A Buddhist monk takes up arms to resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet - then spends the rest of his life trying to atone for the violence by hand printing the best prayer flags in India. A Jain nun tests her powers of detachment as she watches her best friend ritually starve herself to death. Nine people, nine lives; each one taking a different religious path, each one an unforgettable story. William Dalrymple delves deep into the heart of a nation torn between the relentless onslaught of modernity and the ancient traditions that endure to this day. LONGLISTED FOR THE BBC SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE

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.