Other books that might interest you

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  A Very Byzantine Journey -...

  J. Richard Smith

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  From the earliest days of the Church, Christians have used icons—images of Christ—to engage with the story of their faith. However, icons are far more than ancient pictures of Jesus: they are windows on the holy and transcendental, and they tell the New Testament story in a way that makes it real even to those exploring it from a distance.
  
   
  Knowing that this is a story based in geographical fact, J. Richard Smith has visited many of the places where the New Testament story happened, and here he takes us along on his travels tracing the story of icons, to places like Jerusalem, Athens, Istanbul and Cairo, and also to the final resting place of the Cloth of Edessa hidden in the hills in southern Italy. Combining spiritual writing, art history and travelogue, J. Richard Smith invites us to discover that there is more to icons than meets the eye.

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  Walks in My New York - A Story...

  Mikael Olrik

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  The acclaimed artist and architect shares a strolling, personal tour of a city that has become his creative muse and home away from home.   Over the years, Danish architect and artist Mikael Olrik has developed a special relationship with New York City, finding endless inspiration in the vibrant and ever-changing metropolis. In Walks in My New York, Olrik shares his fascinating perspective on New York life through a combination of watercolor, photography and text.   Olrik explores the city with the broad view of an architect, the specificity of an artist, the straight-forwardness of a photographer, and the companionable text of a diarist. He captures everything from street scenes of everyday life to pastoral views of Central Park and landmarks such as the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge. Small maps accompany each entry and act as a sort of ‘GPS’ in print.

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  Antarctica's Lost Aviator - The...

  Jeff Maynard

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  By the 1930s, no one had yet crossed Antarctica, and its vast interior remained a mystery frozen in time. Hoping to write his name in the history books, wealthy American Lincoln Ellsworth announced he would fly across the unexplored continent, and to honor his hero, Wyatt Earp, he would carry his gun belt on the flight.The obstacles to Ellsworth’s ambition were numerous: He didn’t like the cold, he avoided physical work, and he couldn’t navigate. Consequently, he hired the experienced Australian explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins to organize the expedition on his behalf. While Ellsworth battled depression and struggled to conceal his homosexuality, Wilkins purchased a ship, hired a crew, and ordered a revolutionary new airplane constructed.The Ellsworth Trans-Antarctic Expeditions became epics of misadventure, as competitors plotted to beat Ellsworth, pilots refused to fly, crews mutinied, and the ship was repeatedly trapped in the ice. Finally, in 1935, Ellsworth took off to fly from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea. A few hours after leaving, radio contact with him was lost, and the world gave him up for dead.Antarctica’s Lost Aviator brings alive one of the strangest episodes in polar history, using previously unpublished diaries, correspondence, and film to reveal the amazing true story of the first crossing of Antarctica and how, against all odds, it was achieved by the unlikeliest of heroes.

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  A Voyage by Dhow - Selected Pieces

  Norman Lewis

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  Consummate travel writer Norman Lewis’s most remarkable travel essays, collected in one volume“You’d find it of immense interest, I assure you, and full of amazing adventures.” So says a British colonial official to Norman Lewis while imploring him to visit Yemen at a time when the country is rarely visited by Western travelers. And indeed, this splendid collection of Lewis’s travel essays is full of amazing adventures.Spanning sixty years and many countries, Lewis’s writing dives deep into the cultures he visits and brings them to life with eloquent depictions of his personal experiences—from the Huichols of western Mexico to the hunter-gatherer-poet Indians of Paraguay; from the streets of Naples to the steppes of Russia during the Soviet era; and more.

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  Outlandish - Fuel Your Epic

  Morgan Sjogren

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  “Besides drooling over the gorgeous photos, it is guaranteed that you will salivate over the recipes that accompany each adventure and hopefully utilize Morgan’s sustainable outdoor cooking tips.” ?American Trail Running Association Outlandish is a sun-soaked starter manual to fueling your own epic, equal parts fuel for the body and food for the soul.  In this guide, the canyoneering wordsmith and adventurer Morgan Sjogren shows how outdoor adventure can become your lifestyle. Through her riveting personal stories, flavorful recipes, and the book’s gotta-go-there photographs, Sjogren shares her advice and lessons learned from years exploring the desert Southwest while living out of her canary-yellow Jeep Wrangler. Outlandish is a gorgeous guide to a more adventurous life. In Outlandish, Sjogren shows how to sleep better in a car, build a cooking fire, overcome calamity, repurpose bacon grease, leave no trace, sun-dry tomatoes on your car hood, cook food on a hot engine block, and select practical gear for your tailgate kitchen. Equipped with little more than Outlandish, a backpacking stove, a cooler, and a few staple foods, you can seek out your own adventures fueled by Sjogren’s inspiring outdoor lifestyle as well as her favorite burritos, dandelion salads, campfire blondies, and prickly pear margaritas. Sjogren offers up dozens of recipes that draw from the places she’s been?Sedona, Bears Ears, Yosemite, Silverton, Utah?and help her tell intoxicating tales of exploration and mishap. There are taco recipes remembered from the highest mountain in Mexico and “50 Shades of Burritos” with flavors taken from around the Four Corners. This smart and meaningful guide comes straight from the Utah canyon country and deserts of Arizona to share lessons learned from a life lived in wilderness. Sjogren’s exhilarating guide will stoke your desire for adventure while offering tools, tips, and tricks that can help you launch your epic.

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  To America with Love

  A. A. Gill

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  A celebrated British provocateur and Vanity Fair columnist serves up an “immensely entertaining book inspired by his love and knowledge of America” (Sunday Times, London).IN TO AMERICA WITH LOVE, celebrated British provocateur and Vanity Fair colum­nist A. A. Gill traverses the Atlantic to become the freshest chronicler of American identity in recent memory. With a fiery temper, a sharp-tongued wit, and an insatiable curiosity to figure out what makes more than 300 million of the world’s population tick, Gill traces the history and logic of our nation’s habits, collecting wild stories and startling facts along the way. From Colorado, where he meets a local vegeta­tion expert and learns which flowers were in Poca­hontas’s nuptial bouquet, to Kentucky, where he visits the Creationist Museum and drinks moonshine with a hog farmer, and to Harlem, where he misses a turn and stumbles into the wrong barbershop for a once-in-a-lifetime haircut, Gill embarks on a tour of not only the nation’s landscape but also its psyche, playing adventurer, philosopher, statistician, and raconteur all at once. In inimitable fashion he explains why pressing a button in a Manhattan elevator means entering a social contract of American etiquette and inverting conventional hierarchies of space; why browsing through Playboy centerfolds becomes the perfect litmus test for a generation’s political views; and how Hollywood is the metaphysical marketplace for movies, the place where Americans are sold on American romance and taught how to dream the American dream. Weaving together a tapestry of historical erudition and outrageous anecdotes, Gill ultimately captures the scope and spirit of a nation that started off as a conceptual experiment and became a political, sci­entific, and cultural fortress. This humorous and revelatory book shows us why we are who we are by transforming ordinary experiences into extraordinary lessons and promising to never let us look in the mirror the same way again.

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