Results by title

187 books match the query 'Essays & Travelogues' and 4 start with p

cover of Palermo

Palermo

Roberto Alajmo

Haus Publishing, 2017

Palermo's heart lies hidden under its many outer layers. In this unusual guide to the beautiful Sicilian capital, Roberto Alajmo uncovers each stratum to reveal its true character. Although disguised as a tourist's handbook, Palermo has much more to offer than ordinary recommendations for the intrepid traveler. Alajmo gives an insight into the city from a lifelong resident's point of view, showcasing its hidden cultural and culinary jewels; portraying its people, and their secrets; touching on its politics and contentious mafia involvement. Seeing Palermo with one's own eyes is an ineffable experience, even for Alajmo; the essence of the city, its beauty, is the only aspect left to the reader to discover.
[more]
cover of Patrick Leigh Fermor: Noble Encounters between Budapest and Transylvania

Patrick Leigh Fermor

Noble Encounters between Budapest and Transylvania

Michael O'Sullivan

Central European University Press, 2018

This book revisits the trajectory of one section of Patrick Leigh Fermor's famous excursion on foot from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in the 1930s. The highly regarded British travel writer and heroic wartime Special Operations Executive officer walked into Hungary as a youth of 19 at Easter and left Transylvania in August 1934. This intrepid traveler, "a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene" as the New York Times obituary put it in 2011, published his experiences half a century later. Between the Woods and the Water, that covers the part of the epic foot journey from the middle Danube to the Iron Gates, has been a bestseller since it was first published in 1986. In the present volume Michael O'Sullivan reveals the identity of the interesting characters in the travelogue, interviewing several of them eyetoeye. The many counts and barons among his 1934 contacts are a proof of Leigh Fermor's lifelong attraction to the aristocracy. Rich with photos and other documents on places and persons both from the thirties and today, the book offers a compelling social and political history of the period and the area. It provides a particular portrait of Hungary and Transylvania when they were on the brink of momentous change.
[more]
cover of Portage Into The Past

Portage Into The Past

J. Arnold Bolz

University of Minnesota Press, 1999

A Minnesota canoe enthusiast retraces the routes of the voyageurs.

The wilderness of the Boundary Waters is as rich in history as it is in natural beauty. Almost three hundred years ago, French Canadian voyageurs traveled through this area, which straddles the border of the United States and Canada, paddling birch-bark canoes along the St. Lawrence-Superior route to northwestern Canada. In this work of travel and adventure, Bolz recounts a journey he took in 1958, retracing the voyageurs’ route from Grand Portage on Lake Superior through the Quetico-Superior country to Rainy Lake. His canoe and paddle served as a time machine as he re-created a trip first taken centuries ago.

Beautifully illustrated by Francis Lee Jaques, Portage into the Past draws from the journals and maps of the early explorers of the region. Today’s adventurers of the north country will treasure this classic, an ideal guidebook to the region’s remarkable past. “At times, the transition is so smooth that it is with a start that we realize we have suddenly been carried two hundred years into the past.” Canoeing ISBN 0-8166-0919-5 Paper £00.00 $14.95192 Pages 6 x 8 1/4 AprilFesler-Lampert Minnesota Heritage Book SeriesTranslation inquiries: University of Minnesota Press
[more]
cover of Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia

Postcards from Stanland

Journeys in Central Asia

David H. Mould

Ohio University Press, 2015

Central Asia has long stood at the crossroads of history. It was the staging ground for the armies of the Mongol Empire, for the nineteenth-century struggle between the Russian and British empires, and for the NATO campaign in Afghanistan. Today, multinationals and nations compete for the oil and gas reserves of the Caspian Sea and for control of the pipelines. Yet “Stanland” is still, to many, a terra incognita, a geographical blank.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, academic and journalist David Mould’s career took him to the region on Fulbright Fellowships and contracts as a media trainer and consultant for UNESCO and USAID, among others. In Postcards from Stanland, he takes readers along with him on his encounters with the people, landscapes, and customs of the diverse countries—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan—he came to love. He talks with teachers, students, politicians, environmental activists, bloggers, cab drivers, merchants, Peace Corps volunteers, and more.

Until now, few books for a nonspecialist readership have been written on the region, and while Mould brings his own considerable expertise to bear on his account—for example, he is one of the few scholars to have conducted research on post-Soviet media in the region—the book is above all a tapestry of place and a valuable contribution to our understanding of the post-Soviet world.

[more]