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Travel & History
Books that expand your understanding of this world, from places you are actually visiting to places you are far from.
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Peter Forbath
Amazon description
The worlds most dramatic river and the discovery and exploration.
Women and Cruising comments
If I could pinpoint one book that changed the course of my subsequent reading it would be (perhaps oddly!) The River Congo, by Peter Forbath.
This book brought uncomfortably alive the history of Belgium's impact on the Congo, a history happening in the same period as so many great European seafaring explorations, and, in fact, a direct outgrowth of it. Until that book I'd had little interest in history except as a backdrop for a good novel. And though I'd thought myself a worldly person, I was forced to realize how little I actually understood of what historical forces had steered all the stuff going on in the world.
— Gwen Hamlin
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Daniel Boorstin
Amazon description
An original history of man's greatest adventure: his search to discover the world around him.
Women and Cruising comments
Excellent and panoramic. In a preamble, Boorstein says his hero is “Man the Discoverer” and in the book he examines all the horizons that mankind has had to aim at, not just physical ones, but conceptual ones, each of which “had to be opened for us by countless Columbuses” (including a huge section on Chinese exploration!) It made me keen to be my own Columbus, but also to be a careful and considering one.
— Gwen Hamlin
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David McCullough
Amazon description
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Truman, here is the national bestselling epic chronicle of the creation of the Panama Canal. In The Path Between the Seas, acclaimed historian David McCullough delivers a first-rate drama of the sweeping human undertaking that led to the creation of this grand enterprise.
The Path Between the Seas tells the story of the men and women who fought against all odds to fulfill the 400-year-old dream of constructing an aquatic passageway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It is a story of astonishing engineering feats, tremendous medical accomplishments, political power plays, heroic successes, and tragic failures. Applying his remarkable gift for writing lucid, lively exposition, McCullough weaves the many strands of the momentous event into a comprehensive and captivating tale.
Winner of the National Book Award for history, the Francis Parkman Prize, the Samuel Eliot Morison Award, and the Cornelius Ryan Award (for the best book of the year on international affairs), The Path Between the Seas is a must-read for anyone interested in American history, the history of technology, international intrigue, and human drama.
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William Beebe
Women and Cruising comments
William Beebe's 1926 book The Arcturus Adventure recounts his New York Zoological Society expedition by ship to the Galapagos and Cocos Islands which partnered our own trip there.
— Gwen Hamlin
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Amazon description
“Melting pot,” a phrase inevitably associated with the United States, may be even more applicable to Mexico, where ancient civilizations merge with modern cultures in a cross-current of peoples, languages and dialects, art and music, religions, hidden cosmologies, and fabled ruins. Travelers' Tales Mexico explores this deep diversity in essays by important writers who have experienced it firsthand. On his journey south of the border, Carlos Fuentes reveals layer upon layer of history in Mexico City's town square; Alice Adams discovers her love for Frida Kahlo's work; Pete Hamill unearths the ghosts of Hollywood in Puerto Vallarta; and Mary Morris moves to San Miguel to find a writer's life. Travelers' Tales Mexico is a lyrical reminder of why it's both a pleasure and a necessity to visit this magnificent country.
Women and Cruising comments
A collection of travel writing about the country. This introduced me to the genre of travel writing and the whole list of Traveler’s Tales titles, numbers of which I ordered and devoured including collections of travel writing about particular places like Australia and Thailand, about food ( The Adventure of Food was an early favorite), and several women's travel collections. These books began to influence the way I wrote my own Blog.
— Gwen Hamlin
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Amazon description
Food — its smells, textures, colors, flavors, and rituals — is tied intrinsically to place. This heartwarming, surprising, and sumptuous collection of stories reveals our obsession with how food nourishes and sustains us, teaches us about other cultures, and creates community and connection with others. From the award-winning editor of Travelers' Tales Food, here is another collection of funny and sometimes frightening true stories of eating that will make your mouth water while helping you better understand other cultures. Notable authors include Jeffrey Steingarten, Frances Mayes, Jonathan Raban, John Krich, and Maxine Kumin.
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John Steinbeck
Amazon description
This exciting day-by-day account of Steinbeck's trip to the Gulf of California with biologist Ed Ricketts, drawn from the longer Sea of Cortez , is a wonderful combination of science, philosophy, and high-spirited adventure.
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Isabel Allende
Amazon description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
In one of the most important and beloved Latin American works of the twentieth century, Isabel Allende weaves a luminous tapestry of three generations of the Trueba family, revealing both triumphs and tragedies. Here is patriarch Esteban, whose wild desires and political machinations are tempered only by his love for his ethereal wife, Clara, a woman touched by an otherworldly hand. Their daughter, Blanca, whose forbidden love for a man Esteban has deemed unworthy infuriates her father, yet will produce his greatest joy: his granddaughter Alba, a beautiful, ambitious girl who will lead the family and their country into a revolutionary future.
The House of the Spirits is an enthralling saga that spans decades and lives, twining the personal and the political into an epic novel of love, magic, and fate.
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Mario Vargas Llosa
Amazon description
Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic - and finds herself reliving the events of l961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million. Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a combination of violence and blackmail. In Trujillo's gaudy palace, treachery and cowardice have become a way of life. But Trujillo's grasp is slipping. There is a conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution already underway that will have bloody consequences of its own. In this 'masterpiece of Latin American and world literature, and one of the finest political novels ever written' ( Bookforum ), Mario Vargas Llosa recounts the end of a regime and the birth of a terrible democracy, giving voice to the historical Trujillo and the victims, both innocent and complicit, drawn into his deadly orbit.
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Simon Winchester
Amazon description
The bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and The Map That Changed the World examines the enduring and world-changing effects of the catastrophic eruption off the coast of Java of the earth's most dangerous volcano -- Krakatoa.
The legendary annihilation in 1883 of the volcano-island of Krakatoa -- the name has since become a byword for a cataclysmic disaster -- was followed by an immense tsunami that killed nearly forty thousand people. Beyond the purely physical horrors of an event that has only very recently been properly understood, the eruption changed the world in more ways than could possibly be imagined. Dust swirled round die planet for years, causing temperatures to plummet and sunsets to turn vivid with lurid and unsettling displays of light. The effects of the immense waves were felt as far away as France. Barometers in Bogotá and Washington, D.C., went haywire. Bodies were washed up in Zanzibar. The sound of the island's destruction was heard in Australia and India and on islands thousands of miles away. Most significant of all -- in view of today's new political climate -- the eruption helped to trigger in Java a wave of murderous anti-Western militancy among fundamentalist Muslims: one of the first outbreaks of Islamic-inspired killings anywhere.
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Tony Horwitzt
Amazon description
Two centuries after James Cook's epic voyages of discovery, Tony Horwitz takes readers on a wild ride across hemispheres and centuries to recapture the Captain's adventures and explore his embattled legacy in today's Pacific. Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of Confederates in the Attic , works as a sailor aboard a replica of Cook's ship, meets island kings and beauty queens, and carouses the South Seas with a hilarious and disgraceful travel companion, an Aussie named Roger. He also creates a brilliant portrait of Cook: an impoverished farmboy who became the greatest navigator in British history and forever changed the lands he touched. Poignant, probing, antic, and exhilarating, Blue Latitudes brings to life a man who helped create the global village we inhabit today.
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Gavin Young
Amazon description
In this, the sequel to Slow Boats to China (also reissued in Faber Finds), Gavin Young tells, with equal panache, of his return voyage from the China Seas to England, via the South Seas, Cape Horn and West Africa. 'I am decidedly envious of Gavin Young and his Slow Boats Home, successor to his highly entertaining Slow Boats to China ... a fascinating, memorable book.' Eric Newby, the Guardian 'Like Slow Boats to China this is likely to become a classic of travel.' Francis King, the Spectator
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W. Somerset Maugham
Amazon description
This anthology is a thorough introduction to classic literature for those who have not yet experienced these literary masterworks. For those who have known and loved these works in the past, this is an invitation to reunite with old friends in a fresh new format. From Shakespeare s finesse to Oscar Wilde s wit, this unique collection brings together works as diverse and influential as The Pilgrim s Progress and Othello. As an anthology that invites readers to immerse themselves in the masterpieces of the literary giants, it is must-have addition to any library.
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Jennifer Vanderbes
Amazon description
In this extraordinary fiction debut--rich with love and betrayal, history and intellectual passion--two remarkable narratives converge on Easter Island, one of the most remote places in the world.
It is 1913. Elsa Pendleton travels from England to Easter Island with her husband, an anthropologist sent by the Royal Geographical Society to study the colossal moai statues, and her younger sister. What begins as familial duty for Elsa becomes a grand adventure; on Easter Island she discovers her true calling. But, out of contact with the outside world, she is unaware that World War I has been declared and that a German naval squadron, fleeing the British across the South Pacific, is heading toward the island she now considers home.
Sixty years later, Dr. Greer Farraday, an American botanist, travels to Easter Island to research the island's ancient pollen, but more important, to put back the pieces of her life after the death of her husband.
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James A. Michener
Amazon description
Truly one of the most remarkable books to come out of the war. Mr. Michener is a born story-teller."
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Winner of the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Enter the exotic world of the South Pacific, meet the men and women caught up in the drama of a big war. The young Marine who falls madly in love with a beautiful Tonkinese girl. Nurse Nellie and her French planter, Emile De Becque. The soldiers, sailors, and nurses playing at war and waiting for love in a tropic paradise.
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William Mariner
Women and Cruising comments
William Mariner's true account as a boy of surviving a massacre of his ship to be “adopted” by the local cannibals.
— Gwen Hamlin
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R.A Derrick
Women and Cruising comments
Eye-opening
— Gwen Hamlin
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Paul Theroux
Amazon description
In one of his most exotic and breathtaking journeys, the intrepid traveler Paul Theroux ventures to the South Pacific, exploring fifty-one islands by collapsible kayak. Beginning in New Zealand's rain forests and ultimately coming to shore thousands of miles away in Hawaii, Theroux paddles alone over isolated atolls, through dirty harbors and shark-filled waters, and along treacherous coastlines. This exhilarating tropical epic is full of disarming observations and high adventure.
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Jared Diamond
Amazon description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a brilliant work answering the question of why the peoples of certain continents succeeded in invading other continents and conquering or displacing their peoples. This edition includes a new chapter on Japan and all-new illustrations drawn from the television series. Until around 11,000 BC, all peoples were still Stone Age hunter/gatherers. At that point, a great divide occurred in the rates that human societies evolved. In Eurasia, parts of the Americas, and Africa, farming became the prevailing mode of existence when indigenous wild plants and animals were domesticated by prehistoric planters and herders. As Jared Diamond vividly reveals, the very people who gained a head start in producing food would collide with preliterate cultures, shaping the modern world through conquest, displacement, and genocide.The paths that lead from scattered centers of food to broad bands of settlement had a great deal to do with climate and geography. But how did differences in societies arise? Why weren't native Australians, Americans, or Africans the ones to colonize Europe? Diamond dismantles pernicious racial theories tracing societal differences to biological differences. He assembles convincing evidence linking germs to domestication of animals, germs that Eurasians then spread in epidemic proportions in their voyages of discovery. In its sweep, Guns, Germs and Steel encompasses the rise of agriculture, technology, writing, government, and religion, providing a unifying theory of human history as intriguing as the histories of dinosaurs and glaciers. 32 illustrations
Women and Cruising comments
Presents a persuasive analysis of the differences in development by the many different cultures of the world all based on the logical platform of what their bit of earth historically offered them in fundamental resources like domesticable animals or grains. Guns, Germs and Steel was definitely one of those “ah-hah!” books for me.
— Gwen Hamlin
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