Set in almost uninhabitable regions of Central Australia, The Songlines asks and tries to answer these questions: Why is man the most restless, dissatisfied of animals? Why do wandering people conceive the world as perfect whereas sedentary ones always try to change it? Why have the great teachers—Christ or the Buddha—recommended the Road as the way. to salvation? Do we agree with Pascal that all man's troubles stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room?We do not often ask these questions today for we commonly assume that living in a house is normal and that the wandering life is aberrant. But for more than twenty years Chatwin has mulled over the possibility that the reverse might be the case.Pre-colonial Australia was the last landmass on earth peopled not by herdsmen, farmers, or city dwellers, but by hunter-gatherers. Their labyrinths of invisible pathways across the continent are known to us as Songlines or Dreaming Tracks, but to the Aboriginals as the tracks of their ancestors—the Way of the Law. Along these "roads" they travel in order to perform all those activities that are distinctively human—song, dance, marriage, exchange of ideas, and arrangements of territorial boundaries by agreement rather than force.In Chatwin's search for the Songlines, Arkady is an ideal friend and guide: Australian by birth, the son of a Cossack exile, with all the strength and warmth of his inheritance. Whether hunting kangaroo from a Land Cruiser, talking to the diminutive Rolf in his book-crammed trailer, buying drinks for a bigoted policeman (and would-be writer), cheering as Arkady's true love declares herself (part of The Songlines is a romantic comedy), Chatwin turns this almost implausible picaresque adventure into something approaching the scale of a Greek tragedy.The life of the Aboriginals stands in vivid contrast, of course, to the prevailing cultures of our time. And The Songlines presents unforgettable details about the kinds of disputes we know all too well from less traumatic confrontations: over sacred lands invaded by railroads, mines, and construction sites, over the laws and rights of a poor people versus a wealthy invasive one. To Chatwin these are but recent, local examples of an eternal basic distinction between settlers and wanderers. His book, devoted to the latter, is a brilliant evocation of this profound optimism: that man is by nature not a bellicose aggressor but a pacific, song-creating, adaptive species whose destiny is to quest for the truth.

    As the Soviet people looked back on decades of war and famine, conquest and achievement, and forward to sweeping changes during a time of new leadership and openness, the photographers were granted unprecedented access to homes, factories, schools and even prisons. They traveled to all 15 Soviet republics and across 11 time zones. They ventured into areas that have been closed to outsiders for centuries, and they came back with candid images of the daily life of the people behind the headlines, capturing a lost Soviet era, the twilight of a country.

    As a child in Abyssinia he watched the glorious armies of Ras Tafari returning from hand-to-hand battle, their prisoners in chains; at the age of 23 he made his first expedition into the country of the Danakil, a murderous race among whom a man's status in the tribe depended on the number of men he had killed and castrated. His books, "Arabian Sands" and "The Marsh Arabs", tell of his two sojourns in the Empty Quarter and the Marshes of Southern Iraq. In this autobiography, Wilfred Thesiger highlights the people who most profoundly influenced him and the events which enabled him to lead the life of his choice.

    More than 500 sailing routes are detailed, including 40 new routes to such high-latitude destinations as Scandinavia, Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, and Antarctica. The book includes 64 pages of 2-color maps, updated Gps coordinates for navigation, and route-by-route descriptions of weather and hazards.

    24 black-and-white photographs, 10 maps and charts.

    A story of a young couple who abandoned their careers in New York and moved to Ireland tells of their idyllic life in a cottage, surrounded by the beauty and character of the land of their ancestors.

    What Thubron reveals is an astonishing diversity, a land whose still unmeasured resources strain to meet an awesome demand, and an ancient people still reeling from the devastation of the Cultural Revolution.

    This book describes his journeys into the region known as the Western Desert of Egypt or the Libyan Sahara. He is a central character in the group of explorers who would be later fictionalized in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. Libyan Sands is an exploration of the Egyptian western desert and the Libyan Sahara on the eve of the Second World War.

    Out West is an account of three separate journeys: Lewis and Clark's epic adventure through uncharted wilderness; Duncan's retracing of the historic trail, now in various ways tamed, paved, and settled; and the journey of the American West in the years in between. Readers traveling with Duncan will encounter the people who inhabit today's West: farmers and ranchers, cowboys and mountain men, Native Americans, residents of dying small towns, city dwellers who have survived cycles of boom and bust. From the Gateway Arch in St. Louis to the Oregon coast, readers will be treated to a landscape as variously impressive as its people.

    Taking the reader on foot through Istanbul, the European City of Culture 2010, the authors describe the historic monuments and sites of what was once Constantinople and the capital, in turn, of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, in the context of the great living city. Woven throughout are anecdotes, secret histories, hidden gems, and every major place of interest the traveler will want to see. Practical and informative, readable and vividly described, this is the definitive guide to and story of Istanbul, by those who know it best.

    Retraces Ulysses' logical homeward route using a replica of a Bronze Age galley.

    "Cahill . . . (writes) with the precision ofJohn McPhee and Joan Didion tempered by a Monty Pythonesque sense of the absurd."--San Diego Union-Tribune.

    In this acutely perceived and beautifully written book, the bestselling author of Bad Land turns that voyage–which coincided with the Falklands war of 1982-into an occasion for meditations on his country, his childhood, and the elusive notion of home. Whether he’s chatting with bored tax exiles on the Isle of Man, wrestling down a mainsail during a titanic gale, or crashing a Scottish house party where the kilted guests turn out to be Americans, Raban is alert to the slightest nuance of meaning. One can read Coasting for his precise naturalistic descriptions or his mordant comments on the new England, where the principal industry seems to be the marketing of Englishness. But one always reads it with pleasure.

    150 black-and-white and 35 color photographs.

    An ultimate geographical dictionary from Reader's Digest Association that lists countries, cities, natural and man-made wonders accompanied by full-color photographs, maps and charts.

    Walker explores Berlin's dissident mood in the company of friends from both sides, some of whom are wall-jumpers and all of whom cannot help but wonder which side is better.

    It explores the dramatic geographical range of Greece from the Northern mainland with its oriental influences to the islands with their white-washed fishing villages.

    Customize your trip with simple planning tools • Top experiences & attractions • Practical advice for getting around • Easy-to-read color regional mapsExplore the Portland, Seattle, British Columbia and beyond • Discerning Fodor’s Choice picks for hotels, restaurants, sights, and more • “Word of Mouth” tips from fellow Fodor’s travelers • Illustrated features on whale-watching, wineries, and Pike's Market Place • Best open-air adventures, local breweries, and regional cuisineOpinions from destination experts • Fodor’s writers reveal their favorite local haunts • Revised annually to provide the latest information

    He is also the author of "Arabian Sands", "The Marsh Arabs" and "The Life of My Choice". His achievement as a travel photographer is equally impressive. This book is a collection of those photographs which most satisfy Thesiger. Rarely seen images from his Asian travels, a mixture of familiar and unknown pictures of the Arab world in which he found himself most, and most memorably at home, and images of Africa where he has now lived for almost 25 years.

    Beautiful, detailed, large-format maps of every state. Perfect for home and office reference, and a must for all your vehicles. Gazetteer information may include: campgrounds, attractions, historic sites & museums, recreation areas, trails, freshwater fishing site & boat launches, canoe trips or scenic drives. Categories vary by state

    

    To these attainments he has added The Way to the Labyrinth—as vivid, uninhibited, and wide-ranging a memoir as one is ever likely to encounter, now translated and published in English for the first time.Born of a haute-bourgeoise French family—his mother an ardent Catholic who founded a religious order, his father an anticlerical leftwing politician who served as a minister under Aristide Briand, his older brother a priest who became a cardinal—Daniélou spent a solitary childhood in the country. Escaping from his family milieu, he went to Paris where he fell in with avant-garde, bohemian, sexually liberated circles, among whose luminaries were Cocteau, Diaghilev, Max Jacob, and Maurice Sachs. But all along, however ferevently he plunged into various activities, he felt some other destiny awaited him. After a number of journeys, some of them highly adventurous, he found his real home in India. He spent twenty years there, fifteen of them in Benares on teh banks of the Ganges. There he immersed himself in teh study of Sanskrit, Hindu philosophy, music, and the art of the ancient temples of Northern India, and converted to the Hindu religion. But times changes, and soon after India gained its independence, he returned to live again in Europe and devoted much of his great energy to the encouragement of traditional musics from around the world.

    It was a way of life with them. An Australian trader consulted me one day because of a serious drink problem he had. ‘I only had ten cans yesterday, doc,’ he said. ‘And today I haven’t had any. I just don’t feel like it. Today’s the first day in ten years I haven’t had a drink.’ I looked at him. He was yellow; he had hepatitis. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you’ve got hepatitis. That’s why you don’t want to drink. What’s more, you mustn’t drink for at least three months.’ ‘Oh!’ he said.‘And I see from looking at your hospital records that sometimes you vomit blood in the morning.’ ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ ‘It’s not a terribly good sign, you know.’ ‘Oh, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I thought everyone did it.’ He returned three months later. To my surprise he had not touched a drop. ‘Hey doc!’ he said. ‘I feel terrific, I haven’t felt this good in years. Why’s that then?’‘Why do you think?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know. You’re the doc, you should know.’ ‘Well, for the first time in ten years you haven’t got a hangover.’ ‘Oh.’ A look of deep cogitation passed over his face like the shadow of a cloud over a field on a summer’s day.‘Does that mean I can go back on the beer?’ Some men become doctors out of a noble desire to save lives, or because they seek money and prestige; Anthony Daniels did so because he was middle class, because he had to do something and because his father – not a man to be lightly gainsaid – pushed him into it.But this inauspicious beginning led to a great career – if not as a doctor (though he became a respected consultant psychiatrist), then as a doctor-writer.Both in his own name, and under his better-known nom de plume of Theodore Dalrymple, Daniels is a prolific author whose work has spanned 30 years and much of the globe.His formidable energy is equalled in his prose by a clarity and elegance which few can match, and it is this, as well as his unusual experience, originality of insight and unconventional views (by modern standards), which have won him worldwide acclaim.But although he is read – as Theodore Dalrymple – in almost every country on earth, relatively little is known about him.Fool or Physician, which was his second book and remains his most personal, offers his followers a small insight into his past.It details his reluctant entry into medical school (‘I specialised in doing and knowing the least necessary to pass the examinations’), his earliest ventures in medicine in a small midlands town and his subsequent work overseas when, bored almost to tears by life in the NHS, he travels first to the then-Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa (as a ‘well-meaning liberal’ his ‘problem was to discover where in the world pure evil still confronted pure good, where I could demonstrate that I was on the side of the angels, but at the same time live comfortably and register with the General Medical Council’), and later to the Gilbert Islands, a pacific paradise brimming with drunken expatriates, eccentrics and lunatics.

    Full Page Color Illustrations

    It embraces the whole basin of the Amargosa from the Panamints to the Spring Mountains, from the Palmettos to the Avawatz. And it spans a century from the earliest recollections and the oldest records to that day in 1933 when much of the valley was finally set aside as a National Monument. This is the story of an illusory land, of the people it attracted and of the dreams and delusions they pursued-the story of the metals in its mountains and the salts in its sinks, of its desiccating heat and its revitalizing springs, and of all the riches of its scenery and lore-the story of Indians and horse thieves, lost argonauts and lost mine hunters, prospectors and promoters, miners and millionaires, stockholders and stock sharps, homesteaders and hermits, writers and tourists. But mostly this is the story of the illusions-the illusions of a shortcut to the gold diggings that lured the forty-niners, of inescapable deadliness that hung in the name they left behind, of lost bonanzas that grew out of the few nuggets they found, of immeasurable riches spread by hopeful prospectors and calculating con men, and of impenetrable mysteries concocted by the likes of Scotty. These and many lesser illusions are the heart of its history.

    All walks are circular and accessible by road. No rock climbing is involved and the routes, each including a peak over 2000 feet, have been selected by an experienced Scottish walker. All Highland regions are included and each walk can be completed in a day. Maps and information about difficulty rating, type of terrain and conditions in adverse weather is provided.* All walks are circular and accessible by road* No rock climbing is involved* Selected by an experienced Scottish walker* Each route includes a peak over 2,000 feet* All Highland regions are included * All walks can be completed in one day* Each route has a detailed sketch map and ratings for technical difficulty, type of terrain and conditions in adverse weather

    Acclaimed novelist and Florida resident Joy Williams traces U.S. Highway 1 from Key Largo to Key West, combining the best of local legend—colorful stories you won’t find in other guidebooks—with insightful commentary and the most up-to-date advice on where to stay, eat, and wander. Along the way, you will:• explore the exquisite underwater world of North America’s only living reef • discover the beautiful bridges that span the Keys, the forts, and the distinctive “conch” architecture of Key West• experience the eerie serenity of Florida Bay’s “backcountry” and the unique ecology of the Keys• visit the Key West cemetery and learn about the lives of some of the Keys’ eccentrics—writers, madmen, and entrepreneurs with various delusions• find the best (and avoid the worst) cafés, inns, and other establishments that the Keys have to offerHere is the most thorough and candid guide to the Keys, one of the most surprising locales in America. With insight and style, Joy Williams shares with us all of the region’s idiosyncrasies and delights.

    "A wonderful inner journey in the outer light and color of a remote coast, uncommonly well written."--Peter Matthiessen

    

    President Thomas Jefferson shared this dream. He conceived the Corps of Discovery to travel up the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains and westward along possible river routes to the Pacific Ocean. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led this expedition of 1804–6. Along the way they filled hundreds of notebook pages with observations of the geography, Indian tribes, and natural history of the trans-Mississippi West. In April 1805 Lewis and Clark and their party set out from Fort Mandan following the Missouri River westward. This volume recounts their travels through country never before explored by white people. With new personnel, including the Shoshone Indian woman Sacagawea, her husband Toussaint Charbonneau, and their baby, nicknamed Pomp, the party spent the rest of the spring and early summer toiling up the Missouri. Along the way they portaged the difficult Great Falls, encountered grizzly bears, cataloged new species of plants and animals, and mapped rivers and streams.

    Just under three years later they arrived back at Yarmouth, having circled the globe by the way of the West Indies, the Panama Canal, Tahiti, Samoa, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Ascension, and the Azores, with many other ports of call in route.

    A trade paperback edition of an international best-seller, this is a rare travel guide focusing on England's most unusual, eccentric attractions.

    Wild Heron, located just south of Savannah on the Little Ogeechee River, is the oldest plantation house still standing in Georgia. A one-and-a-half story farmhouse built in the style of a West India cottage, it is being restored to reflect the period of the early 1800s.Farther to the interior, in the area around Augusta, are such homes as Fruitlands, now the clubhouse of the Augusta national Golf Club; Meadow Garden; Ware's Folly; and Montrose, built in 1849 and one of the Loveliest Greek Revival houses in the area. Houses photographed along the Plantation Trail, from Athens to Macon, include the white-columned President's House, home since 1949 to the presidents of the University of Georgia; the Howell Cobb House, in Athens; Whitehall, in Covington; Glan Mary, in Sparta; and the Woodruff House, in Macon.Gleason devotes considerable attention to the homes of the western side of the state, from Chickamauga to Thomasville. The Gordon-Lee House, constructed in 1847, was headquarters fro the Union army during the battle of chickamauga. Other houses in this part of Georgia are valley View, which overlooks the Etowah River, west of Cartersville; the Archibald Howell House, near downtown Marietta; Lovejoy, in Clayton Country; The oaks, in the vicinity of LaGrange; and Greenwood and Pebble Hill, near Thomasville.In all, Gleason captures more than one hundred of Georgia's most beautiful antebellum homes, including many lesser-known houses. In addition to exterior photographs, Antebellum Homes of Georgia contains a number of interior views as well as aerial photographs that show the relationship between the houses and their environs: outbuildings, formal gardens, and recd clay fields that were once white with cotton. Captions provide brief histories of the houses and their owners as weel as notes on construction and outstanding architectural details.

    Editor Paul Fussell has brought together some of the best travel writing of all time from the world's most recognized travelers--Marco Polo, Darwin and Kerouac to name a few--and has explored the traveler's psyche from the Age of Discovery to the Age of Mass Tourism.

    Easy to find, or off the beaten track, steeped in tradition or newly established, her discoveries are too wonderful to be overlooked. Chapters are arranged by province, and being with an introduction to the region, including a map, the best months to visit, and a schedule of daily markets. Entries include phone numbers, business hours, and specific directions where necessary. Each chapter also serves up a bonus sampling of the region's signature dishes, all tested for American kitchens. Accented by over 150 evocative photographs taken especially for the book, and featuring a French/English food glossary with more than 1000 entries, this guide captures the food magic that is France. 59,000 copies in print. Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

    This book is a stunning record of this walk with fantastic photographs throughout.

    IMMEDIATE DISPATCH FROM UK STOCKIST - ALL PROCEEDS GO TO THE JEC MEMORIAL NATURE RESERVE, BANKS OF THE LITTLE OUSE, SUFFOLK -Will post internationally by airmail

    

    

    W. Tilman -- mountaineer, sailor and one of the great explorers of this century -- was a prolific and stylish writer. His mountain activities are recorded in H. W. Tilman: The Seven Mountain-Travel Books, an earlier omnibus, and this companion volume deals with his equally enthralling sailing adventures.When he bought the pilot cutter "Mischief" in 1954, it was not with the intention of retiring from mountaineering, but to use the sea for access to remote mountains in high latitudes. Over the next twenty-two years "Mischief" and her successors saw regular service in distant waters, and their owner developed a whole new technique and tradition of amphibious mountaineering. His seafaring technique, like that of his mountaineering, was based on simplicity, using well-tried methods and navigational equipment that was essentially the same as that used by James Cook. He maintained that the only worthwhile innovations made in small ships in the last hundred years were the Diesel engine and Terylene rope. His seamanship was characterized by the same intelligence, cool judgment and masterly skill that had made his mountaineering exploits famous. He became an excellent navigator, with an approach more like that of a merchant sailing ship's master than a modern racing yachtsman's. The object was to arrive, not to win a race, and his ships and crews were carefully nursed through severe conditions without strain or fuss.The eight books collected haere are humorous, learned, devastatingly candid, and packed with information. They recount voyages to the Southern Oceans where he visited Patagonia, the Crozets, Kerguelen, Heard Island and the South Shetlands. No less important were his many trips to Greenland as well as forays to Sptizbergen, Baffin Island and other areas above the Arctic Circle. The mountaineering highlights of his seafaring career were the crossing of the Patagonian ice cap, the crossing of Bylot Island, and the ascent of Big Ben on Heard Island, where although Tilman was not in the summit party, he contributed more than any of them to the success of the expedition.Not all of his voyages were successful or enjoyable. A valued crew member was lost overboard during one venture. There were the sad losses of his cutters, "Mischief" and "Sea Breeze," and other occasions when crew members, unable to match Tilman's persistence, decided to desert or mutiny.Most of his crews were made of sterner stuff. They were rewarded with good fellowship and humor, the opportunity of learning seamanship and mountaineering from a great teacher, and a chance to see what may be done in rough waters and heavy ice in a little, old, unstrengthened ship.Some managed to join him on more than one voyage, including the resourceful Simon Richardson, in whose boat "En Avant," Tilman, Richardson and their crew disappeared after leaving Rio de Janeiro for Port Stanley in November 1977. What happened is a mystery but the passage to South America had been a happy one. The loss of six enterprising young men was tragic, but for Tilman at least, it was a sad but curiously fitting end, one last voyage in the best of good company.

    Peary in 1909. Previously a National Geographic cover story and TV film. Two 8-page photo inserts.

    It’s no wonder. Little Costa Rica is endowed with a mosaic of natural landscapes that are packed with an amazing array of flora and fauna. This is also one of the easiest places in the world to experience the beauty and complexity of tropical nature. Now in full color, Fodor’s Costa Rica 2010 shows off the splendor of Costa Rica like no other guidebook. Features include:• More than 200 color photos to inspire you• An all-new, illustrated “Experience Costa Rica” chapter loaded with valuable advice, including tips on choosing an eco-lodge and planning a destination marriage or honeymoon• A brand-new, illustrated “Biodiversity” chapter to guide you through the country’s varied landscapes and help plan your vacation based on particular activities or topography• New magazine-style illustrated features highlight quintessential Costa Rica: surfing the Salsa Brava, sport-fishing off the Pacific coast, canopy tours in the cloud forests, turtle-nesting tours in Tortuguero, and bird-watching in the rare tropical dry forests of Guanacaste• Interactive full-color maps and planning pages help you easily get your bearings and plan the trip of a lifetimeFodor’s. For Choice Travel Experiences.

    This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

    Great poets such as Marvell, Shelley, Coleridge, and Rossetti, as well as many other lesser known lyricists have recorded excursions abroadin their poetry. Brought together for the first time in an anthology that will delight and inspire both the adventurous traveler and the armchair dreamer, this collection charts the British experience abroad over five centuries as reflected in their verse. Covering many continents and countries and including poets as varied as John Betjeman, William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lawrence Durrell, Rudyard Kipling, D.H. Lawrence, Sylvia Plath, Stephen Spender, Oscar Wilde, and D.J. Enright, this marvelous anthology reveals not only thevarious motives which drove the British to travel abroad, but also, by arranging the poems geographically, exposes historical relationships, prejudices, and predilections.

    A splendid portrait of the state.

    Every year the Warkaris carry palanquins, called palkhis, bearing sandals representing the feet of their saints from various towns to Pandharpur in Maharashtra--to the Temple of Vitoba.Mokashi accompanied the oldest and most revered of the palanquin processions, the palkhi of Jnaneshwar Maharaj, on its two-week journey. His account is the only sustained view of the pilgrimage in any language.

    Includes area maps, access and information on climate and gear. 10 black-and-white photographs. 11 line drawings. 10 maps.

    

    

    Includes orientation information, directions, terrain descriptions, and forest service contacts.

    

    It is packed with facts and trivia.

    The author decribes the principal venues of the time such as the York Minster, Wheeler's, the Caves de France and the Colony and draws profiles of the true Soho personalities he knew, among them David Archer, John Deakin, Francis Bacon, Muriel Belcher, Nina Hamnett and Colin MacInnes. Dan Farson has also written "The Man Who Wrote Dracula", "Henry Williamson: A Personal Memoir", "Out of Step", "A Window by the Sea" and "Jack the Ripper".

    s/t: A Historian's Journey to the American Civil War

    In Hidden San Francisco and Northern California, award-winning travel writer and Bay Area resident Ray Riegert guides readers to little-known gems in his personal stomping grounds. The guide also features expanded coverage of the Napa and Sonoma wine country with reviews of over 50 wineries. 52 maps are included.

    A beautiful new edition of this comprehensive and accessible book on a unique and fascinating place.

    In that time an abortive uprising, the escape of the Dalai Lama, a border war with India and the Cultural Revolution have done nothing to quell people's religious instincts or to improve their economic lot. Uniform concrete apartment blocks have replaced thousands of Buddhist monasteries, which once housed a fifth of the male population, but to Elaine Brook, travelling alone in the country in 1982, Tibetans expressed more anger about the hunger, while food was being whisked away to China, than about the violence and suppression that had overtaken their lives.

    

    Follow a group of scientist over the world's smallest continent as they uncover facts about the colonization of Austrailia.

    The handy guide to practical phrases and conversation covers such everyday situations as greetings, leave-takings, expressions of appreciation, shopping, dates, numbers. Useful notes and intersting travel tips help you cope with real life situations and enjoy traveling throughout Korea.

    Covering more than 2,600 miles, Buchanan and McCauley have provided mile-by-mile descriptions of interesting features, both contemporary and historical, to be seen all across the state. The information is organized by highway, so that modern-day explorers can follow the road logs easily, learning about the land they travel through.

    For more than a year she explored the island's dunes, marshes, waters, and towns to study its complex natural cycles, its fragile ecosystem, its bird, plant, and marine life, and the seasonal routines of its stoical residents. In Hatteras Journal she writes evocatively of a harsh but alluring world, where "in summer the sea oats explode with tawny seeds, the black shimmers glide over Pamlico Sound, the loggerheads heave themselves ashore on silent nights." Along with her perceptive observations about the natural life she encounters, she describes the futility of former government policies such as dune construction, the dangers of peat mining to the sounds and bays, the efforts to protect loggerhead turtles on Bald Head Island, and the evolution of Hurricane Gloria and its effects on the barrier islands. This is a vividly rendered account of the rigors and rewards of dwelling in a habitat where only the most resilient forms of life--natural and human--manage to prevail.Jan DeBlieu is the author of four books and dozens of articles and essays about people and nature. Her first book, Hatteras Journal(Fulcrum 1987), is considered a regional classic on the Outer Banks. It was reprinted in paper by John Blair, Publisher in 1998. Meant to Be Wild (Fulcrum 1991) was chosen as one of the best science books of the year by Library Journal. Wind (Houghton Mifflin, 1998; Shoemaker & Hoard 2006) won the John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Natural History Writing, the highest national award given for a volume of nature writing. Year of the Comets: A Journey from Sadness to the Stars was published by Shoemaker & Hoard in Spring 2005. All Jan's books remain in print. Year of the Comets was released in paper in December 2006. Most of Jan's work explores the subtle ways we are shaped by the landscapes where we live and work. She has contributed essays to many national publications, including The New York Times, Audubon, and Orion. In the spring of 2003 Jan was named the Cape Hatteras Coastkeeper for the North Carolina Coastal Federation, a grassroots environmental group that works to protect coastal waters from pollution. A longtime environmental activist, in the late 1980s she helped form a group that successfully kept oil companies from drilling off the Outer Banks. She lives on Roanoke Island with her husband and son. "Not since Ben MacNeil wrote The Hatterasman in the 1950s has that bare bone of sand between Bodie and Ocracoke islands been written about so affectionately, intelligently, and well." --Norfolk Virginian-Pilot

    R. James (1862-1936) is probably best remembered as a writer of chilling ghost stories, but he was an outstanding scholar of medieval literature and palaeography, who served both as Provost of King's College, Cambridge, and as Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, and many of his stories reflect his academic background. First published in 1930, this volume contains a guide to many historical places of interest in the counties of Suffolk and Norfolk. James concentrates mainly on the medieval history of these counties, weaving fascinating details of personalities and daily life with surviving examples of churches, monasteries and manors. In this tour around the two counties, the history of rich monastic foundations such as Bury St Edmunds and Norwich is discussed together with lesser-known historical sites in a clearly written and richly illustrated volume, which remains a valuable source for medieval scholars and historians.