Category Archives: Travel Guides
Short History of Laos – The Land Inbetween
Laos, perhaps the least known country in mainland Southeast Asia, stands at the region`s crossroads. This small “land in between” is surrounded by China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Burma – countries that, in pre-modern times, provided Lao kings with a field for territorial expansion. But more often, Laos has been a bridge between these powerful
A Glass Apart: Irish Single Pot Still Whiskey
“A must read book for any fan of Irish whiskey. At a time when the category is making the mightiest of comebacks Fionnan O`Connor has written a gem of a book, digging deep in to the heart of his country`s whiskey history and telling its story with style and authority. Excellent.” Dominic Roskrow, Founding Director,
Saving The Daylight
Benjamin Franklin conceived of it. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle endorsed it. Winston Churchill campaigned for it. Kaiser Wilhelm first employed it. Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt went to war with it. Every spring, the clocks go forward, and every autumn they go back. “Saving the Daylight” explores for the first time the contentious, and often
The Bus We Loved
In this affectionate history, Travis Elborough tells the story of the Routemaster`s invention, rise and decline, of the people who worked on it, and of the enthusiasts who were mad about it. Slowly, route by route, London has been losing one of its most famous symbols as more modern designs are brought into service. The
Foreign Babes in Beijing
Hoping to improve her Chinese and broaden her cultural horizons, Rachel DeWoskin went to work for an American PR firm in China. Before she knew it, she was not just exploring, but making Chinese culture, as the sexy and aggressive, fearless Jiexi, star of a wildly successful soap opera. A Chinese counterpart to “Sex and
The Meadowlands
Just five miles west of New York City, the Meadowlands is an untamed, vilified, half-developed and smelly tract of swampland. It is home to rare birds and missing bodies, tranquil marshes and a major sports arena, burning garbage dumps and corporate headquarters, the remains of the original Penn Station and possibly those of more than
Return to Akenfield
Ronald Blythe`s 1969 book “Akenfield” – a moving portrait of English country life told in the voices of the farmers and villagers themselves – is a modern classic. In 2004, writer and reporter Craig Taylor returned to the village in Suffolk on which “Akenfield” was based. Over the course of several months, he sought out
All the Wrong Places : Adrift in the Politics of Asia.
Reportage resists easy definition and comes in many forms – travel essay, narrative history, autobiography – but at its finest it reveals hidden truths about people and events that have shaped the world we know. This new series, hailed as `a wonderful idea` by Don DeLillo, both restores to print and introduces for the first
Twice a Stranger
It was a massive, yet little-known landmark in modern history: in 1923, after a long war over the future of the Ottoman world, nearly two million citizens of Turkey or Greece were moved across the Aegean, expelled from their homes because they were the `wrong` religion. Orthodox Christians were deported from Turkey to Greece, Muslims
The Granta Book Of India
The Granta Book of India brings together, for the first time, evocative, personal and informative pieces from previous editions of Granta, all on the experiences of Indian life, culture and politics. Including extracts from the highly successful Granta 57: India! The Golden Jubilee. Suketu Mehta on Mumbai Chitra Banerji: `What Bengali widows cannot eat` Mark
Soccer War
In 1964, renowned reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski was appointed by the Polish Press Agency as its only foreign correspondent, and for the next ten years he was `responsible` for fifty countries. He befriended Che Guevara in Bolivia, Salvador Allende in Chile and Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. He reported on the fighting that broke out between
Rowing To Alaska
Wayne McLennan tells the story of his utterly extraordinary life through a series of adventures after he leaves his home town in Australia, desperate to avoid following his father and grandfather into the mines. Travelling from the Australian outback to London, to Spain, McLennan has skippered a fishing boat off the coast of Nicaragua, become
Forger
In wartime Berlin, Cioma Schonhaus discovered a way of turning his talent for graphic design to good use: he forged documents which helped save hundreds of Jewish lives. His first challenge involved painstakingly recreating each of the twelve long and twenty-four short feathers on the German Imperial Eagle so that a pass stood up to
Sharon and My Mother-In-Law
Surprisingly funny, and refreshingly different from any other writings on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, “Sharon and My Mother-in-Law”, describes Suad Amiry`s experience of living on the West Bank from the early eighties to the present. Amiry tells us about the life and gossip of her neighbourhood in Ramallah, her moving family history, and the struggle to
Moses, Citizen and Me
When Julia flies in to war-scarred Sierra Leone from London, she is apprehensive about seeing her uncle Moses for the first time in twenty years. But nothing could have prepared her for her encounter with her eight-year-old cousin, Citizen, a former child soldier, and for the shocking truth of what he has done. Driven by
Granta Book of Reportage
Since its relaunch in 1979, “Granta” magazine has championed the art and craft of reportage – journalism marked by vivid description, a novelist`s eye to form and eyewitness reporting that reveals hidden truths about people and events that have shaped the world we know. This updated edition of “The Granta Book of Reportage” collects a
Rats: A Year with New York`s Most Unwanted Inhabitants
Surprisingly funny and compulsively readable, “Rats” is an unlikely account of a year spent in a garbage-strewn alley in lower Manhattan. Sullivan spends the year with a notebook and night-vision goggles, hunting for fabled rat-kings, trapping a rat of his own, and trying (and failing) to conquer his own fear of rats. He meets the
Point of Departure
Reportage resists easy definition and comes in many forms – travel essay, narrative history, autobiography – but at its finest it reveals hidden truths about people and events that have shaped the world we know. This new series, hailed as `a wonderful idea` by Don DeLillo, both restores to print and introduces for the first
One Hundred Hieroglyphs
Egyptian culture is divided from us by several millennia, a lost people, and a dead language. We can discover much about this fascinating civilization from its physical remains, but perhaps the greatest insights into the Egyptian mind come from Egyptian hieroglyphs. They reveal the priorities, concerns and beliefs of the Egyptians – a whole worldview.
Thug
Never in recorded history has there been a group of murderers as deadly as the Thugs. For nearly two centuries, groups of these lethal criminals haunted the roads of India, slaughtering travellers whom they met along the way with such efficiency, that over the years tens of thousands of men, women and children simply vanished
