The World Life And Travel 1950 2000

Download or read book The World: Life and Travel 1950-2000 written by Jan Morris and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2005-04-17 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The travel book of the season."—Craig Seligman, New York Times Book Review The first book to distill Jan Morris's entire body of work into one volume, The World is a magnum opus by the most-celebrated travel writer in the world. To read it is to take an epic armchair journey through the last half of twentieth-century history. A breathtakingly vivid guide to our greatest cosmopolitan cities and cultures from Manhattan to Venice and from Baghdad to Barbados, this book assembles fifty years of Morris's finest travel writing. With eyewitness accounts of such seminal moments as the first successful ascent of Everest, the Eichmann trial, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the handover of Hong Kong, The World promises to create an entirely new generation of Jan Morris readers. A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2003.

Download or read book Global West, American Frontier written by David M. Wrobel and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thoughtful examination of a century of travel writing about the American West overturns a variety of popular and academic stereotypes. Looking at both European and American travelers’ accounts of the West, from de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, David Wrobel offers a counter narrative to the nation’s romantic entanglement with its western past and suggests the importance of some long-overlooked authors, lively and perceptive witnesses to our history who deserve new attention. Prior to the professionalization of academic disciplines, the reading public gained much of its knowledge about the world from travel writing. Travel writers found a wide and respectful audience for their reports on history, geography, and the natural world, in addition to reporting on aboriginal cultures before the advent of anthropology as a discipline. Although in recent decades western historians have paid little attention to travel writing, Wrobel demonstrates that this genre in fact offers an important and rich understanding of the American West—one that extends and complicates a simple reading of the West that promotes the notions of Manifest Destiny or American exceptionalism. Wrobel finds counterpoints to the mythic West of the nineteenth century in such varied accounts as George Catlin’s Adventures of the Ojibbeway and Ioway Indians in England, France, and Belgium (1852), Richard Francis Burton’s The City of the Saints (1861), and Mark Twain’s Following the Equator (1897), reminders of the messy and contradictory world that people navigated in the past much as they do in the present. His book is a testament to the instructive ways in which the best travel writers have represented the West.

Download or read book Allegorizings written by Jan Morris and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Book Review • Editors' Choice Jan Morris delivers her final volume, brimming with reminiscences, meditations on daily life, and mini-essays on everything from maturity to whistling to Princess Diana. Not so long ago, feeling intimations of mortality, Jan Morris embarked on a wholly novel literary enterprise. What began as a series of high-minded letters to her late daughter—in the style of Lord Chesterfield addressing his son—quickly transformed itself into a potpourri of mini-essays and vibrant reminiscences, organized around experiences both majestic and mundane, from traveling the world with her lifelong partner, Elizabeth, to sneezing and kissing and simply growing old. So Allegorizings came to be, and so Morris decided that it should only be published upon her death, not because she had anything to hide but, merely, in parting. Featuring essays largely written in the early twenty-first century, Allegorizings reflects, above all, Morris’s steadfast conviction that nothing is only what it seems. In fact, she observes, everything is allegory. Indeed, in Morris’s telling, even life—the whole conundrum of existence—is one long, majestically impenetrable allegory. Taking us from the separatist hippie colony of Bolinas, California, to her home country of Wales, and introducing us to Nepalese Sherpas and elderly cruise-goers alike, Morris follows the throughline of allegory throughout her works. In one essay, she lambasts the joylessness of maturity (“Maturity! Did ever a heart thrill to the sound of it, still less the meaning?”) and in another, decries the nonsense of nationality. With characteristic verve, she offers odes to whistling and cursing, cats, and exclamation points. Morris’s travels anchor the collection, as she revisits the iconic settings of her previous works. We join her aboard the storied Orient Express, as well as tube trains passing through the purlieus of London. So too, we hike the foothills of the Himalayas—where Morris burst onto scene with her on-the-spot reportage of the first ascent of Everest—and reflect on the picaresque allure of Tournus, a dichotomized town in France where one France, bearing all the vestiges of privilege, seems to kiss another. Intimate and luminously wise, Allegorizings is as much a testament to the virtues of embracing life as it is a testament to its charming, indignant, and ever-surprising author. In her final work, Morris’s writing is as erudite as ever, conveying a generosity of spirit “flavored by well-earned crankiness” (Vox). Though newly bereft of her company, readers will be reminded what “a good, wise, and witty companion” (Alexander McCall Smith) Morris has been to so many, for so long.

Download or read book The Readers' Advisory Guide to Nonfiction written by Neal Wyatt and published by American Library Association. This book was released on 2007-05-14 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Navigating what at she calls the " extravagantly rich world of nonfiction," renowned readers' advisor (RA) Wyatt builds readers' advisory bridges from fiction to compelling and increasingly popular nonfiction to encompass the library's entire collection. She focuses on eight popular categories: history, true crime, true adventure, science, memoir, food/cooking, travel, and sports. Within each, she explains the scope, popularity, style, major authors and works, and the subject's position in readers' advisory interviews. Wyatt addresses who is reading nonfiction and why, while providing RAs with the tools and language to incorporate nonfiction into discussions that point readers to what to read next. In easy-to-follow steps, Wyatt Explains the hows and whys of offering fiction and nonfiction suggestions together Illustrates ways to get up to speed fast in nonfiction Shows how to lead readers to a variety of books using her "read-around" and "reading map" strategies Provides tools to build nonfiction subject guides for the collection This hands-on guide includes nonfiction bibliography, key authors, benchmark books with annotations, and core collections. It is destined to become the nonfiction 'bible' for readers' advisory and collection development, helping librarians, library workers, and patrons select great reading from the entire library collection!

Download or read book A Writer's World written by Jan Morris and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2011-02-17 with total page 773 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a wonderfully evocative collection of her travel writing and reportage from over five decades, Jan Morris - a constant traveller - has produced a unique portrait of the twentieth century. Ranging from New York to Venice, Sydney to Berlin, and the Middle East to South Africa, Jan Morris was a witness to such seminal moments as the Eichmann trial, the first ascent of Everest, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the handover of Hong Kong. Offering a tremendously perceptive and highly personal view of the world, she is as much concerned with conveying the 'feel' of these moments as the events themselves. And, as ever, she displays her unique and inimitable literary style, at once funny, wise and sad. Jan Morris's collection of travel writing and reportage spans over five decades and includes such titles as Venice, Coronation Everest, Hong Kong, Spain, Manhattan '45, A Writer's World and the Pax Britannica Trilogy. Hav, her novel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. 'A glorious compendium of adventure and wisdom' Pico Iyer

Download or read book Knickerbocker written by Elizabeth L. Bradley and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-27 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deep within New York's compelling, sprawling history lives an odd, ornery Manhattan native named Diedrich Knickerbocker. The name may be familiar today: his story gave rise to generations of popular tributes—from a beer brand to a basketball team and more—but Knickerbocker himself has been forgotten. In fact, he was New York's first truly homegrown chronicler, and as a descendant of the Dutch settlers, he singlehandedly tried to reclaim the city for the Dutch. Almost singlehandedly, that is. Diedrich Knickerbocker was created in 1809 by a young Washington Irving, who used the character to narrate his classic satire, A History of New York. According to Irving's partisan narrator, everything good and distinctive, proud and powerful, about New York City—from the doughnuts to the twisting streets of lower Manhattan—could be traced back to New Amsterdam. Terrific general interest, cultural history of a city with a rich and lively literary past. First-ever book on the eponymous myth that has informed New York City culture since the early 1800s. Coincides with the two-hundredth anniversary of Washington Irving's publication of A History of New York. Perfect gift book or addition to library collection of New York Cityùthemed books. Includes a gallery of images that brings Diedrich Knickerbocker, his myth, time, and place to life Knickerbocker engagingly traces the creation, evolution, and prevalence of Irving's imaginary historian in New York literature and history, art and advertising, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Who would imagine this satiric character, at once a snob and a champion of the people, would endure for two hundred years? In Elizabeth L. Bradley's words, "Whether you call it 'blood,' style, attitude, or moxie, the little Dutchman could deliver." And, from this engaging work, it is clear that he does. Bradley's stunning volume offers a surprising and delightful glimpse behind the scenes of New York history, and invites readers into the world of Knickerbocker, the antihero who surprised everyone by becoming the standard-bearer for the city's exceptional sense of self, or what we now call a New York "attitude."

Download or read book State of the World 2002 written by Christopher Flavin and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2002 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In preparation for the World Summit on Sustainable Development in September 2002 in Johannesburg, South Africa, [this book] evaluates what has been achieved since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio. Ten years ago, the leaders of the world produced a plan to begin creating a sustainable global economy, one that meets human needs while protecting and restoring the natural environment. How much progress has the world made toward that goal? With [the book] as your guide, you will learn about the problems facing the delegates in Johannesburg as they try to answer this question -from today's severe inequalities of wealth and income (1.2 billion people live on 1 [dollar] a day or less) to environmental threats such as climate change, growing numbers of tourists in fragile areas, and the proliferation of toxic chemicals. The authors also shed light on the possibilities for change and how existing technologies and resources can help solve many of our most pressing problems. Using renewables like wind power, the energy economy can be converted from oil to hydrogen. Poor farmers can grow more food by taking advantage of "free" biological services, like nitrogen-fixing plants and beneficial insects. And women can have fewer children when they have a chance to get an education and to act on their own decisions on when to have children. [The book] spells out priorities for the Johannesburg Summit in seven key areas: agriculture, energy policy and climate change, chemicals, international tourism, population growth, resource-based conflicts, and global governance. Decisions made today can make all the difference in our efforts to build a more stable and secure world in the future.-- From back cover.