In 1923, America paid close attention, via special radio broadcasts, newspaper headlines, and cover stories in popular magazines, as a government party descended the Colorado to survey Grand Canyon. Fifty years after John Wesley Powell's journey, the canyon still had an aura of mystery and extreme danger. At one point, the party was thought lost in a flood.
Something important besides adventure was going on. Led by Claude Birdseye and including colorful characters such as early river-runner Emery Kolb, popular writer Lewis Freeman, and hydraulic engineer Eugene La Rue, the expedition not only made the first accurate survey of the river gorge but sought to decide the canyon's fate. The primary goal was to determine the best places to dam the Grand. With Boulder Dam not yet built, the USGS, especially La Rue, contested with the Bureau of Reclamation over how best to develop the Colorado River. The survey party played a major role in what was known and thought about Grand Canyon.
The authors weave a narrative from the party's firsthand accounts and frame it with a thorough history of water politics and development and the Colorado River. The recommended dams were not built, but the survey both provided base data that stood the test of time and helped define Grand Canyon in the popular imagination.
Can a man have a love affair with a foreign land? Ron Butler never dreamed Mexico would capture his heart and his soul. But when his ex-wife moved to Guadalajara with their children in the wake of divorce, he found himself crisscrossing the country, seduced by its charms and moved by its rhythms and its melodies.
Like the diver of an old Mexican legend who lives beneath the sea seeking the best pearl, Butler lost himself in Mexico and found the hidden treasures of every tiny hamlet and big metropolis. He writes about the endangered monarch butterflies of El Rosario, the street bands of Zacatecas, and the mummies of Guanajuato. He takes a magical night ferry ride from Mazatlán and a train excursion into Copper Canyon—a chasm four times larger than the Grand Canyon—in Mexico's most mysterious mountains. He goes off the beaten path in such tourist havens as Acapulco and Cancún. And he walks in the footsteps of movie stars and artists who too have been enamored of Mexico.
Poking into the nooks and crannies of Mexico, Butler indulges in tasty Mexican specialties at both the finest restaurants and out-of-the-way street stands. He finds the best tequila in the town named Tequila, the world's most delicious cup of coffee in Veracruz, the sweetest dulce in Morelia, and the best mole—a Mayan chile and chocolate sauce embellished by nuns anxious to please a visiting Spanish viceroy—in Puebla. Sharing his considerable knowledge of art, Butler also uncovers the best of Mexico's museums and advises shoppers about folk crafts.
Informative and helpful as the best travel guide, Dancing Alone in Mexico will help even seasoned travelers to get the most out of their trips to Mexico. Casual and lively as the best travel memoir, the book will also delight the armchair traveler with south-of-the-border stories and adventures that come only to those who dance not alone but with an entire land.
An engrossing memoir in which a photojournalist records both the precursors to today’s conflicts in the Middle East and her own deeply felt conviction that news coverage of the region actually increases the conflicts there.
"You're going where?" Carol Spencer Mitchell's father demanded as she set off in 1984 to cover the Middle East as a photojournalist for Newsweek and other publications. In this intensely thoughtful memoir, Spencer Mitchell probes the motivations that impelled her—a single Jewish woman—to document the turmoil roiling the Arab world in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as how her experiences as a photojournalist compelled her to set aside her cameras and reexamine the way images are created, scenes are framed, and "real life" is packaged for specific news stories.
In Danger Pay, Spencer Mitchell takes us on a harrowing journey to PLO military training camps for Palestinian children and to refugee camps in the Gaza Strip before, during, and after the first intifada. Through her eyes, we experience the media frenzy surrounding the 1985 hijackings of TWA Flight #847 and the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro. We meet Middle Eastern leaders, in particular Yasser Arafat and King Hussein of Jordan, with whom Spencer Mitchell developed close working relationships. And we witness Spencer Mitchell's growing conviction that the Western media's portrayal of conflicts in the Middle East actually helps to fuel those conflicts—a conviction that eventually, as she says, "shattered [her] career."
Although the events that Spencer Mitchell records took place decades ago, their repercussions reverberate in the MIddle Eastern conflicts of today. Likewise, her concern about "the triumph of image over reality" takes on greater urgency as our knowledge of the world becomes ever more filtered by virtual media.
In 1880 a young medical student named Arthur Conan Doyle embarked upon the “first real outstanding adventure” of his life, taking a berth as ship’s surgeon on an Arctic whaler, the Hope. The voyage took him to unknown regions, showered him with dramatic and unexpected experiences, and plunged him into dangerous work on the ice floes of the Arctic seas. He tested himself, overcame the hardships, and, as he wrote later, “came of age at 80 degrees north latitude.”
A special limited, numbered edition of the clothbound book is also available. In addition, a text-only e-book edition is published as Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure, Text-only Edition.
The Old West has been viewed from many perspectives, from the scornful to the uncritically romantic. But seldom has it been treated with the honest nostalgia of the wonderful accounts and pictures gathered in Denver in Slices.
Ohio University Press/Swallow Press is proud to reissue this Western classic, which includes a brief survey of all Denver history, some slices depicting the most fascinating places and characters. The City Ditch, Cherry Creek, River Front Park, the Denver Mint, the Tabors, the Windsor Hotel, the Baron of Montclair, Overland Park, Buffalo Bill, Elitch's Gardens, and Eugene Field—they're all here. Illustrating these stories is an array of nearly one hundred pictures of the people, buildings, and street scenes: a fascinating panorama of the gold rush camp that became the Rocky Mountain metropolis.
With a new foreword by renowned Denver historian Thomas J. Noel, this classic will once again help preserve Denver's lively past.
Across north-central New Mexico and Arizona, along the line of Route 66, now Interstate 40, there first ran a little-known wagon trail called Beale's Wagon Road, after Edward F. Beale, who surveyed it for the War Department in 1857. This survey became famous for employing camels. Not so well known is the fate of the first emigrants who the next year attempted to follow its tracks. The government considered the 1857 exploration a success and the road it opened a promising alternative route to California but expected such things as military posts and developed water supplies to be needed before it was ready for regular travel. Army representatives in New Mexico were more enthusiastic.
In 1858 there was a need for an alternative. Emigrants avoided the main California Trail because of a U.S. Army expedition to subdue Mormons in Utah. The Southern Route ran through Apache territory, was difficult for the army to guard, and was long. When a party of Missouri and Iowa emigrants known as the Rose-Baley wagon train arrived in Albuquerque, they were encouraged to be the first to try the new Beale road. Their journey became a rolling disaster. Beale's trail was more difficult to follow than expected; water sources and feed for livestock harder to find. Indians along the way had been described as peaceful, but the Hualapais persistently harassed the emigrants and shot their stock, and when the wagon train finally reached the Colorado River, a large party of Mojaves attacked them. Several of the emigrants were killed, and the remainder began a difficult retreat to Albuquerque. Their flight, with wounded companions and reduced supplies, became ever more arduous. Along the way they met other emigrant parties and convinced them to join the increasingly disorderly and distressed return journey.
Charles Baley tells this dramatic story and discusses its aftermath, for the emigrants, for Beale's Wagon Road, and for the Mojaves, against whom some of the emigrants pressed legal claims with the federal government.
A picturesque peninsula with 298 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline, state parks, forests, and cozy inns, Door County is one of the Midwest’s prime tourist attractions. Magill Weber explores the many recreational opportunities available to visitors, including secret spots known only to locals and longtime seasonal residents. Wisconsin native Janet Mrazek contributes 125 detailed and easy-to-follow maps. With suggestions of more than 150 scenic hikes, biking and paddling routes, end-of-the-road beaches, lighthouses, and wildlife-watching sites, and descriptions of the local flora and fauna, Door County Outdoors is the ultimate guide for active travelers and nature enthusiasts.
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