Author Jean-Jacques Rousseau Description After a period of forced exile and solitary wandering brought about by his radical views on religion and politics, Jean-Jacques Rousseau returned to Paris in 1770. Here, in the last two years of his life, he wrote his final work, the Reveries. In this eloquent masterpiece the great political thinker describes […]
Category: Travel
The Bonjour Effect | The Secret Codes of French Conversation Revealed
Author Julie Barlow Description Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow spent a decade traveling back and forth to Paris as well as living there. Yet one important lesson never seemed to sink in: how to communicate comfortably with the French, even when you speak their language. In The Bonjour Effect Jean-Benoît and Julie chronicle the lessons […]
Lost Japan
Author Alex Kerr Description An enchanting and fascinating insight into Japanese landscape, culture, history and future. Originally written in Japanese, this passionate, vividly personal book draws on the author’s experiences in Japan over thirty years. Alex Kerr brings to life the ritualized world of Kabuki, retraces his initiation into Tokyo’s boardrooms during the heady Bubble […]
In an Antique Land | History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale
Author Amitav Ghosh Description Once upon a time an Indian writer named Amitav Ghosh set out an Indian slave, name unknown, who some seven hundred years before had traveled to the Middle East. The journey took him to a small village in Egypt, where medieval customs coexist with twentieth-century desires and discontents. But even as […]
Kon-Tiki
Author Thor Heyerdahl Description Now a major motion picture, Kon-Tiki is the record of Thor Heyerdahl’s astonishing three-month voyage across the Pacific.Kon-Tiki is the record of an astonishing adventure — a journey of 4,300 nautical miles across the Pacific Ocean by raft. Intrigued by Polynesian folklore, biologist Thor Heyerdahl suspected that the South Sea Islands […]
Horizon
Author Barry Lopez Description ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR:THE NEW YORK TIMES • NPR • THE GUARDIANFrom pole to pole and across decades of lived experience, National Book Award-winning author Barry Lopez delivers his most far-ranging, yet personal, work to date. Horizon moves indelibly, immersively, through the author’s travels to six regions of the […]
Bears in the Streets | Three Journeys across a Changing Russia
Author Lisa Dickey Description **One of Bustle’s 17 of the Best Nonfiction Books Coming in January 2017 and Men’s Journal’s 7 Best Books of January**”Brilliant, real and readable.” —former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright**A USA Today “New and Noteworthy” Book**Lisa Dickey traveled across the whole of Russia three times—in 1995, 2005 and 2015—making friends […]
The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus
Author Christopher Columbus Description No gamble in history has been more momentous than the landfall of Columbus’s ship the Santa Maria in the Americas in 1492 – an event that paved the way for the conquest of a ‘New World’. The accounts collected here provide a vivid narrative of his voyages throughout the Caribbean and […]
Dispatches from Pluto | Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta
Author Richard Grant Description In Dispatches from Pluto, adventure writer Richard Grant takes on “the most American place on Earth”—the enigmatic, beautiful, often derided Mississippi Delta.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 […]
Bayou Farewell | The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast
Author Mike Tidwell Description The Cajun coast of Louisiana is home to a way of life as unique, complex, and beautiful as the terrain itself. As award-winning travel writer Mike Tidwell journeys through the bayou, he introduces us to the food and the language, the shrimp fisherman, the Houma Indians, and the rich cultural history […]