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Wherever You Go: A Guide to Mindful, Sustainable, and Life-Changing Travel
Houghton, Daniel
(Hardcover)
List Price: $26.99 Sale: $2.33
Imagine your job was to travel the world, then report back on how everyone else should do it. That’s what happened to Daniel Houghton when, fresh out of Western Kentucky University, he took the helm of legendary travel publisher Lonely Planet, then owned by a billionaire who had taken a shine to his work. Suddenly, he was not only jetting off to parts unknown, but closing business deals in foreign languages and scrambling to learn fifty different sets of table manners.As the son of a Delta pilot and a flight attendant, Daniel had always loved to travel, but after Lonely Planet it morphed into a mission—to spread the word about travel’s unique power to change hearts and minds. In Wherever You Go, he speaks for, and to, a new generation, who want more out of travel than a list of experiences. They use it to develop empathy and cultural awareness, whether flying across the world or just heading to a different neighborhood for dinner.Daniel shares his own tips, as well as drawing on interviews with travel legends like Richard Branson, pros like Delta’s longest-serving flight attendant ever, and everyday folks with fascinating stories. You’ll meet Kevan Chandler, a young man in a wheelchair who realized his dream of seeing Europe thanks to six friends who carried him around in a homemade backpack; Captain Lee Rosbach of Bravo’s Below Deck, who guides his young crew to all ends of the earth; and Laura Dekker, the youngest person ever to sail single-handedly around the world. They talk about everything—from their favorite places and their worst misadventures to the environmental and economic impacts of travel. And everyone attests to how their cross-cultural experiences have shaped their worldviews, their politics, their relationships, and even their careers.Whether you’ve booked your next trip or you’re still Instagram-dreaming, let Wherever You Go inspire you to roam beyond your comfort zone.
Barbarian Lost: Travels in the New China
Trudeau, Alexandre
(Hardcover)
List Price: $27.00 Our Price: $2.65
To this day, China remains an enigma. Ancient, complex and fast moving, it defies easy understanding.Ever since he was a boy, Alexandre Trudeau has been fascinated by this great county. Recounting his experiences in the China of recent years, Trudeau visits artists and migrant workers, townspeople and rural farmers. Often accompanied by a young Chinese journalist, Vivien, he explores realities caught in time between the China of our memories and the thrust of progress. The China he seeks out lurks in hints and shadows. It flickers dimly amidst all the glare and noise. The people he encounters along the way give up but small secrets yet each revelation comes as a surprise that jolts us from our preconceived ideas and forces us to challenge our most secure notions.Barbarian Lost, Trudeau’s first book, is an insightful and witty account of the dynamic changes going on right now in China, as well as a look back into the deeper history of this highly codified society. On the ground with the women and men who make China tick, Trudeau shines new light on the country as only a traveller with his storytelling abilities could.
Journeys Home: Inspiring Stories, Plus Tips and Strategies to Find Your Family History
McCarthy, Andrew
(Hardcover)
List Price: $26.00 Sale: $3.01
Addressing the explosive growth in ancestral travel, this compelling narrative combines intriguing tales of discovery with tips on how to begin your own explorations. Actor and award-winning travel writer Andrew McCarthy's featured story recounts his recent quest to uncover his family's Irish history, while twenty-five other prominent writers tell their own heartfelt stories of connection. Spanning the globe, these stories offer personal takes on journeying home, whether the authors are actively seeking long-lost relatives, meeting up with seldom-seen family members, or perhaps just visiting the old country to get a feel for their roots. Sidebars and a hefty resource section provide tips and recommendations on how to go about your own research, and a foreword by the Genographic Project's Spencer Wells sets the scene. Stunning images, along with family heirlooms, old photos, recipes, and more, round out this unique take on the genealogical research craze.
The Comfort Food Diaries: My Quest for the Perfect Dish to Mend a Broken Heart
Nunn, Emily
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Our Price: $3.15
One life-changing night, reeling from her beloved brother’s sudden death, a devastating breakup with her handsome engineer fiancé, and eviction from the apartment they shared, Emily Nunn had lost all sense of family, home, and financial security.After a few glasses of wine, heartbroken and unmoored, Emily—an avid cook and professional food writer—poured her heart out on Facebook. The next morning she woke up with an awful hangover and a feeling she’d made a terrible mistake—only to discover she had more friends than she knew, many of whom invited her to come visit and cook with them while she put her life back together. Thus began the Comfort Food Tour.Searching for a way forward, Emily travels the country, cooking and staying with relatives and friends. Her wonderfully idiosyncratic family comes to life in these pages, all part of the rich Southern story in which past and present are indistinguishable, food is a source of connection and identity, and a good story is often preferred to a not-so-pleasant truth. But truth, pleasant or not, is what Emily Nunn craves, and with it comes an acceptance of the losses she has endured, and a sense of hope for the future.In the salty snap of a single Virginia ham biscuit, in the sour tang of Great-Grandmother’s Mean Lemon Cake, Nunn experiences the healing power of comfort food—and offers up dozens of recipes for the wonderful meals that saved her life. “The Comfort Food Diaries is nothing less than a tour de force by Emily Nunn, our most hilarious and touching food writer. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry...and you’ll get hungry” (Mark Bittman, author of How to Cook Everything).
God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre
Grant, Richard
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Our Price: $3.15
Twenty miles south of the Arizona-Mexico border, the rugged, beautiful Sierra Madre mountains begin their dramatic ascent. Almost 900 miles long, the range climbs to nearly 11,000 feet and boasts several canyons deeper than the Grand Canyon. The rules of law and society have never taken hold in the Sierra Madre, which is home to bandits, drug smugglers, Mormons, cave-dwelling Tarahumara Indians, opium farmers, cowboys, and other assorted outcasts. Outsiders are not welcome; drugs are the primary source of income; murder is all but a regional pastime. The Mexican army occasionally goes in to burn marijuana and opium crops - the modern treasure of the Sierra Madre - but otherwise the government stays away. In its stead are the drug lords, who have made it one of the biggest drug-producing areas in the world. Fifteen years ago, journalist Richard Grant developed what he calls "an unfortunate fascination" with this lawless place. Locals warned that he would meet his death there, but he didn't believe them - until his last trip. During his travels Grant visited a folk healer for his insomnia and was prescribed rattlesnake pills, attended bizarre religious rituals, consorted with cocaine-snorting policemen, taught English to Guarijio Indians, and dug for buried treasure. On his last visit, his reckless adventure spiraled into his own personal heart of darkness when cocaine-fueled Mexican hillbillies hunted him through the woods all night, bent on killing him for sport. With gorgeous detail, fascinating insight, and an undercurrent of dark humor, God's Middle Finger brings to vivid life a truly unique and uncharted world.
This Is Cuba: An American Journalist Under Castro's Shadow
Ariosto, David
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.99 Our Price: $3.99
Fidel Castro is dead. Donald Trump was elected president. And to most outsiders, the fate of Cuba has never seemed more uncertain. Yet those who look close enough may recognize that signs of the next revolution are etched in plain view.This is Cuba is a true story that begins in the summer of 2009 when a young American photo-journalist is offered the chance of a lifetime - a two-year assignment in Havana.For David Ariosto, the island is an intriguing new world, unmoored from the one he left behind. From neighboring military coups, suspected honey traps, salty spooks, and desperate migrants to dissidents, doctors, and Havana’s empty shelves, Ariosto uncovers the island’s subtle absurdities, its Cold War mystique, and the hopes of a people in the throes of transition. Beyond the classic cars, salsa, and cigars lies a country in which black markets are ubiquitous, free speech is restricted, privacy is curtailed, sanctions wreak havoc, and an almost Kafka-esque goo of Soviet-style bureaucracy still slows the gears of an economy desperate to move forward.But life in Cuba is indeed changing, as satellite dishes and internet hotspots dot the landscape and more Americans want in. Still, it’s not so simple. The old sentries on both sides of the Florida Straits remain at their posts, fists clenched and guarding against the specter of a Cold War that never quite ended, despite the death of Fidel and the hand-over of the presidency to a man whose last name isn’t Castro.And now, a crisis is brewing.In This Is Cuba, Ariosto looks at Cuba from the inside-out over the course of nine years, endeavoring to expose clues for what’s in store for the island as it undergoes its biggest change in more than half a century.
Figures in a Landscape: People and Places
Theroux, Paul
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.00 Our Price: $4.49
Paul Theroux’s latest collection of essays applies his signature searching curiosity to a life lived as much in reading as on the road. This writerly tour-de-force features a satisfyingly varied selection of topics. Travel essays take us to Ecuador, Zimbabwe, and Hawaii, to name a few. Gems of literary criticism reveal fascinating depth in the work of Henry David Thoreau, Muriel Spark, Joseph Conrad, and Hunter Thompson. And in a series of breathtakingly personal profiles, we take a helicopter ride with Elizabeth Taylor, go diagnosing with Oliver Sacks, eavesdrop on the day-to-day life of a Manhattan dominatrix, and explore New York with Robin Williams.An extended meditation on the craft of writing binds together this wide-ranging collection, along with Theroux’s constant quest for the authentic in a person or in a place.
How to Be Married: What I Learned from Real Women on Five Continents About Surviving My First (Really Hard) Year of Marriage
Piazza, Jo
(Hardcover)
List Price: $26.00 Our Price: $4.49
Everyone tells you marriage is hard, but no one tells you what to do about it.At age thirty-four, Jo Piazza got her romantic-comedy ending when she met the man of her dreams on a boat in the Galápagos Islands and was engaged three months later. But before long, Jo found herself riddled with questions. How do you make a marriage work in a world where you no longer need to be married? How does an independent, strong-willed feminist become someone’s partner—all the time?In the tradition of writers such as Nora Ephron and Elizabeth Gilbert, award-winning journalist and nationally bestselling author Jo Piazza writes a provocative memoir of a real first year of marriage that will forever change the way we look at matrimony. A travel editor constantly on the move, Jo journeys to twenty countries on five continents to figure out what modern marriage means. Throughout this stunning, funny, warm, and wise personal narrative, she gleans wisdom from matrilineal tribeswomen, French ladies who lunch, Orthodox Jewish moms, Swedish stay-at-home dads, polygamous warriors, and Dutch prostitutes.Written with refreshing candor, elegant prose, astute reporting, and hilarious insight into the human psyche, How to Be Married offers an honest portrait of an utterly charming couple. When life throws more at them than they ever expected—a terrifying health diagnosis, sick parents to care for, unemployment—they ultimately create a fresh understanding of what it means to be equal partners during the good and bad times. Through their journey, they reveal a framework that will help the rest of us keep our marriages strong, from engagement into the newlywed years and beyond.
See You Again in Pyongyang: A Journey Into Kim Jong Un's North Korea
Jeppesen, Travis
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.00 Our Price: $4.49
In See You Again in Pyongyang, Travis Jeppesen, the first American to complete a university program in North Korea, culls from his experiences living, traveling, and studying in the country to create a multifaceted portrait of the country and its idiosyncratic capital city in the Kim Jong Un Era.Anchored by the experience of his five trips to North Korea and his interactions with citizens from all walks of life, Jeppesen takes readers behind the propaganda, showing how the North Korean system actually works in daily life. He challenges the notion that Pyongyang is merely a "showcase capital" where everything is staged for the benefit of foreigners, as well as the idea that Pyongyangites are brainwashed robots. Jeppesen introduces readers to an array of fascinating North Koreans, from government ministers with a side hustle in black market Western products to young people enamored with American pop culture.With unique personal insight and a rigorous historical grounding, Jeppesen goes beyond the media cliches, showing North Koreans in their full complexity. See You Again in Pyongyang is an essential addition to the literature about one of the world's most fascinating and mysterious places.
Best. State. Ever. A Florida Man Defends His Homeland
Barry, Dave
(Hardcover)
List Price: $27.00 Our Price: $4.99
A brilliantly funny exploration of the Sunshine State from the man who knows it best: Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times-bestselling author Dave Barry. We never know what will happen next in Florida. We know only that, any minute now, something will. Every few months, Dave Barry gets a call from some media person wanting to know, "What the hell is wrong with Florida?" Somehow, the state's acquired an image as a subtropical festival of stupid, and as a loyal Floridian, Dave begs to differ. Sure, there was the 2000 election. And people seem to take their pants off for no good reason. And it has flying insects the size of LeBron James. But it is a great state, and Dave is going to tell you why. Join him as he celebrates Florida from Key West at the bottom to whatever it is that's at the top, from the Sunshine State's earliest history to the fun-fair of weirdness that it is today. It's the most hilarious book yet from "the funniest damn writer in the whole country" (Carl Hiaasen, and he should know). By the end, you'll have to admit that whatever else you might think about Florida--you can never say it's boring.
Headhunters on My Doorstep
Troost, J. Maarten
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Our Price: $4.99
Chronicles Troost's return to the South Pacific after his struggle with alcoholism. Deciding to retrace the path once traveled by the author of Treasure Island, Troost follows Robert Louis Stevenson to the Marquesas, the Tuamotus, Tahiti, Kiribati, and Samoa, tumbling from one comic misadventure to another. Headhunters on My Doorstep is a funny yet poignant account of one man's journey to find himself that will captivate travel writing aficionados, Robert Louis Stevenson fans, and anyone who has ever lost his way.
Iron & Silk
Salzman, Mark
(Softcover)
List Price: $12.00 Our Price: $5.29
Salzman captures post-cultural revolution China through his adventures as a young American English teacher in China and his shifu-tudi (master-student) relationship with China's foremost martial arts teacher.
As the Romans Do
Epstein, Alan
(Softcover)
List Price: $13.00 Our Price: $5.59
Rome is a great place to visit - but imagine the delights of living there. Long in love with the Eternal City, Alan Epstein has been reveling in life as a resident since 1995. In As the Romans Do, he reveals the city and its people in all their facets and contradictions: their gregarious caffé culture, inborn artistic flair, passionate appreciation of good food, instinctive mistrust of technology, showy sex appeal, ingrained charm, and much more. He unveils a place alive with pleasure and paradox, both pagan and Christian, Western and Middle Eastern. Rome is where one can relax, reflect, revel, and rebel - all between the morning's cappuccino and the evening's grappa.
The City of Falling Angels
Berendt, John
(Softcover)
List Price: $18.00 Our Price: $5.59
The City of Falling Angels opens on the evening of January 29, 1996, when a dramatic fire destroys the historic Fenice opera house. The loss of the Fenice, where five of Verdi's operas premiered, is a catastrophe for Venetians. Arriving in Venice three days after the fire, Berendt becomes a kind of detective-inquiring into the nature of life in this remarkable museum-city-while gradually revealing the truth about the fire. In the course of his investigations, Berendt introduces us to a rich cast of characters; a prominent Venetian poet whose shocking 'suicide' prompts his skeptical friends to pursue a murder suspect on their own; the first family of American expatriates that loses possession of the family palace after four generations of ownership; an organization of high-society, partygoing Americans who raise money to preserve the art and architecture of Venice, while quarreling in public among themselves, questioning one another's motives and drawing startled Venetians into the fray; a contemporary Venetian surrealist painter and outrageous provocateur; the master glassblower of Venice; and numerous others-stool pigeons, scapegoats, hustlers, sleepwalkers, believers in Martians, the Plant Man, the Rat Man, and Henry James.
Driving Mr. Albert
Paterniti, Michael
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.00 Our Price: $5.59
Albert Einstein's brain floats in a Tupperware bowl in a gray duffel bag in the trunk of a Buick Skylark barreling across America. Driving the car is journalist Michael Paterniti. Sitting next to him is an eighty-four-year-old pathologist named Thomas Harvey, who performed the autopsy on Einstein in 1955 - then simply removed the brain and took it home. And kept it for over forty years. On a cold February day, the two men and the brain leave New Jersey and light out on I-70 for sunny California, where Einstein's perplexed granddaughter, Evelyn, awaits. And riding along as the imaginary fourth passenger is Einstein himself, an id-driven genius, the original galactic slacker with his head in the stars. Part travelogue, part memoir, part history, part biography, and part meditation, Driving Mr. Albert is one of the most unique road trips in modern literature.
First Stop in the New World
Lida, David
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Our Price: $5.59
First Stop in the New World is a street-level panorama of Mexico City, the largest metropolis in the western hemisphere and the cultural capital of the Spanish-speaking world. Journalist David Lida expertly captures the kaleidoscopic nature of life in a city defined by pleasure and danger, ecstatic joy and appalling tragedy - hanging in limbo between the developed and underdeveloped worlds. With this literary-journalist account, he establishes himself as the ultimate chronicler of this bustling megalopolis at a key moment in its - and our - history.
Mexican Enough
Griest, Stephanie Elizondo
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.00 Our Price: $5.59
Growing up in a half-white, half-brown town and family in South Texas, Stephanie Elizondo Griest struggled with her cultural identity. Upon turning thirty, she ventured to her mother's native Mexico to do some root-searching and stumbled upon a social movement that shook the nation to its core. Mexican Enough chronicles her adventures rumbling with luchadores (professional wrestlers), marching with rebel teachers in Oaxaca, investigating the murder of a prominent gay activist, and sneaking into a prison to meet with indigenous resistance fighters. She also visits families of the undocumented workers she befriended back home. Travel mates include a Polish thief, a Border Patrol agent, and a sultry dominatrix. Part memoir, part journalistic reportage, Mexican Enough illuminates how we cast off our identity in our youth, only to strive to find it again as adults -- and the lessons to be learned along the way.
Nine Hills to Nambonkaha
Erdman, Sarah
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.00 Our Price: $5.59
A portrait of a resilient African village, ruled until recently by magic and tradition, now facing modern problems and responding, often triumphantly, to change. When Sarah Erdman, a Peace Corps volunteer, arrived in Nambonkaha, she became the first Caucasian to venture there since the French colonialists. But even though she was thousands of miles away from the United States, completely on her own in this tiny village in the West African nation of Côte d'Ivoire, she did not feel like a stranger for long. As her vivid narrative unfolds, Erdman draws us into the changing world of the village that became her home. Here is a place where electricity is expected but never arrives, where sorcerers still conjure magic, where the tok-tok sound of women grinding corn with pestles rings out in the mornings like church bells. Rare rains provoke bathing in the streets and the most coveted fashion trend is fabric with illustrations of Western cell phones. Yet Nambonkaha is also a place where AIDS threatens and poverty is constant, where women suffer the indignities of patriarchal customs, where children work like adults while still managing to dream. Lyrical and topical, Erdman's beautiful debut captures the astonishing spirit of an unforgettable community.
Perseus in the Wind: A Life of Travel (The Freya Stark Collection)
Stark, Freya
(Paperback)
List Price: $14.00 Our Price: $5.59
Written just after the Second World War, Perseus in the Wind (named after the constellation) is perhaps the most personal, and haunting, of all Freya Stark's writings. She muses on the seasons, the effect light has on a landscape at a particular time of day, the smell of the earth after rain, Muslim saints, Indian temples, war and old age. Each chapter is devoted to a particular theme: happiness (simple pleasures, like her father's passion for the view from his cabin in Canada); education (to be able to command happiness, recognize beauty, value death, increase enjoyment); beauty (incongruous, flighty and elusive - a description of the stars, the burst of flowers in a park); death (a childhood awareness of the finality of time, the meaningfulness of the end); memory (the jewelled quality of literature, pleasure, love, an echo or a scent when aged by the passage of time). For those who have loved her travel writing, Perseus in the Wind illuminates the motivations behind her journeys and the woman behind the traveller.
Never Can Say Goodbye
Botton, Sari (Edt)
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Our Price: $5.85
The follow-up to the award-winning anthology Goodbye to All That, Never Can Say Goodbye is an exuberant celebration of New York, featuring contributions from luminaries such as Elizabeth Gilbert, Susan Orlean, Rosanne Cash, Nick Flynn, Whoopi Goldberg, Phillip Lopate, Owen King, Amy Sohn, Alexander Chee, and many others. These essays take place in dive bars and museums, cinemas and old restaurants, horse-drawn carriages and subway cars, capturing the true essence of life in New York. Never Can Say Goodbye is ultimately a love letter to the Big Apple and a must-have for every lover of New York - regardless of whether or not you call the city home.
The Comfort Food Diaries: My Quest for the Perfect Dish to Mend a Broken Heart
Nunn, Emily
(Hardcover)
List Price: $26.00 Our Price: $6.09
In the tradition of Elizabeth Gilbert and Ruth Reichl, former New Yorker editor Emily Nunn chronicles her journey to heal old wounds and find comfort in the face of loss through travel, home-cooked food, and the company of friends and family.One life-changing night, reeling from her beloved brother’s sudden death, a devastating breakup with her handsome engineer fiancé and eviction from the apartment they shared, Emily Nunn had lost all sense of family, home, and financial security. After a few glasses of wine, heartbroken and unmoored, Emily - an avid cook and professional food writer - poured her heart out on Facebook. The next morning she woke up with an awful hangover and a feeling she’d made a terrible mistake - only to discover she had more friends than she knew, many of whom invited her to come visit and cook with them while she put her life back together. Thus began the Comfort Food Tour.Searching for a way forward, Emily travels the country, cooking and staying with relatives and friends. She also travels back to revisit scenes from her dysfunctional Southern upbringing, dominated by her dramatic, unpredictable mother and her silent, disengaged father. Her wonderfully idiosyncratic aunts and uncles and cousins come to life in these pages, all part of the rich Southern story in which past and present are indistinguishable, food is a source of connection and identity, and a good story is often preferred to a not-so-pleasant truth. But truth, pleasant or not, is what Emily Nunn craves, and with it comes an acceptance of the losses she has endured, and a sense of hope for the future.In the salty snap of a single Virginia ham biscuit, in the sour tang of Grandmother’s Lemon Cake, Nunn experiences the healing power of comfort food - and offers up dozens of recipes for the wonderful meals that saved her life. With the biting humor of David Sedaris and the emotional honesty of Cheryl Strayed, Nunn delivers a moving account of her descent into darkness and her gradual, hard-won return to the living.
Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer
Holmes, Richard
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Our Price: $6.09
Richard Holmes knew he had become a true biographer the day his bank bounced a check that he had inadvertently dated 1772. Because for the acclaimed chronicler of Shelley and Coleridge, biography is a physical pursuit, an ardent and arduous retracing of footsteps that may have vanished centuries before.In this gripping book, Holmes takes us from France’s Massif Central, where he followed the route taken by Robert Louis Stevenson and a sweet-natured donkey, to Mary Wollstonecraft’s Revolutionary Paris, to the Italian villages where Percy Shelley tried to cast off the strictures of English morality and marriage. Footsteps is a wonderful exploration of the ties between biographers and their subjects, filled with passion and revelations.
The Great Global Bucket List
Esrock, Robin
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.99 Our Price: $6.09
For over a decade, renowned travel journalist, bestselling author, and TV host Robin Esrock scoured the globe in search of one-of-a-kind, bucket list–worthy experiences. During his remarkable journey to over 100 countries on seven continents, Esrock uncovered unique adventures, fascinating history, cultural spectacles, natural wonders, hilarious situations and unforgettable characters - proving that modern travel is so much more than just over-trafficked tourist attractions. From the Amazon jungle to the beaches of Zanzibar, The Great Global Bucket List presents a world we don’t hear much about in the news. A world that is strikingly beautiful, thought-provoking, incredibly diverse and sometimes, just very, very funny. With his trademark wit, photography and insight, Esrock introduces the inspiring experiences you’ll be talking and dreaming about for many years to come.
Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure
MacDonald, Sarah
(Paperback)
List Price: $12.95 Our Price: $6.09
When the love of MacDonald's life is posted to India, she quits her dream job to move to the most polluted city on earth, New Delhi. From spiritual retreats and crumbling nirvanas to war zones and New Delhi nightclubs, this is a journey that only a woman on a mission to save her soul, her love life - and her sanity - can survive.
Impossible Owls: Essays
Phillips, Brian
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Our Price: $6.09
In his highly anticipated debut essay collection, Impossible Owls, Brian Phillips demonstrates why he’s one of the most iconoclastic journalists of the digital age, beloved for his ambitious, off-kilter, meticulously reported essays that read like novels.The eight essays assembled here - five from Phillips’s Grantland and MTV days, and three new pieces - go beyond simply chronicling some of the modern world’s most uncanny, unbelievable, and spectacular oddities (though they do that, too). Researched for months and even years on end, they explore the interconnectedness of the globalized world, the consequences of history, the power of myth, and the ways people attempt to find meaning. He searches for tigers in India, and uncovers a multigenerational mystery involving an oil tycoon and his niece turned stepdaughter turned wife in the Oklahoma town where he grew up. Through each adventure, Phillips’s remarkable voice becomes a character itself - full of verve, rich with offhanded humor, and revealing unexpected vulnerability.Dogged, self-aware, and radiating a contagious enthusiasm for his subjects, Phillips is an exhilarating guide to the confusion and wonder of the world today. If John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead was the last great collection of New Journalism from the print era, Impossible Owls is the first of the digital age.
Menagerie Manor
Durrell, Gerald
(Paperback)
List Price: $14.00 Our Price: $6.09
With his unfailing charm, Durrell tells the story of how he finally fulfilled his childhood dream of founding his own private zoo, the Manor of Les Augres, on the English Channel island of Jersey. With the help of an enduring wife, a selfless staff, and a reluctant bank manager, the zoo grows, and readers are treated to a colorful parade of the zoo's unusual animal inhabitants.
Sundays in America: A Yearlong Road Trip in Search of Christian Faith
Shea, Suzanne Strempek
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Our Price: $6.09
When Pope John Paul II died, Suzanne Strempek Shea, who had not been an active member of a church community for some years, recognized in his mourners a faith-filled passion that she longed to recapture in her own life. So she set out on a pilgrimage to visit a different church every Sunday for one year - a journey that would take her through the broad spectrum of contemporary Protestant Christianity practiced in this country. From a rousing Easter Baptist service in Harlem, to Colorado's Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame for a sing-along at the Cowboy Church; from a roofless Episcopal church in Hawaii, to a storefront African orthodox church where jazz legend John Coltrane is considered a bona fide saint; from the largest church in the country to a small-town church packed for a Sunday school class taught by Jimmy Carter, Shea toured more than thirty states in search of the meaning of Christian faith to the many who practice it. The result, Sundays in America, is an essential guide for those seeking a new house for their worship as well as a colorful road trip for the armchair explorer.
To a Mountain in Tibet
Thubron, Colin
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.99 Our Price: $6.09
Colin Thubron's To a Mountain in Tibet is a memoir of discovery and loss, chronicling the author's journey to the holiest mountain on earth, the solitary peak of Kailas in modern-day Tibet. To Buddhists and Hindus, it is the mystic heart of the world and an ancient site of pilgrimage. It has never been climbed. Thubron undertakes this journey in the wake of his mother's death, using the pilgrimage as a lens to examine both his deeply felt loss and his lifelong need for solitude, which has shaped his career as a writer—one who travels to places far outside his own history and culture. A vivid and powerful travelogue through an evocative landscape, To a Mountain in Tibet provides a fascinating encounter with the mythic and spiritual traditions of a foreign culture—encapsulated in the wondrous insights of an intimate personal voyage.
Voyager: Travel Writings
Banks, Russell
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.99 Our Price: $6.09
Now in his mid-seventies, Russell Banks has indulged his wanderlust for more than half a century. This longing for escape has taken him from the "bright green islands and turquoise seas" of the Caribbean islands to peaks in the Himalayas, the Andes, and beyond.In each of these remarkable essays, Banks considers his life and the world. In Everglades National Park this "perfect place to time-travel," he traces his own timeline. Recalling his trips to the Caribbean in the title essay, "Voyager," Banks dissects his relationships with the four women who would become his wives. In the Himalayas, he embarks on a different quest of self-discovery. "One climbs a mountain not to conquer it, but to be lifted like this away from the earth up into the sky," he explains.Pensive, frank, beautiful, and engaging, Voyager brings together the social, the personal, and the historical, opening a path into the heart and soul of this revered writer.
The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New
Dillard, Annie
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.99 Our Price: $6.35
The Abundance includes the best of Annie Dillard's essays, delivered in her fierce and muscular prose. Intense, vivid, and fearless, her work endows the true and seemingly ordinary aspects of life with beauty and irony. These essays invite readers into sweeping landscapes, to join her in exploring the complexities of time and death, often with wry humor. On one page, an eagle falls from the sky with a weasel attached to its throat; on another, a man walks into a bar.Marking the vigor of this powerful writer, The Abundance highlights Annie Dillard's elegance of mind.
A Florida State of Mind: An Unnatural History of Our Weirdest State
Wright, James D.
(Hardcover)
List Price: $27.99 Our Price: $6.59
There's an old clip of Bugs Bunny sawing the entire state of Florida off the continent - and every single time a news story springs up about some shenanigans in Florida, someone on the internet posts it in response. Why are we so ready to wave goodbye to the Sunshine State? In A Florida State of Mind: An Unnatural History of Our Weirdest State, James D. Wright makes the case that there are plenty of reasons to be scandalized by the land and its sometimes-kooky, sometimes-terrifying denizens, but there's also plenty of room for hilarity.Florida didn't just become weird; it's built that way. Uncharted swampland doesn't easily give way to sprawling suburbia. It took violent colonization, land scams to trick non-Floridians into buying undeveloped property, and the development of railroads to benefit one man's hotel empire.Even the most natural parts of Florida are unnatural. Florida citrus? Not from here, but from China. Gators? Oh, they're from Florida all right, but that doesn't make having 1 per every 20 humans normal. Animals...in the form of roadkill? Only Florida allows you to keep anything you kill on the road (and anything you find).Yet everyone loves Florida: tourists come in droves, and people relocate to Florida constantly (only 36% of residents were born there). Crammed with unforgettable stories and facts, Florida will show readers exactly why.
Lasso the Wind
Egan, Timothy
(Paperback)
List Price: $13.00 Our Price: $6.59
Lasso the Wind is a look at the 11 states 'on the sunset side of the 100th meridian' that Egan regards as the true West. Fishing rod and notebook in hand, he travels by car and foot, horseback and raft, through a region struggling to find its future direction under both the ideological weight of the past and the commercial threats of the present. He visits the Sky City of Acoma, which may be the oldest continuously inhabited community in America, and then goes to an instant town on the Colorado River - Lake Havasu City, built around the transplanted London Bridge. He meets an outlaw cowboy in New Mexico, grazing his cattle on federal land. From Las Vegas, a sprawling, ever-expanding monument to gaudiness and glitz, to the relatively untouched wilds of Idaho's Bitterroot Mountains, Egan leads us through the world of industrialists, politicians, ranchers, and developers, back to the heart of the land itself to see the wealth and grandeur that have inspired the dreams of generations. Interweaving historical accounts with explorations of the contemporary landscape, Egan shows how and why the region came to its current state.
Lean Out: A Meditation on the Madness of Modern Life
Henley, Tara
(Paperback)
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A deeply personal and informed reflection on the modern world--and why so many feel disillusioned by it.In 2016, journalist Tara Henley was at the top of her game working in Canadian media. She had traveled the world, from Soweto to Bangkok and Borneo to Brooklyn, interviewing authors and community leaders, politicians and Hollywood celebrities. But when she started getting chest pains at her desk in the newsroom, none of that seemed to matter.The health crisis--not cardiac, it turned out, but anxiety--forced her to step off the media treadmill and examine her life and the stressful twenty-first century world around her. Henley was not alone; North America was facing an epidemic of lifestyle-related health problems. And yet, the culture was continually celebrating the elite few who thrived in the always-on work world, those who perpetually leaned in. Henley realized that if we wanted innovative solutions to the wave of burnout and stress-related illness, it was time to talk to those who had leaned out.Part memoir, part travelogue, and part investigation, Lean Out tracks Henley's journey from the heart of the connected city to the fringe communities that surround it. From early retirement enthusiasts in urban British Columbia to moneyless men in rural Ireland, Henley uncovers a parallel track in which everyday citizens are quietly dropping out of the mainstream and reclaiming their lives from overwork. Underlying these disparate movements is a rejection of consumerism, a growing appetite for social contribution, and a quest for meaningful connection in this era of extreme isolation and loneliness.As she connects the dots between anxiety and overwork, Henley confronts the biggest issues of our time.
My Kind of Place (Updated)
Orlean, Susan
(Paperback)
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New Yorker writer and author of The Library Book takes readers on a series of remarkable journeys in this uniquely witty, sophisticated, and far-flung travel book.In this irresistible collection of adventures far and near, Orlean conducts a tour of the world via its subcultures, from the heart of the African music scene in Paris to the World Taxidermy Championships in Springfield, Illinois—and even into her own apartment, where she imagines a very famous houseguest taking advantage of her hospitality.With Orlean as guide, lucky readers partake in all manner of armchair activity. They will climb Mt. Fuji and experience a hike most intrepid Japanese have never attempted; play ball with Cuba’s Little Leaguers, promising young athletes born in a country where baseball and politics are inextricably intertwined; trawl Icelandic waters with Keiko, everyone’s favorite whale as he tries to make it on his own; stay awhile in Midland, Texas, hometown of George W. Bush, a place where oil time is the only time that matters; explore the halls of a New York City school so troubled it’s known as “Horror High”; and stalk caged tigers in Jackson, New Jersey, a suburban town with one of the highest concentrations of tigers per square mile anywhere in the world.Vivid, humorous, unconventional, and incomparably entertaining, Susan Orlean’s writings for The New Yorker have delighted readers for over a decade. My Kind of Place is an inimitable treat by one of America’s premier literary journalists.
My Paris Dream: An Education in Style, Slang, and Seduction in the Great City on the Seine
Betts, Kate
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Our Price: $6.59
"You can always come back," my mother said. "Just go."As a young woman, Kate Betts nursed a dream of striking out on her own in a faraway place and becoming a glamorous foreign correspondent. After college—and not without trepidation—she took off for Paris, renting a room in the apartment of a young BCBG (bon chic, bon genre) family and throwing herself into the local culture. She was determined to master French slang, style, and savoir faire, and to find a job that would give her a reason to stay.After a series of dues-paying jobs that seemed only to reinforce her outsider status, Kate’s hard work and willingness to take on any assignment paid off: Her writing and intrepid forays into la France Profonde—true France—caught the eye of John Fairchild, the mercurial fashion arbiter and publisher of Women’s Wear Daily, the industry’s bible. Kate’s earliest assignments—investigating the mineral water preferred by high society, chasing after a costumed band of wild boar hunters through the forests of Brittany—were a rough apprenticeship, but she was rewarded for her efforts and was initiated into the elite ranks of Mr. Fairchild’s trusted few who sat beside him in the front row and at private previews in the ateliers of the gods of French fashion. From a woozy yet mesmerizing Yves Saint Laurent and the mischievous and commanding Karl Lagerfeld to the riotous, brilliant young guns who were rewriting all the rules—Martin Margiela, Helmut Lang, John Galliano—Betts gives us a view of what it was like to be an American girl, learning about herself, falling in love, and finding her tribe.Kate Betts’s captivating memoir brings to life the enchantment of France—from the nightclubs of 1980s Paris where she learned to dance Le Rock, to the lavender fields of Provence and the grand spectacle of the Cour Carrée—and magically re-creates that moment in life when a young woman discovers who she’s meant to be.
Paris, Paris
Downie, David
(Paperback)
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Swapping his native San Francisco for the City of Light, travel writer David Downie arrived in Paris in 1986 on a one-way ticket, his head full of romantic notions. Curiosity and the legs of a cross-country runner propelled him daily from an unheated, seventh-floor walk-up garret near the Champs-Elysees to the old Montmartre haunts of the doomed painter Modigliani, the tombs of Pere-Lachaise cemetery, the luxuriant alleys of the Luxembourg Gardens and the aristocratic Ile Saint-Louis midstream in the Seine.Downie wound up living in the chic Marais district, married to the Paris-born American photographer Alison Harris, an equally incurable walker and chronicler. Ten books and a quarter-century later, he still spends several hours every day rambling through Paris, and writing about the city he loves. An irreverent, witty romp featuring thirty-one short prose sketches of people, places and daily life, "Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light" ranges from the glamorous to the least-known corners and characters of the world's favorite city. Photographs by Alison Harris.
Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier
Adams, Mark
(Paperback)
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In 1899, railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman organized a most unusual summer voyage to the wilds of Alaska: He converted a steamship into a luxury "floating university," populated by some of America's best and brightest scientists and writers, including the anti-capitalist eco-prophet John Muir. Those aboard encountered a land of immeasurable beauty and impending environmental calamity. More than a hundred years later, Alaska is still America's most sublime wilderness, both the lure that draws one million tourists annually on Inside Passage cruises and as a natural resources larder waiting to be raided. As ever, it remains a magnet for weirdos and dreamers.Armed with Dramamine and an industrial-strength mosquito net, Mark Adams sets out to retrace the 1899 expedition. Traveling town to town by water, Adams ventures three thousand miles north through Wrangell, Juneau, and Glacier Bay, then continues west into the colder and stranger regions of the Aleutians and the Arctic Circle. Along the way, he encounters dozens of unusual characters (and a couple of very hungry bears) and investigates how lessons learned in 1899 might relate to Alaska's current struggles in adapting to the pressures of a changing climate and world.
The Braindead Megaphone
Saunders, George
(Paperback)
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George Saunders's first foray into nonfiction is comprised of essays on literature, travel, and politics. At the core of this unique collection are Saunders's travel essays based on his trips to seek out the mysteries of the "Buddha Boy" of Nepal; to attempt to indulge in the extravagant pleasures of Dubai; and to join the exploits of the minutemen at the Mexican border. Saunders expertly navigates the works of Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, and Esther Forbes, and leads the reader across the rocky political landscape of modern America. Emblazoned with his trademark wit and singular vision, Saunders's endeavor into the art of the essay is testament to his exceptional range and ability as a writer and thinker.
Going Into Town: A Love Letter to New York
Chast, Roz
(Paperback)
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New Yorker cartoonist and NYT bestselling author Roz Chast, native Brooklynite-turned-suburban commuter deemed the quintessential New Yorker, has always been intensely alive to the glorious spectacle that is Manhattan--the daily clash of sidewalk racers and dawdlers, the fascinating range of dress codes, and the priceless, nutty outbursts of souls from all walks of life.For Chast, adjusting to life outside the city was surreal (you can own trees!? you have to drive!?), but she recognized that the reverse was true for her kids. On trips into town, they would marvel at the strange visual world of Manhattan--its blackened sidewalk gum wads, "those West Side Story–things" (fire escapes)--its crazily honeycombed systems and grids.Told through Chast's singularly zany, laugh-out-loud, touching, and true cartoons, Going into Town is part New York stories (the "overheard and overseen" of the island borough), part personal and practical guide to walking, talking, renting, and venting--an irresistible, one-of-a-kind love letter to the city.
House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest
Childs, Craig
(Softcover)
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A feat of historical detection - the most significant, and certainly the most enthralling, book on American prehistory to appear in decades. The greatest "unsolved mystery" of the American Southwest relates to the Anasazi, the native peoples who by the 11th century converged on Chaco Canyon (now New Mexico) and built a flourishing cultural center that attracted pilgrims from far and wide, a vital crossroads of the prehistoric world. The Anasazis' accomplishments - in agriculture, in art, in commerce, in architecture and engineering - were astounding, rivaling those of the Mayans in distant Central America. By the 13th century, however, the Anasazi were gone from Chaco. Vanished. What was it - drought? pestilence? war? forced migration? mass murder or suicide? Craig Childs draws on scholarly research and a lifetime of adventure and exploration in the American Southwest to pursue the mystery of their disappearance. Considering many possibilities, he points the way to a new understanding of how a vibrant civilization collapsed.
The Jaguar Smile
Rushdie, Salman
(Paperback)
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"I did not go to Nicaragua intending to write a book, or, indeed, to write at all: but my encounter with the place affected me so deeply that in the end I had no choice." So notes Salman Rushdie in his first work of nonfiction, a book as imaginative and meaningful as his acclaimed novels. In The Jaguar Smile, Rushdie paints a brilliantly sharp and haunting portrait of the people, the politics, the terrain, and the poetry of "a country in which the ancient, opposing forces of creation and destruction were in violent collision." Recounting his travels there in 1986, in the midst of America's behind-the-scenes war against the Sandinistas, Rushdie reveals a nation resounding to the clashes between government and individuals, history and morality.
The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey
Buck, Rinker
(Paperback)
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Rinker Buck’s The Oregon Trail is an epic account of traveling the 2,000-mile length of the Oregon Trail the old-fashioned way - in a covered wagon with a team of mules - that has captivated readers, critics, and booksellers from coast to coast. Simultaneously a majestic journey across the West, a significant work of history, and a moving personal saga, Buck’s chronicle is a “laugh-out-loud masterpiece” (Willamette Week) that “so ensnares the emotions it becomes a tear-jerker at its close” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis) and “will leave you daydreaming and hungry to see this land” (The Boston Globe).
The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific
Troost, J. Maarten
(Paperback)
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After racking up useless graduate degrees and muddling through a series of temp jobs, author Troost decided the idea of dropping everything and moving to the ends of the Earth was irresistibly romantic. He should have known better. This is his hilarious story.
Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (P.S.)
Hurston, Zora Neale
(Softcover)
List Price: $13.99 Our Price: $6.89
Based on acclaimed author Zora Neale Hurston's personal experiences in Haiti and Jamaica - where she participated as an initiate rather than just an observer during her visits in the 1930s - Tell My Horse is a fascinating firsthand account of the mysteries of Voodoo. An invaluable resource and remarkable guide to Voodoo practices, rituals, and beliefs, it is a travelogue into a dark, mystical world that offers a vividly authentic picture of ceremonies, customs, and superstitions.
A Year in Paris: Season by Season in the City of Light
Baxter, John
(Paperback)
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When the common people of France revolted in 1789, one of the first ways they chose to correct the excesses of the monarchy and the church was to rename the months of the year. Selected by poet and playwright Philippe-Francois-Nazaire Fabre, these new names reflected what took place at that season in the natural world; Fructidor was the month of fruit, Floréal that of flowers, while the winter wind (vent) dominated Ventôse.Though the names didn’t stick, these seasonal rhythms of the year continue to define Parisians, as well as travelers to the city. As acclaimed author and long-time Paris resident John Baxter himself recollects, “My own arrival in France took place in Nivôse, the month of snow, and continued in Pluviôse, the season of rain. To someone coming from Los Angeles, where seasons barely existed, the shock was visceral. Struggling to adjust, I found reassurance in the literature, music, even the cuisine of my adoptive country, all of which marched to the inaudible drummer of the seasons.”Devoting a section of the book to each of Fabre’s months, Baxter draws upon Paris’s literary, cultural and artistic past to paint an affecting, unforgettable portrait of the city. Touching upon the various ghosts of Paris past, from Hemingway and Zelda Fitzgerald, to Claude Debussy to MFK Fisher to Francois Mitterrand, Baxter evokes the rhythms of the seasons in the City of Light, and the sense of wonder they can arouse for all who visit and live there.A melange of history, travel reportage, and myth, of high culture and low, A Year in Paris is vintage John Baxter: a vicarious thrill ride for anyone who loves Paris.
Pirate Hunter of the Caribbean
Cordingly, David
(Softcover)
List Price: $18.00 Our Price: $7.19
From renowned pirate historian David Cordingly, author of Under the Black Flag and film consultant for the original Pirates of the Caribbean, comes the thrilling story of Captain Woodes Rogers, the avenging nemesis of the worst cutthroats ever to terrorize the high seas. Once a marauding privateer himself, Woodes Rogers went from laying siege to laying down the law. During Britain's war with Spain, Rogers sailed for the crown in sorties against Spanish targets in the Pacific; battled scurvy, hurricanes, and mutinies; captured a treasure galleon; and even rescued the castaway who inspired Robinson Crusoe. Appointed governor of the Bahamas in 1717, the fearless Rogers defended the island colony of King George I against plundering pirates and an attempted Spanish invasion. His resolute example led to the downfall of such notorious pirates as Blackbeard, Calico Jack, and the female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read. A vividly detailed and action-packed portrait of one of the early eighteenth century's most colorful characters, Pirate Hunter of the Caribbean serves up history that's as fascinating and gripping as any seafaring legend.
Seven League Boots: Adventures Across the World from Arabia to Abyssinia
Halliburton, Richard
(Paperback)
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"I had been commissioned to go anywhere in the world I wished and write whatever pleased me. My only orders were to move fast, visit strange places, to meet whomever was interesting - and to start at once," Richard Halliburton's fifth and last book, Seven League Boots illustrates how he followed these orders with passion and abandon. America's favorite adventurer dined with Haile Selassie and rode the Rhinoceros Express in Ethiopia; he had an audience with King Ibn Saud outside the gates of Mecca (which he had tried to sneak into) and finally rode an elephant over the Alps in the tracks of another great adventurer, Hannibal. This is Halliburton at his best: reckless and romantic. It is also the last chapter of a life that had, at its end, grown tragic. Nearing forty, physically exhausted, and in financial trouble, Halliburton thought to roll the dice once again, hoping that the charm which had always saved him in the past would materialize one more time. But it was not to be. His last journey was fatal. Soon after finishing this book, he attempted to sail a junk across the Pacific, but never returned.
Blue Highways: A Journey into America
Heat-Moon, William Least
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Our Price: $7.45
A masterful view of the diversity of America, told via the author's 13,000-mile, 38-state, automobile trek down the country's fascinating backroads. His adventures, his discoveries, and his recollections of the extraordinary people he encountered along the way amount to a revelation of the true American experience.
Blue: A St. Barts Memoir
Coggins, David
(Hardcover)
List Price: $24.95 Our Price: $7.45
Blue: A St. Barts Memoir by artist and writer David Coggins is an affectionate, poetic account of his family's annual visits to St. Barthélemy in the French West Indies. As in his popular Paris in Winter, the pages of Blue are full of lyrical writing and vivid watercolors and ink drawings.Coggins and his family have a passion for the simple yet sophisticated pleasures of life on the beautiful French island. That passion is contagious, and the reader is soon caught up in rituals developed and refined over 20 years. Much of it centers around the mountain villa where they stay and the timeless joys of the Caribbean: swimming, reading, sailing, meals overlooking the sea.Coggins describes the natural world lovingly, and captures it in his drawings--sublime sky and sea, lush tropical gardens, abundant wildlife from iguanas to whales. He writes about social life, about the famous and glamorous but more about people who live on the island, chefs, artists, wine sellers, sailors.Blue is a delight for the eye and the mind, an antidote to the pressures of urban life. It's a deeply personal telling of one family's experiences in an idyllic setting, but Coggins's gifts as storyteller and illustrator, conveyed with humanity and a love of life, make Blue universally enchanting.
The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World
Weiner, Eric
(Paperback)
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Many authors have attempted to describe what happiness is: fewer have shown us where it is, what we can learn from the inhabitants of different cultures, and how changing your location can change your mood. Now in this enlightening book, Eric Weiner, a self-described mope and longtime foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, travels to some of the world's most contented places. Full of inspired moments and earned epiphanies, this riveting book will make you happier as you visit: India, where happiness and misery live side-by-side; Bhutan, where the king has made Gross National Happiness a national priority; Switzerland, where residents believe envy is the great enemy of happiness; Iceland, which, despite being cold, remote, and full of failure, is among the world's happiest places - and for good reason, the author finds.
Havana: A Subtropical Delirium
Kurlansky, Mark
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Our Price: $7.45
Award-winning author Mark Kurlansky presents an insider's view of Havana: the elegant, tattered city he has come to know over more than thirty years. Part cultural history, part travelogue, with recipes, historic engravings, photographs, and Kurlansky's own pen-and-ink drawings throughout, Havana celebrates the city's singular music, literature, baseball, and food; its five centuries of outstanding, neglected architecture; and its extraordinary blend of cultures.Like all great cities, Havana has a rich history that informs the vibrant place it is today--from the native Taino to Columbus's landing, from Cuba's status as a U.S. protectorate to Batista's dictatorship and Castro's revolution, from Soviet presence to the welcoming of capitalist tourism. Havana is a place of extremes: a beautifully restored colonial city whose cobblestone streets pass through areas that have not been painted or repaired since long before the revolution.Kurlansky shows Havana through the eyes of Cuban writers, such as Alejo Carpentier and José Martí, and foreigners, including Graham Greene and Hemingway. He introduces us to Cuban baseball and its highly opinionated fans; the city's music scene, alive with the rhythm of Son; its culinary legacy. Through Mark Kurlansky's multilayered and electrifying portrait, the long-elusive city of Havana comes stirringly to life.
I'm Off Then
Kerkeling, Hape
(Softcover)
List Price: $15.00 Our Price: $7.45
Overweight, overworked, and physically unfit, Kerkeling was an unlikely candidate to make the arduous pilgrimage across the French Alps to the Spanish Shrine of St. James, a 1,200-year-old journey undertaken by nearly 100,000 people every year. But that didn’t stop him from getting off the couch and walking. Along the way, lonely and searching for meaning, he began the journal that turned into this utterly frank, engaging book. Simply by struggling with his physical limitations and the rigors of long-distance walking, he discovered a deep sense of peace that transformed his life and allowed him to forgive himself, and others, more readily. He learned something every day, and he took to finishing each entry with his daily lessons. Filled with quirky fellow pilgrims, historic landscapes, and Kerkeling’s self-deprecating sense of humor, I’m Off Then is an inspiring travelogue, a publishing phenomenon, and a spiritual journey unlike any other.
Londoners
Taylor, Craig
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.99 Our Price: $7.45
Acclaimed writer and editor Craig Taylor spent years traversing every corner of London, getting to know the most interesting of its residents - the voice of the London Underground, a West End rickshaw driver, an East End nightclub door attendant, a mounted soldier of the Queen's Life Guard. Now, in Londoners, this diverse cast of characters - rich and poor, young and old, native and immigrant, men and women (and even a Sarah who used to be a George) - shares indelible tales that capture the city as never before. With candor and humor, these voices paint a vivid, epic, and wholly original portrait of twenty-first-century London, scripting the autobiography of one of the world's greatest cities.
The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian in Paris
Baxter, John
(Softcover)
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Walking is the best way to experience the romance, history, and off-the-beaten-path pleasures of Paris (and life itself, perhaps). In that spirit, the author of the popular "Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas" reveals the most beautiful walks through Paris.
Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape
Shehadeh, Raja
(Softcover)
List Price: $15.00 Our Price: $7.45
Raja Shehadeh is a passionate hill walker. He enjoys nothing more than heading out into the countryside that surrounds his home. But in recent years, his hikes have become less than bucolic and sometimes downright dangerous. That is because his home is Ramallah, on the Palestinian West Bank, and the landscape he traverses is now the site of a tense standoff between his fellow Palestinians and settlers newly arrived from Israel. In this original and evocative book, we accompany Raja on six walks taken between 1978 and 2006. The earlier forays are peaceful affairs, allowing our guide to meditate at length on the character of his native land, a terrain of olive trees on terraced hillsides, luxuriant valleys carved by sacred springs, carpets of wild iris and hyacinth and ancient monasteries built more than a thousand years ago. But latterly, as seemingly endless concrete is poured to build settlements and their surrounding walls, he finds the old trails are now impassable and the countryside he once traversed freely has become contested ground. He is harassed by Israeli border patrols, watches in terror as a young hiking companion picks up an unexploded missile and even, on one occasion when accompanied by his wife, comes under prolonged gunfire.
Passage to Juneau
Raban, Jonathan
(Paperback)
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With the same rigorous observation (natural and social), invigorating stylishness, and encyclopedic learning that he brought to his National Book Award-winning Bad Land, Jonathan Raban conducts readers along the Inside Passage from Seattle to Juneau. The physical distance is 1,000 miles of difficult-and often treacherous-water, which Raban navigates solo in a 35-foot sailboat. But Passage to Juneau also traverses a gulf of centuries and cultures: the immeasurable divide between the Northwest's Indians and its first European explorers - between its embattled fishermen and loggers and its pampered new class. Along the way, Raban offers captivating discourses on art, philosophy, and navigation and an unsparing narrative of personal loss.
Godforsaken Grapes: A Slightly Tipsy Journey Through the World of Strange, Obscure, and Underappreciated Wine
Wilson, Jason
(Hardcover)
List Price: $26.00 Our Price: $7.69
There are nearly 1,400 known varieties of wine grapes in the world—from altesse to zierfandler—but 80 percent of the wine we drink is made from only 20 grapes. In Godforsaken Grapes, Jason Wilson looks at how that came to be and embarks on a journey to discover what we miss.Stemming from his own growing obsession, Wilson moves far beyond the “noble grapes,” hunting down obscure and underappreciated wines from Switzerland, Austria, Portugal, France, Italy, the United States, and beyond. In the process, he looks at why these wines fell out of favor (or never gained it in the first place), what it means to be obscure, and how geopolitics, economics, and fashion have changed what we drink. A combination of travel memoir and epicurean adventure, Godforsaken Grapes is an entertaining love letter to wine.
Knitlandia: A Knitter Sees the World
Parkes, Clara
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.99 Our Price: $7.69
Over the last decade, Clara Parkes has clocked so many travel miles that she's essentially taken off from or landed in a new city every two weeks. As the eyes and ears (and fingers) of the knitting world, she has seen it all. In Knitlandia she takes readers along on many of her most memorable voyages, big and small, from the fjords of Iceland to a cozy yarn shop in Paris's 13th arrondissement, from a noisy spinning mill in Taos to a fledgling festival in Edinburgh. With her usual mix of eloquence and humor, Parkes weaves a masterful narrative that is both personal and universal, touching on the heart of what it means to be a knitter.
My Family and Other Animals
Durrell, Gerald
(Softcover)
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When the unconventional Durrell family can no longer endure the damp, gray English climate, they do what any sensible family would do: sell their house and relocate to the sunny Greek isle of Corfu. My Family and Other Animals was intended to embrace the natural history of the island but ended up as a delightful account of Durrell's family's experiences, from the many eccentric hangers-on to the ceaseless procession of puppies, toads, scorpions, geckoes, ladybugs, glowworms, octopuses, bats, and butterflies into their home.
The Nature Instinct: Learn to Find Direction, Sense Danger, and Even Guess Nature's Next Move Faster Than Thought
Gooley, Tristan
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.95 Our Price: $7.69
Publisher's note: The Nature Instinct was published in the UK under the title Wild Signs and Star Paths.Master outdoorsman Tristan Gooley was just about to make camp when he sensed danger - but couldn’t say why. After sheltering elsewhere, Gooley returned to investigate: What had set off his subconscious alarm?Suddenly, he understood: All of the tree trunks were slightly bent. The ground had already shifted once and could easily become treacherous in a storm.The Nature Instinct shows how we, too, can unlock this intuitive understanding of our surroundings. Learn to sense the forest’s edge from deep in the woods, or whether a wild animal might pose danger - before you even know how you know.
Stalin's Nose: Across the Face of Europe
MacLean, Rory
(Paperback)
List Price: $20.00 Our Price: $7.69
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.
Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip (P.S.)
Hessler, Peter
(Softcover)
List Price: $15.99 Our Price: $8.05
From the bestselling author of "Oracle Bones" and "River Town" comes the final book in his award-winning China trilogy, reporting on the human side of the economic revolution in China.
Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta
Grant, Richard
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Our Price: $8.05
Richard Grant and his girlfriend were living in a shoebox apartment in New York City when they decided on a whim to buy an old plantation house in the Mississippi Delta. Dispatches from Pluto is their journey of discovery into this strange and wonderful American place.
Taco USA
Arellano, Gustavo
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Our Price: $8.05
Nationally syndicated columnist and bestselling author of "Ask a Mexican" Gustavo Arellano presents a tasty trip through the history and culture of Mexican food in this country, uncovering great stories and charting the cuisine's tremendous popularity north of the border. Arellano's fascinating narrative combines history, cultural criticism, food writing, personal anecdotes, and Jesus on a tortilla. In seemingly every decade for over a century, America has tried new culinary trends from south of the border, loved them, and demanded the next big thing. As a result, Mexican food dominates American palates to the tune of billions of dollars in sales per year, from canned refried beans to tortilla wraps and ballpark nachos. It's a little-known history, one that's crept up on this country and left us better for it.
Honeymoon in Purdah: An Iranian Journey
Wearing, Alison
(Paperback)
List Price: $21.00 Our Price: $8.19
To go beyond the legacy of revolution, religious fundamentalism and veiled women and find the real people of Iran, a young Canadian dons the cloak of Islam. The result of Alison Wearing's journey is a warm, funny and shocking collection of riveting portraits and stories about the generous, irrepressible people she met. With a novelist's love of language and eye for detail, she takes the reader into the homes and hearts of people whose spirit, intelligence and laughter enlighten and impress. Beautifully written, engaging, fascinating at every turn, Honeymoon in Purdah reveals an Iran rarely seen by Westerners and leads this exceptional bestselling young writer across new literary borders.
My Paris Dream
Betts, Kate
(Hardcover)
List Price: $27.00 Our Price: $8.19
For readers of How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are, My Paris Dream is a charming and insightful memoir about coming of age as a fashion journalist in 1980s Paris, by former Vogue and Harper's Bazaar editor Kate Betts, the author of Everyday Icon: Michelle Obama and the Power of Style.
The Book of Eating: Adventures in Professional Gluttony
Platt, Adam
(Paperback)
List Price: $27.99 Our Price: $8.79
A wildly hilarious and irreverent memoir of a globe-trotting life lived meal-to-meal by one of our most influential and respected food criticsAs the son of a diplomat growing up in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, Adam Platt didn’t have the chance to become a picky eater. Living, traveling, and eating in some of the most far-flung locations around the world, he developed an eclectic palate and a nuanced understanding of cultures and cuisines that led to some revelations which would prove important in his future career as a food critic. In Tokyo, for instance—“a kind of paradise for nose-to-tail cooking”—he learned that “if you’re interested in telling a story, a hair-raisingly bad meal is much better than a good one."From dim sum in Hong Kong to giant platters of Peking duck in Beijing, fresh-baked croissants in Paris and pierogi on the snowy streets of Moscow, Platt takes us around the world, re-tracing the steps of a unique, and lifelong, culinary education. Providing a glimpse into a life that has intertwined food and travel in exciting and unexpected ways, The Book of Eating is a delightful and sumptuous trip that is also the culinary coming-of-age of a voracious eater and his eventual ascension to become, as he puts it, “a professional glutton.”
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Solnit, Rebecca
(Paperback)
List Price: $18.00 Our Price: $8.79
Whether she is contemplating the history of walking as a cultural and political experience over the past two hundred years (Wanderlust), or using the life of photographer Eadweard Muybridge as a lens to discuss the transformations of space and time in late nineteenth-century America (River of Shadows), Rebecca Solnit has emerged as an inventive and original writer whose mind is daring in the connections it makes. A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnit's own life to explore issues of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown. The result is a distinctive, stimulating, and poignant voyage of discovery.
The Nature Instinct: Relearning Our Lost Intuition for the Inner Workings of the Natural World
Gooley, Tristan
(Hardcover)
List Price: $24.95 Our Price: $8.79
Readers of master outdoorsman Tristan Gooley have learned that the world is filled with clues to look for—we can use the Big Dipper to tell time, for example, and a budding flower to find south. But what about the innate survival instincts that told Gooley to move on one night, just as he was about to make camp? Everything looked perfect, but something felt wrong. When Gooley returned to his abandoned campsite to search for clues, there they were: All of the tree trunks were slightly bent. The ground had already shifted once in a storm—and could easily shift again, becoming treacherous in heavy rain.The Nature Instinct shows us how Gooley and other expert observers—from hunters in the English countryside to the Pygmy people in the Congo—have recovered and rekindled this lost “sixth sense;” a subconscious,deeper understanding of our surroundings. By training ourselves through slow, careful observation, we too can unlock this kind of intuition—for finding the forest’s edge when deep in the woods, or knowing when a wild animal might pose danger—without even having to stop to think about it.
Short Life in a Strange World: Birth to Death in 42 Panels
Ferris, Toby
(Hardcover)
List Price: $32.50 Our Price: $8.79
In 2012, facing the death of his father and impending fatherhood, Toby Ferris set off on a seemingly quixotic mission to track down and look at - in situ - every painting still in existence by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the most influential and important artist of Northern Renaissance painting.The result of that pursuit is a remarkable journey through major European cities and across continents. As Ferris takes a keen analytical eye to the paintings, each piece brings new revelations about Bruegel’s art, and gives way to meditations on mortality, fatherhood, and life. Ferris conjures a whole world to which most of us have probably lost the key, and in the process teaches us how to look, patiently and curiously, at the world.Short Life in a Strange World is a dazzlingly original and assured debut - a strange and bewitching hybrid of art criticism, philosophical reflection, and poignant memoir. Beautifully illustrated with sixty-six color images, it subtly alters the way we see the world and ourselves.
Ten Years a Nomad: A Traveler's Journey Home
Kepnes, Matthew
(Hardcover)
List Price: $27.99 Our Price: $8.79
Part memoir and part philosophical look at why we travel, filled with stories of Matt Kepnes' adventures abroad, an exploration of wanderlust and what it truly means to be a nomad. New York Times bestselling author of How to Travel the World on $50 a Day, Matthew Kepnes knows what it feels like to get the travel bug. After meeting some travelers on a trip to Thailand in 2005, he realized that living life meant more than simply meeting society's traditional milestones, such as buying a car, paying a mortgage, and moving up the career ladder. Inspired by them, he set off for a year-long trip around the world before he started his career. He finally came home after ten years. Over 500,000 miles, 1,000 hostels, and 90 different countries later, Matt has compiled his favorite stories, experiences, and insights into this travel manifesto. Filled with the color and perspective that only hindsight and self-reflection can offer, these stories get to the real questions at the heart of wanderlust. Travel questions that transcend the basic "how-to," and plumb the depths of what drives us to travel - and what extended travel around the world can teach us about life, ourselves, and our place in the world.Ten Years a Nomad is for travel junkies, the travel-curious, and anyone interested in what you can learn about the world when you don’t have a cable bill for a decade or spend a month not wearing shoes living on the beach in Thailand.
Uganda Be Kidding Me (Large Print)
Handler, Chelsea
(Hardcover)
List Price: $29.00 Our Price: $9.19
Wherever Chelsea Handler travels, one thing is certain: she always ends up in the land of the ridiculous. Now, in this uproarious collection, she sneaks her sharp wit through airport security and delivers her most absurd and hilarious stories ever. On safari in Africa, it's anyone's guess as to what's more dangerous: the wildlife or Chelsea. But whether she's fumbling the seduction of a guide by not knowing where tigers live (Asia, duh) or wearing a bathrobe into the bush because her clothes stopped fitting seven margaritas ago, she's always game for the next misadventure. The situation gets down and dirty as she defiles a kayak in the Bahamas, and outright sweaty as she escapes from a German hospital on crutches. When things get truly scary, like finding herself stuck next to a passenger with bad breath, she knows she can rely on her family to make matters even worse. Thank goodness she has the devoted Chunk by her side-except for the time she loses him in Telluride. Complete with answers to the most frequently asked traveler's questions, hot travel trips, and travel etiquette, none of which should be believed, UGANDA BE KIDDING ME has Chelsea taking on the world, one laugh-out-loud incident at a time.
The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New
Dillard, Annie
(Hardcover)
List Price: $25.99 Our Price: $9.89
In recognition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s long and lauded career as a master essayist, a landmark collection, including her most beloved pieces and some rarely seen work, rigorously curated by the author herself.
Knitlandia: A Knitter Sees the World
Parkes, Clara
(Hardcover)
List Price: $19.95 Our Price: $9.89
Building on the success of The Yarn Whisperer, Parkes's rich personal essays invite readers and devoted crafters on excursions to be savored, from a guide who quickly comes to feel like a trusted confidante. In Knitlandia, she takes readers along on 17 of her most memorable journeys across the globe over the last 15 years, with stories spanning from the fjords of Iceland to a cozy yarn shop in Paris's 13th arrondissement.
My Nigeria: Five Decades of Independence
Cunliffe-Jones, Peter
(Hardcover)
List Price: $26.00 Our Price: $9.89
His nineteenth-century cousin, paddled ashore by slaves, twisted the arms of tribal chiefs to sign away their territorial rights in the oil-rich Niger Delta. Sixty years later, his grandfather helped craft Nigeria's constitution and negotiate its independence, the first of its kind in Africa. Four decades later, Peter Cunliffe-Jones arrived as a journalist in the capital, Lagos, just as military rule ended, to face the country his family had a hand in shaping. Part family memoir, part history, My Nigeria is a piercing look at the colonial legacy of an emerging power in Africa. Marshalling his deep knowledge of the nation's economic, political, and historic forces, Cunliffe-Jones surveys its colonial past and explains why British rule led to collapse at independence. He also takes an unflinching look at the complicated country today, from email hoaxes and political corruption to the vast natural resources that make it one of the most powerful African nations; from life in Lagos's virtually unknown and exclusive neighborhoods to the violent conflicts between the numerous tribes that make up this populous African nation. As Nigeria celebrates five decades of independence, this is a timely and personal look at a captivating country that has yet to achieve its great potential.
Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World
O'Connor, M. R.
(Hardcover)
List Price: $29.99 Our Price: $9.89
In this compelling narrative, O'Connor seeks out neuroscientists, anthropologists and master navigators to understand how navigation ultimately gave us our humanity. Biologists have been trying to solve the mystery of how organisms have the ability to migrate and orient with such precision - especially since our own adventurous ancestors spread across the world without maps or instruments. O'Connor goes to the Arctic, the Australian bush and the South Pacific to talk to masters of their environment who seek to preserve their traditions at a time when anyone can use a GPS to navigate.O’Connor explores the neurological basis of spatial orientation within the hippocampus. Without it, people inhabit a dream state, becoming amnesiacs incapable of finding their way, recalling the past, or imagining the future. Studies have shown that the more we exercise our cognitive mapping skills, the greater the grey matter and health of our hippocampus. O'Connor talks to scientists studying how atrophy in the hippocampus is associated with afflictions such as impaired memory, dementia, Alzheimer’s Disease, depression and PTSD. Wayfinding is a captivating book that charts how our species' profound capacity for exploration, memory and storytelling results in topophilia, the love of place.
Island on Fire
Witze, Alexandra
(Hardcover)
List Price: $26.95 Our Price: $10.15
Laki is Iceland's largest volcano. Its eruption in 1783 is one of history's great, untold natural disasters. Spewing out sun-blocking ash and then a poisonous fog for eight long months, the effects of the eruption lingered across the world for years. It caused the deaths of people as far away as the Nile and created catastrophic conditions throughout Europe. Island on Fire is the story not only of a single eruption but the people whose lives it changed, the dawn of modern volcanology, as well as the history - and potential - of other super-volcanoes like Laki around the world. And perhaps most pertinently, in the wake of the eruption of another Icelandic volcano which closed European air space in 2010, acclaimed science writers Witze and Kanipe look at what might transpire should Laki erupt again in our lifetime.
Pravda Ha Ha: True Travels to the End of Europe
MacLean, Rory
(Hardcover)
List Price: $27.00 Our Price: $10.39
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.
Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils
Farrier, David
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.00 Our Price: $10.89
What will the world look like in ten thousand years—or ten million? What kinds of stories will be told about us?In Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, the award-winning author David Farrier explores the traces we will leave for the very distant future. Modern civilization has created objects and landscapes with the potential to endure through deep time, whether it is plastic polluting the oceans and nuclear waste sealed within the earth or the 30 million miles of roads spanning the planet. Our carbon could linger in the atmosphere for 100,000 years, and the remains of our cities will still exist millions of years from now as a layer in the rock. These future fossils have the potential to reveal much about how we lived in the twenty-first century.Crossing the boundaries of literature, art, and science, Footprints invites us to think about how we will be remembered in the myths and stories of our distant descendants. Traveling from the Baltic Sea to the Great Barrier Reef, and from an ice-core laboratory in Tasmania to Shanghai, one of the world’s biggest cities, Farrier describes a world that is changing rapidly, with consequences beyond the scope of human understanding. As much a message of hope as a warning, Footprints will not only alter how you think about the future; it will change how you see the world today.
Food to Write Home About: Hawaii
Berusch, Brian
(Hardcover)
List Price: $29.95 Our Price: $11.99
This isn't just a food book - it's the story of a culinary journey. Presented in a unique format that melds stunning imagery with correspondence from a loving son to his mother, we follow Hawaii restaurateur Bill Tobin as he tastes his way through paradise. As his palate evolves, a life in the restaurant world unfolds before him. We learn what it means to embrace new flavors and allow them to flourish within. Finally, local chefs as well as those who have adopted Hawaii as home share their recipes . . . and help spread a little aloha to those who find a place at your table.
Havana: A Subtropical Delirium
Kurlansky, Mark
(Hardcover)
List Price: $26.00 Our Price: $11.99
Award-winning author Mark Kurlansky presents an insider's view of Havana: the elegant, tattered city he has come to know over more than thirty years. Part cultural history, part travelogue, with recipes, historic engravings, photographs, and Kurlansky's own pen-and-ink drawings throughout, Havana celebrates the city's singular music, literature, baseball, and food; its five centuries of outstanding, neglected architecture; and its extraordinary blend of cultures.Like all great cities, Havana has a rich history that informs the vibrant place it is today--from the native Taino to Columbus's landing, from Cuba's status as a U.S. protectorate to Batista's dictatorship and Castro's revolution, from Soviet presence to the welcoming of capitalist tourism. Havana is a place of extremes: a beautifully restored colonial city whose cobblestone streets pass through areas that have not been painted or repaired since long before the revolution.Kurlansky shows Havana through the eyes of Cuban writers, such as Alejo Carpentier and José Martí, and foreigners, including Graham Greene and Hemingway. He introduces us to Cuban baseball and its highly opinionated fans; the city's music scene, alive with the rhythm of Son; its culinary legacy. Through Mark Kurlansky's multilayered and electrifying portrait, the long-elusive city of Havana comes stirringly to life.
Going Into Town: A Love Letter to New York
Chast, Roz
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.00 Our Price: $13.09
For native Brooklynite Roz Chast, adjusting to life in the suburbs (where people own trees!?) was surreal. But she recognized that for her kids, the reverse was true. On trips into town, they would marvel at the strange world of Manhattan: its gum-wad-dotted sidewalks, honeycombed streets, and "those West Side Story things" (fire escapes) Their wonder inspired Going Into Town, part playful guide, part New York stories, and part love letter to the city, told through Chast's laugh-out-loud, touching, and true cartoons.
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