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  Paris Times Eight - Finding...

  Deirdre Kelly

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  “Very engaging . . . This charming travel memoir shows us how a person and a city can grow and change in tandem.” —Booklist   Over eight visits to Paris, Deirdre Kelly has found herself—first as a nineteen-year-old and then later as a budding writer, a dance critic, and a fashion reporter. Subsequent visits—with her mother, her future husband, and later as a mother herself—have shown her that while some parts of Paris remain constant, her life is always evolving. More than just a beautiful and romantic backdrop for her self-discovery, Paris itself contributes to that discovery, emerging as a principal character in Kelly’s life, an influence that inspires, guides, and teaches as she ages. A terrific gift for budding travelers, Francophiles, and women on their own path toward growth, this book reminds readers of their own favorite place.   “A poignant, honest, and deliciously sexy coming-of-age story.” —Jan Wong, national bestselling author of Beijing Confidential   “Deirdre Kelly’s writing is fast-paced and full of color and gives the reader an insider’s view. She gets it right.” —Sally Armstrong, national bestselling author of The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor   “Takes the reader on a colorful travelogue along the narrow streets of the Marais district, the spectacular Tuileries gardens and the bustling Galleries Lafayette department store . . . a fast-paced, breezy read, its substance subtly woven into a tale of a city whose glamour and beauty never fades.” —Ottawa Citizen   “At times pensive, sardonic and laugh-out-loud funny, as it chronicles a real life with all its comedies and tragedies.” —Calgary Herald

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  Incidents of Travel in Central...

  John Lloyd Stephens

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  The year is 1838. The scene is the dense Honduran forest along the Copán River. Two men, John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, are about to rediscover Mayan civilization. Their guide, slashing through the rampant growth with his machete, leads them to a structure with steps up the side, shaped like a pyramid. Next they see a stone column, fourteen feet high, sculptured on the front with a portrait of a man, “solemn, stern and well fitted to excite terror,” covered on the sides with hieroglyphics, and with workmanship “equal to the finest monuments of the Egyptians.” Stephens records these discoveries and also his travels in Central America, where he had been sent by President Van Buren as special ambassador to the ill-fated Republic of Central America. The republic being engulfed in civil war when Stephens arrives in Guatemala, he finds himself dodging revolutionary armies while he hunts for a “legitimate government” to which to present his credentials. Catherwood, meanwhile, directs his immense artistic talent to illustrating views of Mayan architecture. Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan was a best seller in its day and has been called an “Indiana Jones” saga by modern reviewers. (Summary by Sue Anderson)

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  The Battle of Marne 1914 - A...

  Andrew Uffindell

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  A traveler’s guide to the history and sites of the World War I battle in the Marne River valley in France. 
   
  The First Battle of the Marne was one of the most pivotal battles in history. Fought outside Paris in September 1914, it turned the tide of the German invasion of France and robbed Kaiser Wilhelm II of his best chance of winning the First World War. 
   
  The battle began when the French and British armies launched a massive counter-offensive, and it ended—after five, tense days of fluctuating fortunes—in a German retreat. The so-called “miracle of the Marne” was among the most crucial episodes of the war, and yet no complete, in-depth guide to the battlefield has been available until now in English. 
   
  Andrew Uffindell begins his guidebook with a gripping account of the battle, followed by a series of easy-to-follow tours of the battlefield. Each tour covers a particular sector in detail, using vivid eyewitness accounts to reveal what the fighting was like for the men in the front line. 
   
  This unique and highly illustrated book enables readers to explore the battlefield and retrace the course of those dramatic events for themselves. It gives directions to dozens of museums, cemeteries, and monuments, including the memorials to the famous “taxis of the Marne.” It will be fascinating reading for anyone interested in the Great War, and an essential companion for visitors keen to see the actual terrain over which the battle was fought.

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  Blues for Cannibals - The Notes...

  Charles Bowden

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  The author of Murder City and Down by the River reflects on the destructive nature of American culture.Cultivated from the fierce ideas seeded in Blood Orchid, Blues for Cannibals is an elegiac reflection on death, pain, and a wavering confidence in humanity’s own abilities for self-preservation. After years of reporting on border violence, sex crimes, and the devastation of the land, Bowden struggles to make sense of the many ways in which we destroy ourselves and whether there is any way to survive. Here he confronts a murderer facing execution, sex offenders of the most heinous crimes, a suicidal artist, a prisoner obsessed with painting portraits of presidents, and other people and places that constitute our worst impulses and our worst truths. Painful, heartbreaking, and forewarning, Bowden at once tears us apart and yearns for us to find ourselves back together again.“A thrillingly good writer whose grandness of vision is only heightened by the bleak originality of his voice.” —Ron Hansen, The New York Times Book Review “A major literary work of profound social consciousness . . . [Bowden] writes with the intensity of Joan Didion, the voracious hunger of Henry Miller, the feral intelligence and irony of Hunter Thompson, and the wit and outrage of Edward Abbey . . . This is gutsy, soulful, pyrotechnic, significant. And transformative writing.” —Donna Seaman, Chicago Tribune “A vivid, lyrical journey through the American Southwest . . . [but] this book is no travelogue. Rather, it is a visceral exploration of a much darker landscape, that of the human psyche.” —Debra Ginsberg, The San Diego Union-Tribune“A book of absolutely furious beauty . . . At the height of [Bowden’s] rapturous indignation, with majestic lamentations stretching out almost to the snapping point, he sounds like Walt Whitman in a very bad mood . . . Sweet bloody Jerusalem, when he’s cooking, who can touch him?” —David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle

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  Black Dragon River - A Journey...

  Dominic Ziegler

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  Black Dragon River is a personal journey down one of Asia's great rivers that reveals the region's essential history and culture. The world's ninth largest river, the Amur serves as a large part of the border between Russia and China. As a crossroads for the great empires of Asia, this area offers journalist Dominic Ziegler a lens with which to examine the societies at Europe's only borderland with east Asia. He follows a journey from the river's top to bottom, and weaves the history, ecology and peoples to show a region obsessed with the past-and to show how this region holds a key to the complex and critical relationship between Russia and China today. 
  One of Asia's mightiest rivers, the Amur is also the most elusive. The terrain it crosses is legendarily difficult to traverse. Near the river's source, Ziegler travels on horseback from the Mongolian steppe into the taiga, and later he is forced by the river's impassability to take the Trans-Siberian Railway through the four-hundred-mile valley of water meadows inland. As he voyages deeper into the Amur wilderness, Ziegler also journeys into the history of the peoples and cultures the river's path has transformed. 
  The known history of the river begins with Genghis Khan and the rise of the Mongolian empire a millennium ago, and the story of the region has been one of aggression and conquest ever since. The modern history of the river is the story of Russia's push across the Eurasian landmass to China. For China, the Amur is a symbol of national humiliation and Western imperial land seizure; to Russia it is a symbol of national regeneration, its New World dreams and eastern prospects. The quest to take the Amur was to be Russia's route to greatness, replacing an oppressive European identity with a vibrant one that faced the Pacific. Russia launched a grab in 1854 and took from China a chunk of territory equal in size nearly to France and Germany combined. Later, the region was the site for atrocities meted out on the Russian far east in the twentieth century during the Russian civil war and under Stalin. 
  The long shared history on the Amur has conditioned the way China and Russia behave toward each other-and toward the outside world. To understand Putin's imperial dreams, we must comprehend Russia's relationship to its far east and how it still shapes the Russian mind. Not only is the Amur a key to Putinism, its history is also embedded in an ongoing clash of empires with the West.

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  A Lady's Life in the Rocky...

  Isabella L. Bird

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  Isabella Bird began travelling while in her early twenties to help alleviate illness that had plagued her since childhood. She was a single woman in her early forties when she made her treck through the Rocky Mountains. A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains details this fascinating account of her travels through a series of letters written to her sister, Henrietta. These letters are filled with beautiful, vivid descriptions of the scenery, the people she encountered, the way of life, and a mountain man named Jim Nugent, that was as rough as they come, but a complete gentleman with Ms. Bird. She has the distinction of being the first woman to become a member of the Royal Geographical Society in 1892. (Summary by Laura Caldwell)

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