now, at least, remains the final frontier.
’n Grieselrige reis na die plekke waar van Suid-Afrika se bekendste moorde gepleeg is asook ’n hele aantal minder bekendes.
Maak kennis met die moordenaars en die doodgewone gemeenskappe waar slagoffers van die vroegste tye tot die onlangse verlede wreed aan hul einde gekom het.
In 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton set forth to make history with the
first-ever crossing of the Antarctic continent. He sailed into the
Weddell Sea aboard the Endurance, while a ship called the Aurora
sailed into the Ross Sea to create a lifeline of vital food and
fuel depots to supply the epic crossing. Yet all went tragically
wrong when the Aurora broke free of her moorings in an Antarctic
gale and stranded ten men ashore. Left with little more than the
clothing on their backs and scavenged equipment, the men vowed to
carry on in the face of impossible odds. Meanwhile the rest of the
Aurora crew, cast adrift at the mercy of the elements, battled for
survival. The lost men struggled to save themselves and carry out
their mission with little hope of rescue.
Frederik Paulsen's first great adventure involved taking the reins,
at age thirty, of the Ferring pharmaceutical firm founded by his
father. After he had transformed the company into a multinational
corporation, Paulsen began to recall his childhood dream of
discovering unknown lands, sparked by the Viking tales of his
native Sweden. He therefore set off to explore realms of ice and
snow.In the spring of 2000, he stood at the North Pole - only to
discover that the planet had several other extreme poles: the
wandering magnetic pole, to which every compass points; the
somewhat more stable geomagnetic pole; and the 'pole of
inaccessibility'. Since the earth has two hemispheres, these four
northern poles have their southern counterparts in the Antarctic.
Paulsen therefore set himself the challenge of being the first
person to reach all eight poles.Charlie Buffet and Thierry Meyer
recount Paulsen's thirteen-year adventure in freezing, hostile
regions that were once the site of historic exploits and are now a
laboratory for scientists trying to decipher our planet's future.
The foreword is by Ellen MacArthur
A rich blend of history and spirituality, adventure and politics,
laced with the thread of black comedy familiar to readers of
William Dalrymple's previous work. In AD 587, two monks, John
Moschos and Sophronius the Sophist, embarked on an extraordinary
journey across the Byzantine world, from the shores of the
Bosphorus to the sand dunes of Egypt. Their aim: to collect the
wisdom of the sages and mystics of the Byzantine East before their
fragile world shattered under the eruption of Islam. Almost 1500
years later, using the writings of John Moschos as his guide,
William Dalrymple set off to retrace their footsteps. Taking in a
civil war in Turkey, the ruins of Beirut, the tensions of the West
Bank and a fundamentalist uprising in Egypt, William Dalrymple's
account is a stirring elegy to the dying civilisation of Eastern
Christianity.
In 1960 the government of Trinidad invited V. S. Naipaul to revisit
his native country and record his impressions. In this classic of
modern travel writing he has created a deft and remarkably
prescient portrait of Trinidad and four adjacent Caribbean
societies-countries haunted by the legacies of slavery and
colonialism and so thoroughly defined by the norms of Empire that
they can scarcely believe that the Empire is ending.
In The Middle Passage, Naipaul watches a Trinidadian movie audience
greeting Humphrey Bogart's appearance with cries of "That is man "
He ventures into a Trinidad slum so insalubrious that the locals
call it the Gaza Strip. He follows a racially charged election
campaign in British Guiana (now Guyana) and marvels at the Gallic
pretension of Martinique society, which maintains the fiction that
its roads are extensions of France's "routes nationales." And
throughout he relates the ghastly episodes of the region's colonial
past and shows how they continue to inform its language, politics,
and values. The result is a work of novelistic vividness and
dazzling perspicacity that displays Naipaul at the peak of his
powers.
Over twenty years ago, Sven Lindqvist, one of the great pioneers of
a new kind of experiential history writing, set out across Central
Africa. Obsessed with a single line from Conrad's The Heart of
Darkness - Kurtz's injunction to 'Exterminate All the Brutes' - he
braided an account of his experiences with a profound historical
investigation, revealing to the reader with immediacy and
cauterizing force precisely what Europe's imperial powers had
exacted on Africa's peoples over the course of the preceding two
centuries. Shocking, humane, crackling with imaginative energies
and moral purpose, Exterminate All the Brutes stands as an
impassioned, timeless classic. It is essential reading for anybody
ready to come to terms with the brutal, racist history on which
Europe built its wealth.
The French Jesuit Pierre-Francois-Xavier de Charlevoix's 1744
journal of his voyage through French North America-New France,
Louisiana, and the Caribbean-is among the richest
eighteenth-century accounts of the continent's colonization, as
well as its indigenous inhabitants, flora, and fauna. Micah True's
new translation of this influential text is the first to appear
since 1763. It provides the first complete and reliable English
version of Charlevoix's journal and reveals the famous Jesuit to
have been a better literary stylist than has often been assumed on
the basis of earlier translations. Complemented by a detailed
introduction and richly annotated, this volume finally makes
accessible to an Anglophone audience one of the key texts of
eighteenth-century French America.
The outer world flew open like a door, and I wondered - what is it
that we're just not seeing? In this greatly anticipated sequel to
Findings, prize-winning poet and renowned nature writer Kathleen
Jamie takes a fresh look at her native Scottish landscapes, before
sailing north into iceberg-strewn seas. Her gaze swoops
vertiginously too; from a countryside of cells beneath a hospital
microscope, to killer whales rounding a headland, to the
constellations of satellites that belie our sense of the remote.
Written with her hallmark precision and delicacy, and marked by
moments in her own life, Sightlines offers a rare invitation to
pause and to pay heed to our surroundings.
One grey dismal day, Janine Marsh was on a trip to northern France
to pick up some cheap wine. She returned to England a few hours
later having put in an offer on a rundown old barn in the rural
Seven Valleys area of Pas de Calais. This was not something she'd
expected or planned for. Janine eventually gave up her job in
London to move with her husband to live the good life in France. Or
so she hoped. While getting to grips with the locals and la vie
Francaise, and renovating her dilapidated new house, a building
lacking the comforts of mains drainage, heating or proper rooms,
and with little money and less of a clue, she started to realize
there was lot more to her new home than she could ever have
imagined. These are the true tales of Janine's rollercoaster ride
through a different culture - one that, to a Brit from the city,
was in turns surprising, charming and not the least bit baffling.
Isolated and terrifyingly cold, the South Pole is every
adventurer's dream and every adventurer's nightmare. In a bid to
carry messages of peace to speak out at the Pole to help the
harmony of the Earth, Tess and partner Pete would venture to the
very end of the world. They join the historic South Pole Race, to
compete with the likes of Olympic champion James Cracknell and Ben
Fogle in the first race to the South Pole since Scott and Amundsen.
To complete this mission they would have to battle severe medical
problems, lack of money, hardship and deprivation. For Tess it was
more than combating cold hands with a warm heart, it was a journey
to push out the reaches of the human mind.
Bestselling travel writer Richard Grant "sensitively probes the
complex and troubled history of the oldest city on the Mississippi
River through the eyes of a cast of eccentric and unexpected
characters" (Newsweek). Natchez, Mississippi, once had more
millionaires per capita than anywhere else in America, and its
wealth was built on slavery and cotton. Today it has the greatest
concentration of antebellum mansions in the South, and a culture
full of unexpected contradictions. Prominent white families dress
up in hoopskirts and Confederate uniforms for ritual celebrations
of the Old South, yet Natchez is also progressive enough to elect a
gay black man for mayor with 91% of the vote. Much as John Berendt
did for Savannah in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and the
hit podcast S-Town did for Woodstock, Alabama, so Richard Grant
does for Natchez in The Deepest South of All. With humor and
insight, he depicts a strange, eccentric town with an unforgettable
cast of characters. There's Buzz Harper, a six-food-five gay
antique dealer famous for swanning around in a mink coat with a
uniformed manservant and a very short German bodybuilder. There's
Ginger Hyland, "The Lioness," who owns 500 antique eyewash cups and
decorates 168 Christmas trees with her jewelry collection. And
there's Nellie Jackson, a Cadillac-driving brothel madam who became
an FBI informant about the KKK before being burned alive by one of
her customers. Interwoven through these stories is the more somber
and largely forgotten account of Abd al Rahman Ibrahima, a West
African prince who was enslaved in Natchez and became a cause
celebre in the 1820s, eventually gaining his freedom and returning
to Africa. With an "easygoing manner" (Geoff Dyer, National Book
Critics Circle Award-winning author of Otherwise Known as the Human
Condition), this book offers a gripping portrait of a complex
American place, as it struggles to break free from the past and
confront the legacy of slavery.
Winner of the Prix Renaudot 2019 A New York Times Best Book of 2021
'Extraordinarily beautiful... a long last loving glance at the
planet.' Carl Safina, author of Becoming Wild The Art of Patience
sees the renowned French adventurer and writer set off for the high
plateaux of remotest Tibet in search of the elusive snow leopard.
There, in the company of leading wildlife photographer Vincent
Munier and two companions, at 5,000 metres and in temperatures of
-25C, the team set up their hides on exposed mountainsides, and
occasionally in the luxury of an icy cave, to await a visitation
from the almost mythical beast. This tightly focused and tautly
written narrative is simultaneously a dazzling account of an
exacting journey, an apprenticeship in the art of patience, an
acceptance of the ruthlessness of the natural world and, finally, a
plea for ecological sanity. A small masterpiece, it is one of those
books that demands to be read again and again.
'This is a joy of a book. I know nothing of sweaters and little of
Iceland, and this book used pictures and words to open Iceland and
its people for me, using Icelandic sweaters and knitting to do it.'
- Neil Gaiman In Iceland there's a piece of knitwear that everybody
has but no one has bought: the lopapeysa, or 'lopi' for short. This
sweater made from unspun Icelandic wool is a treasured piece of the
island's culture passed down from generation to generation, used
and cherished. In this guide, Joan of Dark and Kyle Cassidy take
you on an 800-mile adventure around Iceland's breathtaking
landscapes to explore and experience the island's rich knitting
tradition and to show you how to make your very own lopi-style
knits. By interviewing local experts, wool producers and knitters
they trace the history of the patterns and along the way meet rock
stars, professors and designers who share their knitting-related
stories and reveal some of their country's hidden gems. From
isolated waterfalls, hot springs and iconic movie locations to
beautiful Icelandic horses, giant glaciers and erupting volcanos,
the book is full of stunning photographs at every turn. The journey
inspired 12 beautiful lopi-style knitting patterns all presented
here with photographs, charts and detailed instructions to
carefully guide you through each project whether you are a complete
beginner or an experienced knitter. So pick up your needles and
spend some time in the land of ice and fire! Work your way through
the projects from the traditional sweater to gloves and hats, a
cosy jumper dress and stylish headbands all while finding out why
the lopapeysa is so special and so individual to Iceland.
Commemorating Cicerone's 50th year, Fifty Years of Adventure is a
compilation of tales by Cicerone authors. A story to celebrate each
year Cicerone has been publishing outdoor activity guidebooks, the
collection is a delicious hotpot of adventures in their every shape
and form. Soak up the sun, ice-cream in hand, with Aileen Evans on
the Isle of Man coast path; discover the secret side of Snowdon
with Rachel Crolla; cycle downhill for five weeks on the Danube
Cycleway with Mike Wells; climb Kilimanjaro with Alex Stewart; and
feel the sting of sub zero temperatures climbing K2 - the Savage
Mountain - with Alan Hinkes. Also featured are ten tales of mishaps
and misadventures that have befallen Cicerone authors while out and
about, researching for a guidebook. Between stifling giggles and
gasping out loud, gain greater insight into the mighty task that is
guidebook writing. And in 'The Cicerone Story', learn about other
aspects of guidebook creation, and discover how things have changed
over the last fifty years. Accompanied by outstanding photography,
each page of this finely crafted anniversary book is a veritable
visual delight. As enchanting as it is inspiring, Fifty Years of
Adventure is a must for anyone with an appreciation for adventure.
Hoping to rediscover his deeper purpose, Rijumati, an English
Buddhist teacher and businessman, embarked on a journey into the
unknown: a round-the-world trip by land and sea that became a kind
of pilgrimage. Months - and many crises - later he returned with
new reverence for ordinary people and places, a sense of veneration
for nature's wonders and a profound gratitude for being human. Part
travel diary and part record of a spiritual journey, these pages
evoke the sacred, remote places encountered in the outer world
alongside the 'inner terrain' that unfolded along the way. If you
have ever felt the call of the open road, longed to travel as a
form of self-discovery, or just wanted to know how to stay sane
whilst getting a visa stamp in Kazakhstan, then Pilgrimage to
Anywhere is for you.
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