In Unruly Places, Alastair Bonnett goes to some of the most unexpected, offbeat places in the world to reinspire our geographical imagination.Bonnett’s remarkable tour includes moving villages, secret cities, no man’s lands, and floating islands. He explores places as disorienting as Sandy Island, an island included on maps until just two years ago despite the fact that it never existed. Or Sealand, an abandoned gun platform off the English coast that a British citizen claimed as his own sovereign nation, issuing passports and crowning his wife as a princess. Or Baarle, a patchwork of Dutch and Flemish enclaves where walking from the grocery store’s produce section to the meat counter can involve crossing national borders.An intrepid guide down the road much less traveled, Bonnett reveals that the most extraordinary places on earth might be hidden in plain sight, just around the corner from your apartment or underfoot on a wooded path. Perfect for urban explorers, wilderness ramblers, and armchair travelers struck by wanderlust, Unruly Places will change the way you see the places you inhabit.

    When Michael Crichton -- a Harvard-trained physician, bestselling novelist, and successful movie director -- began to feel isolated in his own life, he decided to widen his horizons. He tracked wild animals in the jungles of Rwanda. He climbed Kilimanjaro and Mayan pyramids. He trekked across a landslide in Pakistan. He swam amid sharks in Tahiti. Fueled by a powerful curiosity and the need to see, feel, and hear firsthand and close-up, Michael Crichton has experienced adventures as compelling as those he created in his books and films. These adventures -- both physical and spiritual -- are recorded here in Travels, Crichton's most astonishing and personal work.

    And they are dangerous." In The Truth About Stories, Native novelist and scholar Thomas King explores how stories shape who we are and how we understand and interact with other people. From creation stories to personal experiences, historical anecdotes to social injustices, racist propaganda to works of contemporary Native literature, King probes Native culture's deep ties to storytelling. With wry humor, King deftly weaves events from his own life as a child in California, an academic in Canada, and a Native North American with a wide-ranging discussion of stories told by and about Indians. So many stories have been told about Indians, King comments, that "there is no reason for the Indian to be real. The Indian simply has to exist in our imaginations." That imaginative Indian that North Americans hold dear has been challenged by Native writers - N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louis Owens, Sherman Alexie, and others - who provide alternative narratives of the Native experience that question, create a present, and imagine a future. King reminds the reader, Native and non-Native, that storytelling carries with it social and moral responsibilties. "Don't say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You've heard it now."

    Perelman's companion is cartoonist Al Hirschfield, whose drawings capture the very essence of Perelmania.

    Fortunately (or unfortunately?) losing her comfortable office job was the perfect opportunity to do exactly that. At 28 years old, single, unattached, and now unemployed, she took her 2015 Yamaha FZ-07 and built the nimble sport bike into a make-shift adventure motorcycle. She packed it full of camping gear, and set off on an adventure that she had always dreamed about. The problem? Tiffani had scarcely traveled outside her long-time home in Los Angeles, let alone with nothing but a tent and hope to keep her safe. Chronicles of a Motorcycle Gypsy is an inspiring tale of confronting fears, insecurities, and self doubts for the sake of following your heart, all while discovering the many wonders of the 49 continental United States. Tiffani encounters some of the best and worst of humanity, meets a friend that eventually makes her journey a little less lonely, and puts all of her riding skills to the test, struggling with everything from her first time riding a sport bike in deep sand to getting caught in a blizzard in the Colorado mountains. It's a big world outside the racetrack! Originally published as a Travelogue in Motorcyclist Magazine as Girl Meets World, this full length memoir contains the untold stories and the details that were a little too racy for the blog. If you loved Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman's Long Way Round and Ted Simon's Jupiter's Travels, you'll love Chronicles of a Motorcycle Gypsy!

    The tussle between the father and the son was the most poignant and pathetic stories of their lives. Gandhi,who was busy attending meetings and conferences where the fate of forty crore Indians was to be decided, would often find headlines in a newspaper screaming 'Police arrested drunk Harilal for creating a scene on the road'. And sometimes, Harilal himself from the dias of the fundamentalist Muslim organization's meeting - 'I shall continue fighting till Ba and Bapu embrace Islam.'In this book the author tries to make an ardent effort to understand yet another enigmatic facet of human life.

    Shifting from memoir to fiction, it focuses on the commonplace experiences underlying our lives that are the true basis for storytelling. At the book’s core is Isabel Huggan’s old house in rural France, from where she contemplates the real meaning of “home,” and the mysterious manner in which memory gives substance to ordinary things around us. With a light touch, she brings to life the people she has met in her travels from whom valuable lessons have been learned.Isabel Huggan writes with the candour and compassion that made her earlier books so well loved, and here she speaks even more clearly from the heart. Belonging is an intimate conversation between the narrator who needs to examine her life because it has not turned out as she expected, and her readers, who will find their own concerns illuminated in surprising ways. Slowly, a pattern emerges as certain motifs become apparent: happiness, friendship, landscape, language, heartache. As the book draws to a close, readers will understand the fictional character who says, “There is nothing in our lives that doesn’t fit.”

    He returned to Australia in a box, but that was only the start of his adventures.Crazily impulsive, romantic, and free-spirited, Reg became a national hero for smuggling himself 13,000 miles home as air freight. But as his fame and sporting career faded, Reg decided to smuggle something very different. Soon, he was on the run with his girlfriend, playing a cat-and-mouse game with police on three continents. A wild road trip across India and Africa—idyllic beaches and prison hellholes, shady friends and shadier cops, gun-toting militias and drug-running gangsters —led to a court room in Sri Lanka and the fight of his life. Could Reg beat the death sentence he’d just been given, or was this box too big to climb out of?

     Through thirteen wildly imaginative short stories and a passional essay on colonialism and Southeast Asia, Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow startles, amuses, and infuriates its readers with juxtaposed images and penetrating insights into the media jungle. Like subtitles read in a foreign film, the pace of Brian Fawcett’s intoxicating prose accelerates quickly and unfolds right before the readers eyes until it is moving more swiftly than the imagines on the evening moves. Passion stirs in the pages of Fawcett’s book, urging readers to resist the annihilation of memory and imagination in our society.

    There she meets its founder, who once modeled with a pelican on his arm for a Dewar’s Scotch campaign but has since declined into a pit of fraud and madness. He becomes our embezzling protagonist whose tales about the birds he “rescues” never quite add up. Gerard’s personal stories are no less eerie or poignant: An essay that begins as a look at Gerard’s first relationship becomes a heart-wrenching exploration of acquaintance rape and consent. An account of intimate female friendship pivots midway through, morphing into a meditation on jealousy and class.Sunshine State offers a unique look at Florida, a state whose economically and environmentally imperiled culture serves as a lens through which we can examine some of the most pressing issues haunting our nation.BFF --Mother-father God --Going diamond --Records --The mayor of Williams Park --Sunshine state --Rabbit --Before: an inventory

    The result: "The most creative, generous, and democratic of any of the annual volumes" (Rick Moody).Among its numerous awards, the Pushcart Prize has been chosen for the Poets Writers / Barnes Noble "Writers for Writers" Award and the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement recognition.

    Yet, in his many travels, he'd never visited the Northwest Territories, "the white ribbon across the top of North American maps found beneath a paper crease still crisp at the fold." After an all-too-brief visit to a literary festival in Yellowknife, Bidini was hooked on the place and its people. From the time he returned home, all he could do was think about going back to the North.At the same time, Bidini found himself at a career crossroads. His position as a columnist with a national newspaper had come to an end, leaving him reflecting on his lifelong love of newspapers and questioning the future of journalism in Canada. Writing had always been Bidini's way to make sense of the world around him and he was determined to find an outlet for his unique perspective. Still fresh with the memories of his recent visit to the Northwest Territories, Bidini contacts the Yellowknifer, one of the last truly local and independent newspapers, and signs on as a guest columnist for an unforgettable summer. Midnight Light: A Personal Journey to the North, is Dave Bidini's fast, funny and, at times, powerfully poignant chronicle of the incredible time he spent "up there" in the NWT. The Yellowknifer, like the city it serves, bucks all of the trends and invokes all of the charms and frustrations of stubborn nationalism. The newspaper is completely locally-focused and treats the global news sharescape as if it never existed. The paper gives Bidini a ground-level view of a city and its environs, including Great Bear Lake, Tuktoyaktuk, and Nahanni National Park, that are on one hand lost in time, and on another faced with the very stark realities of poverty, racism, addiction, and hopelessness. Along the way, Midnight Light introduces readers to an extraordinary cast of characters, including Dene elders and entrepreneurs adapting to a changing way of life, various artists who are giving the region a powerful voice to the rest of the world, politicians and law enforcement officers who are dealing with the community's difficult history and economic realities, and an assortment of complicated souls from the South who have travelled North as a "last chance" to build lives for themselves. Woven throughout Midnight Light's tremendous narrative is the story of the irascible John McFadden, a veteran Toronto newspaper crime reporter who "escaped" to Yellowknife. McFadden is the key character in the Yellowknifer's ongoing fight with the authorities (RCMP forces) who do not take kindly to journalistic doggedness. McFadden and the paper became the centre of attention across the country when he was charged with obstruction and threatened with jail time. He was found not guilty and the police were forced to change their tactics. Yet the tension between the RCMP and the Yellowknifer remains unresolved. In Midnight Light, Dave Bidini brings Yellowknife, the Northwest Territories and its remarkable and proud people to brilliant life.

    One of Europe's oldest and most historic regions, it is rich with wonders including castles, wild white horses, Roman ruins, and Carcassonne, Europe's greatest fortified town. What really drew them to this area, however, was the locals' love of food and wine. As their visits to the region became longer and their dream of owning a home intensified, they began to discover another way of living--a slower one based on gastronomic pleasure and the really important things in life: hunting for mushrooms, morning trips to the bakery, long lunches, and heated debates about the best way to make cassoulet. Including mouthwatering recipes and delightful duotone drawings, this wonderful memoir is for the fans of Peter Mayle and Frances Mays

    There was no specific destination in mind except to visit countries, not the airports and luxury hotels but the country itself, to experience local culture and ways of life. This entailed sleeping in tribesmen's huts and cheap hostels and using local transportation whenever possible: traversing jungle roads packed eighteen souls to a single Peugeot station wagon in Guinea-Bissau, boating the length of the Amazon snacking on roasted piranha, and hitchhiking across Iraq during the war. I've floated on dilapidated ferries across surging estuaries, ridden horseback or in military trucks across deserts and plains, followed the course of rivers, crossed wastelands, bused and trekked through deep jungle, traversed mountain ranges and lounged on the remotest beaches. I adopted local customs and ate local food: roasted goat's eye as the guest of honour at a Mongolian tribal feast, alligator nuggets, mystery kabobs, ‘bush meat' ubiquitous to certain regions of Africa ... but drew the line at wheelbarrows brimming over with smoked monkey corpses. A man's got to know his limitations." --Mike Spencer BownIn 1990, Calgary-raised Mike Spencer Bown packed a backpack and began a journey that would eventually take him through each of the world's 195 countries and span more than two decades. From relaxing on the white sand beaches of Bali to waiting out blizzards in Tibetan caves, Bown trekked from country to country, driven by a desire to see the world in the most authentic way possible, not to just collect stamps on his passport. Eventually, he began to earn international recognition for some of his more unconventional destinations--such as a memorable trip to war-torn Mogadishu.The World's Most Travelled Man is an eye-opening account of the universal human experience as seen from each corner of the changing world. Blending a romantic connection to nature through solitude and the social examination of culture, Bown fully immerses himself in each experience, however diverse, dangerous or dirty, veering way, way off the backpacker circuit to see the world through an unparalleled perspective. The World's Most Travelled Man is a journey of global proportions shared with the humility of a man who simply wants to satisfy his own curiosity and live life to the fullest.

    The photos he took and the accompanying interviews became the blog Humans of New York. In the first three years, his audience steadily grew from a few hundred to over one million. In 2013, his book Humans of New York, based on that blog, was published and immediately catapulted to the top of the NY Times Bestseller List. It has appeared on that list for over twenty-five weeks to date. The appeal of HONY has been so great that in the course of the next year Brandon's following increased tenfold to, now, over 12 million followers on Facebook. In the summer of 2014, the UN chose him to travel around the world on a goodwill mission that had followers meeting people from Iraq to Ukraine to Mexico City via the photos he took.Now, Brandon is back with the follow up to Humans of New York that his loyal followers have been waiting for: Humans of New York: Stories. Ever since Brandon began interviewing people on the streets of NY, the dialogue he's had with them has increasingly become as in-depth, intriguing, and moving as the photos themselves. Humans of New York: Stories presents a whole new group of humans, complete with stories that delve deeper and surprise with greater candour.