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  1984 And The Spanish Civil War

  Paul Read

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  In 1937, George Orwell spent six months witnessing the rise and fall of a popular revolution on the streets of Barcelona and Catalonia. Alone amongst his contemporaries, Orwell understood what the success or failure of that Spanish Revolution would mean for the rest of the world.  
  1984 And The Spanish Civil War explores the background to the Civil War and the hidden anarchist revolution within a revolution. As Orwell arrives in Catalunya, he observes something bright and new in the world. But when Orwell returns from fighting on the front, he is confronted by the Communists conducting a misinformation campaign against this revolutionary spirit and he is forced to flee from their purges. He returns home to England, where he begins to write his account, but finds few are prepared to listen. In order to tell his story, he writes literally (Homage to Catalunya), then when that fails, he adopts the structure of allegory (Animal Farm) and finally that of a dystopian fictional Britain in 1984.  
  Yet publication is a constant struggle for Orwell in a world that refuses to criticise the role of the USSR. Though he dies in despair, his words are not lost, for their message is picked up once more on the streets of the same country he fought for back in the 1930's.  
  Praise for 1984 and The Spanish Civil War: 
  "Paul has achieved in a concise volume what others have failed in far more voluminous accounts." 
  "An interesting read if you are new to Orwell or the Civil War in Spain...Highly recommended". 
  The Forgotten Stories from Spain Series brings you accounts of human bravery and spirit at a moment of unleashed cruelty during the Spanish Civil War. Stories of co-operation that have a universal message, as relevant to the world today, as it was in Spain during the 1930's.

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  Finding George Orwell in Burma

  Emma Larkin

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  Over the years the American writer Emma Larkin has spent traveling in Burma, she has come to know all too well the many ways this police state can be described as  "Orwellian." The life of the mind exists in a state of siege in Burma, and it long has. The connection between George Orwell and Burma is not simply metaphorical, of course; Orwell's mother was born in Burma, and he was shaped by his experiences there as a young man working for the British Imperial Police. Both his first novel, Burmese Days, and the novel he left unfinished upon his death were set in Burma. And then there is the place of Orwell's work in Burma today: Larkin found it a commonplace observation in Burma that Orwell did not write one book about the country but three-the other two being Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. When Larkin quietly asked one Burmeseman if he knew the work of George Orwell, he stared blankly for a moment and then said, "Ah, you mean the prophet."Finding George Orwell in Burma is the story of the year Larkin spent traveling across this shuttered police state using the life and work of Orwell as her guide. Traveling from Mandalay and Rangoon to poor delta backwaters and up to the old hill-station towns in the mountains of Burma's far north, Larkin visits the places Orwell worked and lived and the places his books live still. She brings to vivid life a country and a people cut off from the rest of the world, and from one another, by the ruling military junta and its network of spies and informers. Orwell's spoor leads Larkin to strange, ghostly traces of the British colonial presence and to people who have found ways to bolster their minds against the state's all-pervasive propaganda. Orwell's moral clarity, hatred of injustice, and observant gaze serve as the author's compass in a less tangible sense too: they are qualities that also suffuse this, her own powerful reckoning with one of the world's least free countries.

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  France’s Most Famous Palaces:...

  Charles River Editors

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  For the French, and those who study their history, Versailles is a symbol of, as Charles Dickens once put it, “the best of times…the worst of times.” It was here that the Sun King, Louis XIV, built a palace worthy of a great nation during a time when peace was, at best, short-lived. It was at Versailles that Russian Tsar Peter the Great studied the palace’s architecture and gardens so that he could recreate them in his home country. Indeed, the greatest minds and artistic geniuses of the later stages of the Renaissance came to Versailles to build and paint, and it was here that Madame de Pompadour and her successor, Madame du Barry, used their wit and beauty to charm a king into doing their bidding. 
  	France, like all European countries, has had its fair share of palaces over time, but none suffered the rise and fall of fortune like the Tuileries. Built by a widow with a flair for architecture, it grew for more than a decade, along with the royal family that it housed. Then, during the French Revolution, it fell from grace with that family and even became a sight of execution, its famous gardens providing the background for the infamous guillotine.  
  	The Louvre's very name conjures up scenes of art and elegance, and of long halls filled with beauty and people strolling through them whispering quietly among themselves about the glories they are witnessing. Even those who have never been to the Louvre know some of its most prized possessions, from ancient statues to Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa”. As the world’s largest museum, the Louvre is unquestionably the cultural highpoint of Paris, a city that has long been considered the cultural center of Europe. 

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  Seagulls in My Soup

  Tristan Jones

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  Join Tristan Jones as he tells tales of the humorous and fascinating adventures that his Saga of a Wayward Sailor began. Discover more anecdotes and unexpected adventures aboard a converted lifeboat ketch cruising the coasts of the Balearic region with Tristan, his one-eyed, three-legged dog, Nelson and the prim Bishop's sister, Sissie St. John. It's a prolific prose journey of surprising arrivals, machine gun-thwarting and ship-saving escapades of a wayward sailor and his motley crew.

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  Rediscovering the Great Plains -...

  Norman Scott Henderson

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  An “engrossing” memoir of traveling Canada's Qu’Appelle River Valley via horse, canoe, and Native American dogsled (Calgary Herald).   The North American Plains are one of the world’s great landscapes—but today, the most intimate experience most of us are likely to have of the great grasslands is from behind the window of a car or train. It was not always so. In the earliest days, Plains Indians traveled on foot across the vastness, with only the fierce, wolflike Plains dogs as companions. Later, with the arrival of Europeans, horses and canoes appeared on the Plains. In this book, Norman Henderson, a leading scholar of the world’s great temperate grasslands, revives these traditional modes of travel, journeying along 200 miles of Canada’s Qu’Appelle River valley by dog and travois (the wooden rack pulled by dogs and horses used by Native Americans to transport goods), then by canoe, and finally by horse and travois.   Henderson interweaves his own adventures with the exploits of earlier Plains travelers, like Lewis and Clark, Francisco Coronado, La Vérendrye, and Alexander Henry. Lesser-known experiences of the fur traders and others who struggled to cross this strange and forbidding landscape also illuminate the story, while Henderson’s often humorous description of his attempts to find and train old Plains breeds of dogs and horses highlight the difficulties involved in recreating archaic travel methods. He also draws on the history of the world’s other great temperate grasslands: the South American pampas and the Eurasian steppes. Recalling the work of Ian Frazier and Jonathan Raban, Henderson’s account offers a deeper understanding of the natural and human history of the North American Plains.   “A captivating ‘biography of a landscape,’ its good humor blended with impressive scholarship, including snappy thumbnail histories of canoes, horses, dogs, barbed wire and those pesky blood-sucking mosquitoes.” —Publishers Weekly

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  A Goddess in the Stones -...

  Norman Lewis

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  “An absorbing introduction” to the tribal peoples of India, their ancient traditions, and the remote regions that they inhabit (Kirkus Reviews).  In the 1990s, the fifty-four million members of India’s tribal colonies accounted for seven percent of the country’s total population—yet very little about them was recorded. Norman Lewis depicts India’s jungles as being endangered by “progress,” and his sense of urgency in recording what he can about the country’s distinct tribes results in a compelling and engaging narrative. From the poetic Muria people whose diet includes monkeys, red ants, and crocodiles, to the tranquil mountain tribes who may be related to the Australian Aborigines, to the naked Mundas people who may shoot, with bow and arrow, anyone who laughs in their direction, Lewis chronicles the unique characteristics of the many tribes that find their way of life increasingly threatened by the encroachment of modernity.

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