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Shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award
'A gem of a book, informative, companionable, sometimes funny, and
wholly original. MacLean must surely be the outstanding, and most
indefatigable, traveller-writer of our time' John le Carre In 1989
the Berlin Wall fell. In that euphoric year Rory MacLean travelled
from Berlin to Moscow, exploring lands that were - for most Brits
and Americans - part of the forgotten half of Europe. Thirty years
on, MacLean traces his original journey backwards, across countries
confronting old ghosts and new fears: from revanchist Russia,
through Ukraine's bloodlands, into illiberal Hungary, and then
Poland, Germany and the UK. Along the way he shoulders an AK-47 to
go hunting with Moscow's chicken Tsar, plays video games in St
Petersburg with a cyber-hacker who cracked the US election, drops
by the Che Guevara High School of Political Leadership in a
non-existent nowhereland and meets the Warsaw doctor who tried to
stop a march of 70,000 nationalists. Finally, on the shores of Lake
Geneva, he waits patiently to chat with Mikhail Gorbachev. As
Europe sleepwalks into a perilous new age, MacLean explores how
opportunists - both within and outside of Russia, from Putin to
Home Counties populists - have made a joke of truth, exploiting
refugees and the dispossessed, and examines the veracity of
historical narrative from reportage to fiction and fake news. He
asks what happened to the optimism of 1989 and, in the shadow of
Brexit, chronicles the collapse of the European dream.
'Crazy, charming, a delight' - John le Carre In Rory MacLean's
groundbreaking debut travel book, Winston the pig drops on to Uncle
Peter's head and kills him dead. Unwilling to be left alone in her
house Aunt Zita, a faded Austrian aristocrat and a vivacious
eccentric, hijacks her nephew and, together with Winston, sets out
on one last ride. The Berlin Wall has fallen only weeks before and
Zita is determined to reach across the reopened borders and
rediscover her remarkable east European family. In a rattling
Trabant the unlikely trio puff and wheeze across the changing
continent, following the threads of memory. Zita's relations - the
angel of Prague, the Hungarian grave digger who buried Stalin's
nose, a dying Romanian propagandist - help tie together the loose
ends of her life. They picnic at Auschwitz. They meet Lenin's
embalmer. They carry a long-lost corpse over the Carpathian
mountains. Through war and revolution, decay and regeneration,
Stalin's Nose is a surreal and darkly comic ride and a portrait of
Europe like no other.
The memory of a brief visit to Burma had haunted Rory MacLean for
years. A decade after the violent suppression of an unarmed
national uprising, which cost thousands of lives and all hopes for
democracy, he seized the chance to return. Travelling from Rangoon
to Mandalay and Pagan, into the heart of the Golden Triangle, he
hears stories of ordinary people struggling to survive under one of
the most brutal and repressive regimes in the world and meets Aung
San Suu Kyi, perhaps the most courageous woman of our time and the
embodiment of all Burma's hope. On his journey MacLean exposes the
tragedy of a hundred betrayals. "Under the Dragon" is a perceptive
and heartbreaking portrayal of contemporary Burma, a country that
is shot through with desperation and fear, but also blessed - even
in the darkest places - with beauty and courage.
The first single-volume biography of Berlin, one of the world's
great cities - told via twenty-one portraits, from medieval times
to the twenty-first century. A city devastated by Allied bombs,
divided by a Wall, then reunited and reborn, Berlin today resonates
with the echo of lives lived, dreams realised and evils executed.
No other city has repeatedly been so powerful and fallen so low.
And few other cities have been so shaped and defined by individual
imaginations. Through vivid portraits spanning five centuries, Rory
MacLean reveals the varied and rich history of Berlin, from its
brightest to its darkest moments. We encounter an ambitious
prostitute refashioning herself as a princess, a Scottish mercenary
fighting for the Prussian Army, Marlene Dietrich flaunting her
sexuality and Hitler fantasising about the mega-city Germania. The
result is a uniquely imaginative biography of one of the world's
most volatile yet creative cities.
“Eight years after moving from New York City to Berlin, a feeling
of alienation still haunts me. I wander the streets alone at night,
camera in hand, trying to find my place in my latest 'home.’”
What does "home" mean when one is a stranger living in another
country? Artist Romeo Alaeff explores this question in In der
Fremde: Pictures from Home, a haunting, cinematic, and evocative
survey of Berlin as seen through the lens of an eternal outsider.
Framed by Alaeff’s complex familial background, spanning from
Yemen to the former USSR, Poland, Israel, and the United States,
the photographs are tinged with a deep sense of longing and touch
on themes of migration, belonging, and the search for home.
Inspiring essays by Yuval Noah Harari, Christian Rattemeyer,
Charles Simic, Eva Hoffman, Rory MacLean, Joseph Kertes, and Romeo
Alaeff illuminate a wide horizon of perspectives.
In the 1960s hundreds of thousands of young Westerners, inspired by
Kerouac and the Beatles, blazed the 'hippie trail' overland from
Istanbul to Kathmandu in search of enlightenment and a bit of cheap
dope. Since the Summer of Love, the countries that offered so much
to these dreamers have confronted the full force of modernity and
transformed from worlds of Western fantasy to political minefields.
Through a landscape of breathtaking beauty Rory MacLean retraces
the path of the once well-worn 'hippie trail' from Turkey to Iran,
Afghanistan to Pakistan, India to Nepal, meeting trail veterans and
locals on his way, and relives wide-eyed adventures as he witnesses
a world of extraordinary and terrifying transformation.
When his mother Joan was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Rory
MacLean and his wife Katrin took her into their home. For five
months, as their life fragmented and turned inward, they fought
both to resist and to accept the inevitable. Each gave vent to
their emotions in different ways, but all three kept a diary.
Heartbreakingly honest and deeply moving, Gift of Time is the story
of those days, in the words of a son, his wife and his mother.
Woven together into a poignant meditation on life and death, they
illuminate the courage and dignity of one woman who confronted what
we all must face. Threaded through with wisdom and guilt, anger and
acceptance, the story is punctuated by a family wedding and the
hope of new life, by bin-bags of old letters and books
rediscovered, by the end of winter and the first signs of spring.
Powerful, raw and urgent, this slender volume is above all a
celebration of life. Capturing every moment of beauty and pain it
acknowledges that what survives all of us is love. Praise for Rory
MacLean's previous titles: Stalin's Nose: 'The most extraordinary
debut in travel writing since In Patagonia. A dark, sardonic and
brilliant book which grows in stature with every page' William
Dalrymple 'A surreal masterpiece' Colin Thubron The Oatmeal Ark:
'One of the most original and innovative travel books for years.'
Alexander Frater 'A truly astonishing performance' Jan Morris 'Such
a book as this rather marvellously explains why literature still
lives.' John Fowles Under the Dragon: 'I cannot imagine a better
book on the beauty and terror of Burma. Read it. Read it. Read it.'
Fergal Keane 'It will make you cry and it will give you hope. ...
It is astonishingly good.' Jeanette Winterson. Magic Bus: 'A
disturbing, gripping and intensely passionate story' Esther Freud.
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