Other books that might interest you

• 

  My Grape Village

  Laura Bradbury

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Five years after My Grape Escape, Laura and Franck are back in Burgundy to tackle their newest project, a derelict 16th-century winemaker's cottage located behind Franck's family home. 
  Navigating the different rules for raising children and managing a family in a small French village prove every bit as challenging for Laura as learning to drive a stick shift through narrow streets or arguing with tyrannical French officials over paint colors (spoiler alert: any color as long as it's gray). Come along on this evocative and honest journey where love, coupled with good French food and local wine, pave the way to la belle vie. 
  PRAISE FOR LAURA BRADBURY 
  "Bradbury's Grape Series feels like a series of honest and funny letters sent from a friend about her fascinating (and sometimes baffling) life in France. A beautiful read." 
  —JANICE MACLEOD, New York Times bestselling author of Paris Letters and A Paris Year 
  "Bradbury's Grape Series takes the reader on a romantic adventure into the heart, soul, and people of la belle France. Filled with delicious food, love, and laughter, Bradbury's writing proves that you have to dare to follow your heart wherever it leads you...and that sometimes we have to step outside our comfort zone to truly live." 
  —SAMANTHA VÉRANT, author of How to Make a French Family and Seven Letters from Paris

  Show book

• 

  The Blue Plateau - An Australian...

  Mark Tredinnick

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  The author of The Land’s Wild Music depicts Australia’s Blue Mountains through stories of the land and the lives within it. 
   
  At the farthest extent of Australia’s Blue Mountains, on the threshold of the country’s arid interior, the Blue Plateau reveals the vagaries of a hanging climate: the droughts last longer, the seasons change less, and the wildfires burn hotter and more often. In The Blue Plateau, Mark Tredinnick tries to learn what it means to fall in love with a home that is falling away. 
   
  A landscape memoir in the richest sense, Tredinnick’s story reveals as much about this contrary collection of canyons and ancient rivers, cow paddocks and wild eucalyptus forests as it does about the myriad generations who struggled to remain in the valley they loved. It captures the essence of a wilderness beyond subjugation, the spirit of a people just barely beyond defeat. Charting a lithology of indigenous presence, faltering settlers, failing ranches, floods, tragedy, and joy that the place constantly warps and erodes, The Blue Plateau reminds us that, though we may change the landscape around us, it works at us inexorably, with wind and water, heat and cold, altering who and what we are. 
   
  The result is an intimate and illuminating portrayal of tenacity, love, grief, and belonging. In the tradition of James Galvin, William Least Heat-Moon, and Annie Dillard, Tredinnick plumbs the depths of people’s relationship to a world in transition. 
   
  Praise for The Blue Plateau 
   
  “One of the wisest, most gifted and ingenious writers you could hope to find.” —Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma 
   
  “I’ve never been to Australia, but now—after this book—it comes up in my dreams. The landscape in the language of this work is alive and conscious, and Tredinnick channels it in prose both wild and inspired. . . . Part nonfiction novel, part classic pastoral, part nature elegy, part natural history, the whole of The Blue Plateau conveys a deep sense, rooted in the very syntax of a lush prose about an austere land, that there can be no meaningful division between nature and culture, between humans and all the other life that interdepends with us, not in the backcountry of southeastern Australia, nor anywhere else.” —Orion 
   
  “Absorbed slowly, as a pastoral landscape of loss and experiment in seeing and listening, the book richly rewards that patience.” —Publishers Weekly

  Show book

• 

  The Passenger: Paris

  Passenger The

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  The best new writing, photography, art, and reportage from and about Paris—in the “rich and engrossing” series for literary travelers (Times Literary Supplement). 
   
  Paris’s postcard image has suffered multiple blows in recent years: the November 2015 terrorist attacks, the demonstrations of the yellow vests, the riots in the suburbs, Notre-Dame in flames, record heatwaves and the coronavirus. Meanwhile, soaring living costs are forcing many Parisians to leave the city. 
   
  Yet these are not just a series of unfortunate events. They are phenomena—from increasing population density to climate change, from immigration to the repercussions of globalization and geopolitics—that all metropolises in the world must face. And in Paris, today, the mood is not one of defeat but of renewal: from the city’s ongoing environmental and urbanistic transformation to the fight by a new generation of chefs against the traditionalism of starred restaurants; from the children of immigrants who take to the streets for the right to feel French to the women determined to break the sexism and stereotypes that dominate the fashion industry. Is there anyone who seriously thinks they can teach Parisians how to make a revolution? This volume includes: 
   
  Out of the Shadows by Tash Aw · Against the Stars by Tommaso Melilli · Afraid of Being Free by Samar Yazbek · Plus: the Champs-Elysées between luxury and riots, the French Republic between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, the most elegant Congolese dandies of all time, one Parisian woman you will not encounter, the city’s legendary football team that is not the PSG, and much more . . .  
   
  “The Passenger readers will find none of the typical travel guide sections on where to eat or what sights to see. Consider the books, rather, more like a literary vacation.” —Publishers Weekly

  Show book

• 

  Thrilling Cities - Fourteen...

  Ian Fleming

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  A CAPTIVATING JOURNEY AROUND THE WORLD FROM THE CREATOR OF JAMES BOND 
  Ian Fleming’s world travels and interests, as well as his journalism and wartime experiences, lent authority to everything he wrote. In 1959, the Sunday Times commissioned Fleming to write a series of dispatches from the world’s most beguiling locales. The result was Thrilling Cities, a masterpiece of well-observed travelogue that stands ably alongside the author’s Bond canon. 
  From Hong Kong to Honolulu, New York to Naples, he left the bright main streets for the back alleys, abandoning tourist sites in favor of underground haunts, and mingling with celebrities, gangsters and geishas. The result is a series of vivid snapshots of a mysterious, vanished world from a twentieth century Western perspective. 
  Just like his most famous fictional creation, Ian Fleming was a well-traveled man of the world who knew where to go to find excitement, adventure…and danger. In Thrilling Cities, he takes us along on a journey of international intrigue worthy of James Bond.

  Show book

• 

  George Washington's Virginia

  John R Maass

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  George Washington slept, worked, and fought here . . . A historian’s guide to Virginia sites and landmarks associated with the Founding Father.   Born in the Tidewater region, George Washington was reared near Fredericksburg and took up residence at Mount Vernon along the Potomac River. As a young surveyor, he worked in Virginia’s backcountry. He began his military career as a Virginia militia officer on the colony’s frontier. The majority of his widespread landholdings were there—and his entrepreneurial endeavors ranged from the swamplands of the Southeast to the upper Potomac River Valley.   In this book, historian John R. Maass explores the numerous sites all over the Commonwealth associated with Washington—and demonstrates their lasting importance.  Includes photos and illustrations

  Show book

• 

  A Year Amongst the Persians

  Edward Granville Browne

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Edward Granville Browne, born in Stouts Hill, Uley, Gloucestershire, England, was a British orientalist who published numerous articles and books of academic value, mainly in the areas of history and literature. His works are respected for their scholarship, uniqueness, and style. He published in areas which few other Western scholars had explored to any sufficient degree. He used a language and style that showed high respect for everybody, even toward those he personally did not view in positive light. In A Year Amongst the Persians (1893) he wrote a sympathetic portrayal of a Persian society which few Westerners had ever seen, including a frank account of the effects of opium. It did not attract the attention it deserved at the time of its initial publication, but after his death in 1926 it was reprinted and became a classic in English travel literature. A Year Amongst the Persians includes moving accounts of the Bahá’í community in Iran. Concerning his meetings with the Bahá’ís of Iran, Browne writes: “The memory of those assemblies can never fade from my mind; the recollection of those faces and those tones no time can efface. I have gazed with awe on the workings of a mighty Spirit, and I marvel whereunto it tends”.Edward G. Browne referred to Bahá’ís as Bábís, but this was a mistake on his part. Siyyid ‘Alí-Muhammad-i-Shírází (1819-1850), known as the “Báb”, which is Arabic for “Gate”, proclaimed that He was the Promised One of Islám. He declared His mission in 1844 and was executed by the Persian government in 1850. His followers were known as Bábís. The Báb also proclaimed that He was the Gate, Herald and Forerunner of an even greater Manifestation of God who would come after Him, the Promised One of all religions and Return of Christ in the Glory of the Father. In 1863, Mírzá Husyan-‘Alí-yi-Núrí (1817-1892), known as Bahá’u’lláh (Arabic for “The Glory of God”), proclaimed that He was the Promised One foretold by the Báb. By the time Browne arrived in Iran, most Bábís had already accepted Bahá’u’lláh as the Promised One and were now known as Bahá’ís. A small group of Bábís, led by Mírzá Yahyá Núrí, known as Azal, who was Bahá’u’lláh’s younger half-brother, rejected these claims. Azal is notorious for poisoning his own Brother (i.e. Bahá’u’lláh) as well as trying to assassinate other enemies on numerous occasions. While the Báb had made Azal His nominal successor, this was only until the Promised One were to appear, upon which time Azal’s authority was supposed to cease. Most Bábís realised Azal’s depravity and turned to Bahá’u’lláh, whose character and spirituality were unsurpassed. Browne was sympathetic to Azal’s claims but was also impressed by the spirituality of the Bahá’í community. The followers of Azal (sometimes spelled Ezel) were known as Azalís.While Browne’s sympathetic views on Azal were misguided, he made a great contribution to Bahá’í studies through his translations of historical works and his accounts of the Bahá’í community. Amongst Persians, at a time when nearly the whole nation was highly suspicious of foreigners, and in particular of any British or Russian person due to the political dynamics of that time, Edward Browne was well accepted by the people who knew him and his works. He is well remembered today, and a street named after him in Tehran, as well as his statue, remained even after the Iranian revolution in 1979.(Summary by Nicholas James Bridgewater)

  Show book