Results by title
187 books match the query 'Essays & Travelogues' and 7 start with i
I Will Mix Your Blood with Coal
Snapshots from the East of UkraineOleksandr Mykhed, Tanya Savchynska, and David Mossop
Northwestern University Press, 2025
In 2014, the Russian army, with support from local militants, occupied parts of Ukraine’s two easternmost regions—once the beating industrial heart of the Soviet Union—where coal extraction has since exhausted both the human population and the natural resources. In late 2016, Oleksandr Mykhed set out on a research trip to explore the deep history and contested present of the area from the perspective of a fellow countryman who’d never been there.
Mykhed brings us on a painful yet hopeful journey across the Ukrainian east, sharing conversations with locals, snippets from archival documents, and the complicated perspectives of prominent cultural figures, such as writer Serhiy Zhadan, historian Olena Stiazhkina, and philosopher Ihor Kozlovsky, who was imprisoned and tortured for nearly two years.
I Will Mix Your Blood with Coal invites us to meet generations of coal miners. To learn about the Belgian and British investors who founded the east’s industrial cities. To remember the harrowing events of the First and Second World Wars and the incalculable brutality of Soviet history. To see the activists who are even now working to improve the country. To hear sweet memories of a lost utopia that never existed. Mykhed provides a unique portrait of life in the east during the war, before the full-scale invasion that would change everything.
Improbable Journeys
Robin Magowan
Northwestern University Press, 2002
For more than four decades, poet Robin Magowan has journeyed in search of ecstatic spiritual experiences. Hitchhiking and walking, by bus or boat or when necessary by horse, he has explored lands as exotic as Nepal and New Guinea, as classic as Italy or France, and as forgotten as Persia and pre-Castro Cuba. All the while he has submerged himself, whether in the mysteries of Haitian voodoo or the simples pleasures of Burgundian peasant life. Known for the beauty, wit, and expressive power of his prose, Magowan's writing vibrates with the intensity of an outsider who crawls into the skin of a country--and emerges transformed.
In Byron's Footsteps
Tessa de Loo
Haus Publishing, 2010
In the Other Direction Now
Dispatches from East AfricaNavid Kermani
Haus Publishing, 2026
More than a travelogue: a work of human depth and understanding that has much to teach those interested in contemporary global affairs and postcolonial realities.
Navid Kermani is an acclaimed writer already well known in the English-speaking world for his books Upheaval: The Refugee Trekthrough Europe and Along the Trenches: A Journey through Eastern Europe to Isfahan. His new book, In the Other Direction Now, continues his thoughtful documentation of global peripheries. Visiting southern Madagascar, the Comoros, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Sudan, Kermani examines how global fault lines converge, from postcolonial neglect and the devastating impact of climate change to the rising and often nefarious influence of China and the consequences of the Ukraine War.
Reflective, astute, and intellectually rigorous, Kermani’s empathetic yet unflinching perspective does not aim to interpret Africa for us, but to learn from it in all its variousness and multiplicity. Music emerges as a unifying thread—Christian hymns, Sufi dances, and Sudanese jazz become symbols of resilience and transformation, providing cultural links that bind communities across conflict, faith, and history and offering a counterpoint to colonial clichés and Western ignorance. These specific, grounded accounts of people and places contextualize global inequalities not as a product of some intrinsic African deficiency but as part of interconnected systems shaped by the Global North as much as by local governance and the legacy of colonialism.
Inspired Journeys
Travel Writers in Search of the MuseEdited by Brian Bouldrey
University of Wisconsin Press, 2016
Irish Journal
Heinrich Boll
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Isolarion
A Different Oxford JourneyJames Attlee
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Through the centuries, people from all walks of life have heard the siren call of a pilgrimage, the lure to journey away from the familiar in search of understanding. But is a pilgrimage even possible these days for city-dwellers enmeshed in the pressures of work and family life? Or is there a way to be a pilgrim without leaving one’s life behind? James Attlee answers these questions with Isolarion, a thoughtful, streetwise, and personal account of his pilgrimage to a place he thought he already knew—the Cowley Road in Oxford, right outside his door.
Isolarion takes its title from a type of fifteenth-century map that isolates an area in order to present it in detail, and that’s what Attlee, sharp-eyed and armed with tape recorder and notebook, provides for Cowley Road. The former site of a leper hospital, a workhouse, and a medieval well said to have miraculous healing powers, Cowley Road has little to do with the dreaming spires of the tourist’s or student’s Oxford. What Attlee presents instead is a thoroughly modern, impressively cosmopolitan, and utterly organic collection of shops, restaurants, pubs, and religious establishments teeming with life and reflecting the multicultural makeup of the surrounding neighborhood.
From a sojourn in a sensory-deprivation tank to a furtive visit to an unmarked pornography emporium, Attlee investigates every aspect of the Cowley Road’s appealingly eclectic culture, where halal shops jostle with craft jewelers and reggae clubs pulsate alongside quiet churchyards. But the very diversity that is, for Attlee, the essence of Cowley Road’s appeal is under attack from well-meaning city planners and predatory developers. His pilgrimage is thus invested with melancholy: will the messy glories of the Cowley Road be lost to creeping homogenization?
Drawing inspiration from sources ranging from Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy to contemporary art, Attlee is a charming and companionable guide who revels in the extraordinary embedded in the everyday. Isolarion is at once a road movie, a quixotic stand against uniformity, and a rousing hymn in praise of the complex, invigorating nature of the twenty-first-century city.