Other books that might interest you

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  Desticity Strasbourg (EN) -...

  Desticity

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  This audio book has been designed to be listened to on the spot, in front of Strasbourg' monuments or sites of interest. This will enrich your visit experience. They can also be listened to again after your visit, or at any other time, to better know the monuments you like. 
  Each chapter of this book tells the story and architecture of a site, in a short format of a few minutes. Refer to the title of the chapter for the name of the monument. 
  Desticity will allow you to discover essential information on the history, architecture and cultural anecdotes of Strasbourg' monuments, sites and tourist districts. 
  Your imagination will be stimulated by an immersion in the history of what you admire. These moments of visit are to be shared with family and friends. 
  Plug in your headphones and open your eyes wide... Enjoy your visit with Desticity!

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  Border Odyssey - Travels along...

  Charles D. Thompson

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  This blend of travelogue and reportage from the US-Mexico border is “an exploration of 2,000 miles of fraught, rugged and deeply contested territory” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).   In a quest to capture a real-life, close-up view of the land where so many have been kicked, cussed, spit on, arrested, detained, trafficked, or killed—and the subject that has been debated for decades by politicians and commentators—Charles D. Thompson records his journey from Boca Chica to Tijuana, and his conversations with everyone from border officials to migrant workers to local residents. Along the journey, five centuries of cultural history (indigenous, French, Spanish, Mexican, African American, colonist, and US), wars, and legislation unfold.   Among the terrain traversed: walls and more walls, unexpected roadblocks, and patrol officers; a golf course (you could drive a ball across the border); a Civil War battlefield (you could camp there); the southernmost plantation in the US; a hand-drawn ferry, a road-runner tracked desert and a breathtaking national park; barbed wire, bridges, and a trucking-trade thoroughfare; ghosts with guns; obscured, unmarked, and unpaved roads; a Catholic priest and his dogs, artwork, icons, and political cartoons; a sheriff and a chain-smoking mayor; a Tex-Mex eatery empty of customers and a B&B shuttering its doors; murder-laden newspaper headlines at breakfast; the kindness of the border-crossing underground; and too many elderly, impoverished, ex-U.S. farmworkers, braceros, who lined up to have Thompson take their photograph.   “A firsthand look at how modern U.S. border policy has affected the people in the region, from migrant workers to indigenous people to border patrol agents to residents of economically stagnant towns just north of the boundary. The result is a travel memoir with a conscience, an extension of Thompson’s ongoing work to humanize the hotly debated region.” —The News & Observer

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  American Scenery Vol 1

  Nathaniel Parker Willis

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  Although the focus of this book is the engravings depicting scenic sites of 19th century America, each is accompanied by a short description of the site and location. These vignettes give us rare glimpses of scenic locations as they appeared in 1840. All sites are in the eastern part of the United States, especially New England and New York. This is Volume One of a two-volume set. (Summary by Larry Wilson)

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  The Space Business - From Hotels...

  Andrew May

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  Even before Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, private companies were exploiting space via communication satellites—a sector that is seeing exponential growth in the internet age. In human spaceflight, too, commercialization is making itself felt. Billionaire entrepreneurs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson have long trumpeted plans to make space travel a possibility for ordinary people, and those ideas are inching ever closer to reality. At the same time, other companies plan to mine the Moon for helium-3 and asteroids for precious metals. Popular-science writer Andrew May takes an entertaining, in-depth look at the triumphs and heroic failures of our quixotic quest to commercialize the final frontier.

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  A Handful of Honey - Away to the...

  Annie Hawes

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  Aiming to track down a small oasis town deep in the Sahara, some of whose generous inhabitants came to her rescue on a black day in her adolescence, Annie Hawes leaves her home in the olive groves of Italy and sets off along the south coast of the Mediterranean. 
   Travelling through Morocco and Algeria she eats pigeon pie with a family of cannabis farmers, and learns about the habits of djinns; she encounters citizens whose protest against the tyrannical King Hassan takes the form of attaching colanders to their television aerials - a practice he soon outlaws - and comes across a stone-age method of making olive-oil, still going strong. She allows a ten-year-old to lead her into the fundamentalist strongholds of the suburbs of Algiers - where she makes a good friend. 
   Plunging southwards, regardless, into the desert, she at last shares a lunch of salt-cured Saharan haggis with her old friends, in a green and pleasant palm grove perfumed by flowering henna: once, it seems, the favourite scent of the Prophet Mohammed. She discovers at journey's end that life in a date-farming oasis, haunting though its songs may be, is not so simple and uncomplicated as she has imagined. 
   Annie Hawes has legions of fans. Her writing has the well-built flow of fiction and the self-effacing honesty of a journal.

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  Red Line

  Charles Bowden

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  The author is joined by a retired narcotics cop as they investigate the assassination of a drug dealer and hit man outside Tucson, Arizona.One of Charles Bowden’s earliest books, Red Line powerfully conveys a desert civilization careening over the edge―and decaying at its center. Bowden’s quest for the literal and figurative truth behind the assassination of a murderous border-town drug dealer becomes a meditation on the glories of the desert landscape, the squalors of the society that threatens it, and the contradictions inherent in trying to save it.“At its best, Red Line can read like an original synthesis of Peter Matthiessen and William Burroughs . . . A brave and interesting book.” —David Rieff, Los Angeles Times Book Review“Charles Bowden’s Red Line is a look at America through the window of the southwest. His vision is as nasty, peculiar, brutal, as it is intriguing and, perhaps, accurate. Bowden offers consciousness rather than consolation, but in order to do anything about our nightmares we must take a cold look and Red Line casts the coldest eye in recent memory.” —Jim Harrison“The Southwest as portrayed in this Kerouac-esque odyssey betokening the death of the American frontier spirit is a landscape of broken dreams, violence, uprooted lives and fallen idols. . . . Miles distant from tourist-poster images of the Sunbelt, this vista of narrow greed, diminished expectations and despoilation of nature sizzles with the harsh, unrelenting glare of a hyperrealist painting.” —Publishers Weekly

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