Book picks similar to
Ulysses' Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge, and Geographical Distance by Mary W. Helms
travel
cultural-history
anthropology
nonfiction
Versailles: A History
Robert B. Abrams - 2017
Here is the dramatic - and tragic - story of Versailles and the men and women who made it their home.
Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity
Sarah B. Pomeroy - 1975
Though much debated, its position as the basic textbook on women's history in Greece and Rome has hardly been challenged."--Mary Beard, Times Literary Supplement. Illustrations.
The African Adventurers: A Return to the Silent Places
Peter Hathaway Capstick - 1992
Only Capstick "can write action as cleanly and suspensefully as the best of his predecessors" (Sports Illustrated). This long-awaited sequel to Death in the Silent Places (1981) brings to life four turn-of-the-century adventurers and the savage frontiers they braved.* Frederick Selous, a British hunter, naturalist, and soldier, rewrote the history books with his fearless treks deep into the Dark Continent.* English game ranger Constantine "Iodine" Ionides saved Tanganyikan villages from man-eating lions and leopards. He also gained lasting fame for his uncanny ability to capture black mambas, cobras, Gaboon vipers, and other deadly snakes.* The dashing Brit Johnny Boyes who gained the chieftainship of the Kikuyu tribe with sheer bravado and survived the ferocious battles and ambushes of intertribal warfare.* And Scottish ex-boxer, Jim Sutherland, one of the best ivory hunters who ever lived. His tracking skills and stamina afoot became the stuff of African hunting legend.If you are a Capstick fan, you'll relish The African Adventurers, his eleventh book. Once again he delivers "the kind of chilling stories that Hemingway only heard second-hand...with a flair and style that Papa himself would admire" (Guns and Ammo). The author's pungent wit and his authenticity gained from years in the bush make this quartet of vintage heroics an unforgettable return to the silent places.
From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers
Marina Warner - 1994
Why are storytellers so often women, and how does that affect the status of fairy tales? Are they a source of wisdom or a misleading temptation to indulge in romancing?
Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor
Paul Farmer - 2003
Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience working in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world’s poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. With passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the beleaguered villages of Haiti and Chiapas, this book links the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence. Farmer challenges conventional thinking within human rights circles and exposes the relationships between political and economic injustice, on one hand, and the suffering and illness of the powerless, on the other.Farmer shows that the same social forces that give rise to epidemic diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis also sculpt risk for human rights violations. He illustrates the ways that racism and gender inequality in the United States are embodied as disease and death. Yet this book is far from a hopeless inventory of abuse. Farmer’s disturbing examples are linked to a guarded optimism that new medical and social technologies will develop in tandem with a more informed sense of social justice. Otherwise, he concludes, we will be guilty of managing social inequality rather than addressing structural violence. Farmer’s urgent plea to think about human rights in the context of global public health and to consider critical issues of quality and access for the world’s poor should be of fundamental concern to a world characterized by the bizarre proximity of surfeit and suffering.
The Last Summer of Reason
Tahar Djaout - 1999
The belief that no work of beauty created by humans should rival the wonders of their god is slowly consuming society, and the art once treasured is now despised. Boualem resists the new regime with quiet determination, using the shop and his personal history as weapons against puritanical forces. Readers are taken into the lush depths of the bookseller's dreams, the memories of his now empty family life, and his passion for literature, then yanked back into the terror and drudgery of his daily routine by the vandalism, assaults, and death warrants that afflict him."Books have been the compost in which Boualem's life ripened, to the point where his bookish hands and his carnal hands, his paper body and his body of flesh and blood very often overlap and mingle. In the end Boualem himself didn't see a clear distinction any more. He has met so many characters in books, he has come in contact with so many destinies that his own life would be nothing without them."Marketing plans for "The Last Summer of Reason":A percentage of proceeds go to ABFFE. Joint promotions with ABFFE and member stores, including highlight in "Bookselling This Week," Galley mailing & BookSense Galley Program participation National advertising Co-op availableTahar Djaout was considered one of the most promising writers of his generation, and was a firm believer in democracy. Djaout's murder wasattributed to the Islamic Salvation Front, who reported that he was killed because he "wielded a fearsome pen." He is the author of eleven books, including the novel "Les vigiles," which won the Prix Mediterrane.
Zen Baggage: A Pilgrimage to China
Red Pine - 2005
Zen Baggage is an account of that journey. He weaves together historical background, interviews with Zen masters, and translations of the earliest known records of Zen, along with personal vignettes. Porter’s account captures the transformations taking place at religious centers in China but also the abiding legacy they have somehow managed to preserve. Porter brings wisdom and humor to every situation, whether visiting ancient caves containing the most complete collection of Buddhist texts ever uncovered, enduring a six-hour Buddhist ceremony, searching in vain for the ghost in his room, waking up the monk in charge of martial arts at Shaolin Temple, or meeting the abbess of China’s first Zen nunnery. Porter’s previously published Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits has become recommended reading at Zen centers and universities throughout America and even in China (in its Chinese translation), and Zen Baggage is sure to follow suit.
Begging to Be Black
Antjie Krog - 2010
The murder weapon was then hidden on Antjie Krog 's stoep. In Begging to Be Black, Krog begins by exploring her position in this controversial case. From there the book ranges widely in scope, both in time reaching back to the days of Basotho king Moshoeshoe and in space as we follow Krog 's experiences as a research fellow in Berlin, far from the Africa that produced her. Begging to Be Black forms the third part of a trilogy that Antjie Krog (unknowingly) began with Country of My Skull and continued with A Change of Tongue. Mixing memoir and history, philosophy and poetry, the book is stylistically experimental and personally courageous. Begging to Be Black is a welcome addition to Krog 's own oeuvre and to South African literary non-fiction.
Tristes Tropiques
Claude Lévi-Strauss - 1955
His account of the people he encountered changed the field of anthropology, transforming Western notions of ‘primitive’ man. Tristes Tropiques is a major work of art as well as of scholarship. It is a memoir of exquisite beauty and a masterpiece of travel writing: funny, discursive, movingly detailing personal and cultural loss, and brilliantly connecting disparate fields of thought. Few books have had as powerful and broad an impact.
The Travel Book: A journey through every country in the world
Lonely Planet Kids - 2015
Every single country gets its own dedicated page, and a mix of photography and beautiful illustrations brings each land to life. Perfect for keeping explorers aged 8 years and up entertained on the road.Authors: Lonely Planet KidsAbout Lonely Planet Kids: From the world's leading travel publisher comes Lonely Planet Kids, a children's imprint that brings the world to life for young explorers everywhere. We're kick-starting the travel bug and showing kids just how amazing our planet is. Our mission is to inspire and delight curious kids, showing them the rich diversity of people, places and cultures that surrounds us. We pledge to share our enthusiasm and continual fascination for what it is that makes the world we live in the magnificent place it is. A big adventure awaits! Come explore.Award-winning children's titles from Lonely Planet include The Amazing World Atlas (Independent Publisher Award, Gold for Juvenile Multicultural Non-fiction, 2015), How to Be a Space Explorer (Independent Publisher Award, Silver for Juvenile Non-fiction, 2015), Not For Parents The Travel Book, Not For Parents Paris, Not For Parents London, Not For Parents New York City, and Not For Parents Rome (all Parent Tested Parent Approved winners, 2012).Lonely Planet guides have won the TripAdvisor Traveler's Choice Award in 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015.
The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia
Piers Vitebsky - 2005
Images carved into rocks and tattooed on the skin of mummies hint at ancient ideas about the reindeer's magical ability to carry the human soul on flights to the sun. These images pose one of the great mysteries of prehistory: the "reindeer revolution," in which Siberian native peoples tamed and saddled a species they had previously hunted.Drawing on nearly twenty years of field work among the Eveny in northeast Siberia, Piers Vitebsky shows how Eveny social relations are formed through an intense partnership with these extraordinary animals as they migrate over the swamps, ice sheets, and mountain peaks of what in winter is the coldest inhabited region in the world. He reveals how indigenous ways of knowing involve a symbiotic ecology of mood between humans and reindeer, and he opens up an unprecedented understanding of nomadic movement, place, memory, habit, and innovation.The Soviets' attempts to settle the nomads in villages undermined their self-reliance and mutual support. In an account both harrowing and funny, Vitebsky shows the Eveny's ambivalence toward productivity plans and medals and their subversion of political meetings designed to control them. The narrative gives a detailed and tender picture of how reindeer can act out or transform a person's destiny and of how prophetic dreaming about reindeer fills a gap left by the failed assurances of the state.Vitebsky explores the Eveny experience of the cruelty of history through the unfolding and intertwining of their personal lives. The interplay of domestic life and power politics is both intimate and epic, as the reader follows the diverging fate of three charismatic but very different herding families through dangerous political and economic reforms. The book's gallery of unforgettable personalities includes shamans, psychics, wolves, bears, dogs, Communist Party bosses, daredevil aviators, fire and river spirits, and buried ancestors. The Reindeer People is a vivid and moving testimony to a Siberian native people's endurance and humor at the ecological limits of human existence.
Babylon's Ark: The Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo
Lawrence Anthony - 2007
Once Anthony entered Baghdad he discovered that full-scale combat and uncontrolled looting had killed nearly all the animals of the zoo.But not all of them. U.S. soldiers had taken the time to help care for the remaining animals, and the zoo's staff had returned to work in spite of the constant firefights. Together the Americans and Iraqis had managed to keep alive the animals that had survived the invasion.Babylon's Ark chronicles the zoo's transformation from bombed-out rubble to peaceful park. Along the way, Anthony recounts hair-raising efforts to save a pride of the dictator's lions, close a deplorable black-market zoo, and rescue Saddam's Arabian horses. His unique ground-level experience makes Babylon's Ark an uplifting story of both sides working together for the sake of innocent animals caught in the war's crossfire.
A Comma In A Sentence
R. Gopalakrishnan - 2013
As time passed, railways were built and newspapers appeared, isolated villages like vilakkudi were exposed to social and cultural change. It is this transition that the author, Ranganathans great -great-great grandson, tries to trace through the story of his family.
Reluctant Pioneer: How I Survived Five Years in the Canadian Bush
Thomas Osborne - 1995
The view 16-year-old Thomas Osborne first had of Muskoka was at night, trudging alone with his even younger brother along unmarked primitive roads to find their luckless father who, in 1875, had decided to make a new start for his beleaguered family on some "free land" in the bush east of the pioneer village of Huntsville, Ontario. The miracle is that Thomas lived to tell the tale.For the next five years Thomas endured starvation, falling through the ice and freezing, accidents with axes and boats, and narrow escapes from wolves and bears. Many years later, after returning to the United States, Osborne wrote down all his adventures in a graphic memoir that has become, in the words of author and journalist Roy MacGregor, "an undiscovered Canadian classic."Reluctant Pioneer provides a brooding sense of adventure and un- sentimental realism to deliver a powerful account of pioneer life where tragedies arrive as naturally as rain and where humour resides in irony.
Exterminate All the Brutes; and Desert Divers
Sven Lindqvist - 2012
Lindqvist presents a unique study of Europe's dark history in Africa, written both as a travel diary and as a historical examination of European imperialism and racism over the past 2 centuries, and confronts the roots of European genocide.