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187 books match the query 'Essays & Travelogues' and 4 start with j
Jolliet and Marquette
A New History of the 1673 ExpeditionMark Walczynski
University of Illinois Press, 2023
Often viewed in isolation, the Jolliet and Marquette expedition in fact took place against a sprawling backdrop that encompassed everything from ancient Native American cities to French colonial machinations. Mark Walczynski draws on a wealth of original research to place the explorers and their journey within seventeenth-century North America. His account takes readers among the region’s diverse Native American peoples and into a vanished natural world of treacherous waterways and native flora and fauna. Walczynski also charts the little-known exploits of the French-Canadian officials, explorers, traders, soldiers, and missionaries who created the political and religious environment that formed Jolliet and Marquette and shaped European colonization of the heartland.
A multifaceted voyage into the past, Jolliet and Marquette expands and updates the oft-told story of a pivotal event in American history.
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Joshua Tree
Desolation TangoText by Deanne Stillman; Photographs by Galen Hunt
University of Arizona Press, 2006
In a subtle dance of arid solitude, two southern California deserts come together at Joshua Tree National Park. One is the Colorado Desert—an extension of the Sonoran Desert—and features natural gardens of ocotillo and cholla cactus. The other end of the park engages the Mojave Desert, the special habitat of the Joshua tree as well as some of the most interesting geologic displays found anywhere. After the area became a national monument in 1936, local and regional residents were the primary visitors. As Southern California grew so did park visitation; Joshua Tree now lies within a three-hour drive of more than 18 million people. Elevated from national monument to national park status in 1994, Joshua tree now sees greater numbers of visitors than ever from around the nation and the world. For Deanne Stillman, Joshua Tree is a place of pilgrimage. Her own desert mecca, the park speaks to her in ways that no other place does. With crisp and impassioned narrative she takes the reader through the park’s wonders, including a talking cactus, mysterious petroglyphs, and rocks in the shape of the late New York Yankees manager Billy Martin. Stunning photographs by Galen Hunt further accentuate the gorgeous landscape, highlighting the growing need to preserve its beauty. While it explores the park’s history, geology, flora, and fauna, Joshua Tree also is a plea to walk lightly on the land, to conserve our natural heritage, and to appreciate places that call out to the soul.
Additional Information and Publicity
Electric Politics Review
World Hum Excerpt
Arroyo Monthly
San Bernardino Sun Christmas Pick
Los Angeles Times Profile
Additional Information and Publicity
Electric Politics Review
World Hum Excerpt
Arroyo Monthly
San Bernardino Sun Christmas Pick
Los Angeles Times Profile
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Journey toward the Cradle of Mankind
Guido Gozzano
Northwestern University Press, 1996
The distinguished Italian poet Guido Gozzano (1883-1916) embarked for India in February 1912, ostensibly to treat his tuberculosis. His trip lasted three months and, all told, he spent six weeks on the subcontinent. His dispatches home for a newspaper are collected and published here in English for the first time.
The extent of Gozzano's travels--to Ceylon, Goa, Agra, Jaipur--makes one wonder how the writer could visit all or even most of the places he so vividly describes. "I did not honestly think I would find so much of it intact," the spellbound Gozzano repeats to himself, before what he must shortly recognize as prodigious evidence of decay.
The extent of Gozzano's travels--to Ceylon, Goa, Agra, Jaipur--makes one wonder how the writer could visit all or even most of the places he so vividly describes. "I did not honestly think I would find so much of it intact," the spellbound Gozzano repeats to himself, before what he must shortly recognize as prodigious evidence of decay.
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Journeys from Scandinavia
Travelogues of Africa, Asia, and South America, 1840—2000Elisabeth Oxfeldt
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
For all of the scholarship done on postcolonial literatures, little has been applied to Scandinavian writing. Yet, beginning with the onset of tourism beyond Scandinavia in the 1840s, a compelling body of prose works documents Scandinavian attitudes toward foreign countries and further shows how these Scandinavian travelers sought to portray themselves to uncharted cultures.
Focusing on Danish and Norwegian travelogues, Elisabeth Oxfeldt traces the evolution of Scandinavian travel writing over two centuries using pivotal texts from each era, including works by Hans Christian Andersen, Knut Hamsun, and Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen). Oxfeldt situates each one in its historical and geopolitical context, and her close readings delineate how each travelogue reflects Scandinavia’s ongoing confrontation between Self and the non-European cultural Other.
A long-overdue examination of travel literature produced by some of Denmark and Norway’s greatest writers, Journeys from Scandinavia unpacks the unstable constructions of Scandinavian cultural and national identity and, in doing so, complicates the common assumption of a homogeneous, hegemonic Scandinavia.
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