| Search | About | Preferences | Interact | Help | |
| 150 million books. 1 search engine. | ||

› Find signed collectible books: 'Abandon : A Romance'
More editions of Abandon : A Romance:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Adrift'
A NEW YORK TIMES besteller, this true story tells the riveting, first-hand account of the only man in history to have survived more than a month alone at sea,fighting for his life in an inflatable raft after his small sloop capsized only six days out. Racked by hunger, buffeted by storms, and broiled by the tropical sun, Steven Callahan drifted over eighteen hundred miles of ocean, fighting off sharks with a makeshift spear, and watching nine ships pass by without turning back. Here is a story of anguish and horror, of undying heroism, hope--and survival. [via]
More editions of Adrift:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Adrift : 76 Days Lost at Sea'
After his small sailboat sank in the Atlantic, Steve Callahan spent 76 days in a five-foot inflatable raft, drifting 1800 miles before his rescue. [via]
More editions of Adrift : 76 Days Lost at Sea:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Adventures on the Wine Route: A Wine Buyer's Tour of France'
A tale of the travels of a wine merchant through France's wine regions where he spends several months each year tasting and buying, searching out great wines and talented wine makers. It describes the passions, beliefs, strengths and weaknesses of growers and negociants from both chateaux and farmhouses. Good and bad practices in wine-making are held up for inspection and the wines themselves are judged by their finesse, balance and personality. [via]
More editions of Adventures on the Wine Route: A Wine Buyer's Tour of France:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Aeneid'
Arma virumque cano: "I sing of warfare and a man at war." Long the bane of second-year Latin students thrust into a rhetoric of sweeping, seemingly endless sentences full of difficult verb forms and obscure words, Virgil's Aeneid finds a helpful translator in Robert Fitzgerald, who turns the lines into beautiful, accessible American English. Full of betrayal, heartache, seduction, elation, and violence, the Aeneid is the great founding epic of the Roman empire. Its pages sing of the Roman vision of self, the Roman ideal of what it meant to be a citizen of the world's greatest power. The epic's force carries across the centuries, and remains essential reading. [via]
More editions of The Aeneid:

› Find signed collectible books: 'African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan'
More editions of African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Almost Heaven: Travels Through the Backwoods of America'
More editions of Almost Heaven: Travels Through the Backwoods of America:

› Find signed collectible books: 'An American Looks at Britain'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Around the World: On Expenses'
More editions of Around the World: On Expenses:

› Find signed collectible books: 'At Home in France: Tales of an American and Her House Abroad'
More editions of At Home in France: Tales of an American and Her House Abroad:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Atlantic High: A Celebration'
William F. Buckley Jr.-s account of his voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in the sailboat Sealestial, Atlantic High is a work that everywhere evidences Buckley-s love for sailing and good companionship. Infused with his inimitable wit and supported by a rich fund of anecdotes and observations, Atlantic High is truly a one-of-a-kind work. [via]
More editions of Atlantic High: A Celebration:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Australia Travel Guide'
More editions of Australia Travel Guide:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Basin and Range'
One of the most valuable tools for the advancement of geological science has in fact been the humble road cut. United States Interstate 80 crosses the entire North American continent, in the process exposing hundreds of millions of years of geological history. In Basin and Range, McPhee, accompanied at times by Princeton geologist Kenneth S. Dreyfuss, demonstrates how the contorted and tilted rocks seen in these road cuts reveal how islands of the earth's crust have floated across the earth's surface, crashing and folding to form basin and range. This is a masterful and sometimes even poetic volume of popular writing about plate tectonics, communicating the profound satisfaction of using scientific research as a tool for understanding the world around us.
This is the first of four books on North American geology by McPhee, collectively entitled Annals of the Former World. The other volumes are In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, and Assembling California. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Big Year : A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession'
More editions of The Big Year : A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Blue Guide Florence'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Blue Guide Florence: City Guide'
More editions of Blue Guide Florence: City Guide:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Blue Guide Greece'
More editions of Blue Guide Greece:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Candide or Optimism: A Fresh Translation, Backgrounds, Criticism'
Robert M. Adams's superlative revised translation of Candide provides the basis for this widely adopted Norton Critical Edition.
The accompanying apparatus has been revised in accordance with recent biographical and critical materials. The Backgrounds and Criticism sections provide important essays that shed light on major critical issues relevant to Candide and to the intellectual climate of the period. In addition to the reports of five English visitors to Ferney, essays by Haydn Mason, Erich Auerbach, Ernst Cassirer, and Robert M. Adams are included. The final section of the edition, "The Climate of Controversy," summarizes the debate surrounding Voltaire's works and includes essays by Peter Gay, Raymond Naves, Gustave Lanson, and John Morley. Also included are a series of quotations about Voltaire by such prominent figures as Gustave Flaubert, Frederick the Great, and Stendhal, as well as the text of "Pangloss's Song," a ballad from the 1956 Candide-based operetta by Richard Wilbur. [via]More editions of Candide or Optimism: A Fresh Translation, Backgrounds, Criticism:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Cold Mountain'
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE
One of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain is a masterpiece that is at once an enthralling adventure, a stirring love story, and a luminous evocation of a vanished American in all its savagery, solitude, and splendor.
Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, Inman, a Confederate soldier, decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains and to Ada, the woman he loved there years before. His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. At the same time, Ada is trying to revive her father's derelict farm and learn to survive in a world where the old certainties have been swept away. As it interweaves their stories, Cold Mountain asserts itself as an authentic American Odyssey--hugely powerful, majestically lovely, and keenly moving. [via]
More editions of Cold Mountain:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Colossus of New York : A City in 13 Parts'
In a dazzlingly original work of nonfiction, the award-winning novelist Colson Whitehead re-creates the exuberance, the chaos, the promise, and the heartbreak of New York. Here is a literary love song that will entrance anyone who has lived inor spent timein the greatest of American cities.
A masterful evocation of the city that never sleeps, The Colossus of New York captures the citys inner and outer landscapes in a series of vignettes, meditations, and personal memories. Colson Whitehead conveys with almost uncanny immediacy the feelings and thoughts of longtime residents and of newcomers who dream of making it their home; of those who have conquered its challenges; and of those who struggle against its cruelties.
Whiteheads style is as multilayered and multifarious as New York itself: Switching from third person, to first person, to second person, he weaves individual voices into a jazzy musical composition that perfectly reflects the way we experience the city. There is a funny, knowing riff on what it feels like to arrive in New York for the first time; a lyrical meditation on how the city is transformed by an unexpected rain shower; and a wry look at the ferocious battle that is commuting. The plaintive notes of the lonely and dispossessed resound in one passage, while another captures those magical moments when the city seems to be talking directly to you, inviting you to become one with its rhythms.
The Colossus of New York is a remarkable portrait of life in the big city. Ambitious in scope, gemlike in its details, it is at once an unparalleled tribute to New York and the ideal introduction to one of the most exciting writers working today. [via]
More editions of The Colossus of New York : A City in 13 Parts:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Cornucopia: A Gastronomic Tour of Britain'
More editions of Cornucopia: A Gastronomic Tour of Britain:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds'
More editions of Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Ella in Europe: An American Dog's International Adventures'
More editions of Ella in Europe: An American Dog's International Adventures:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Encyclopedia of World Travel'
More editions of Encyclopedia of World Travel:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Encyclopedia of World Travel'
no DJ, some yellowing to page edges, minor shelf wear. [via]
More editions of Encyclopedia of World Travel:

› Find signed collectible books: 'An End To Suffering: The Buddha In The World'
More editions of An End To Suffering: The Buddha In The World:
› Find signed collectible books: 'English Passengers'
Christopher Columbus was looking for a passage to India when he ran full-tilt boogie into the Americas. One of the narrators of Matthew Kneale's ambitious historical novel English Passengers has more modest aspirations: Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley wants only to smuggle a little tobacco, brandy, and French pornography from the Isle of Mann to a secluded beach in England. Yet somehow in the process, he and his crew end up weighing anchor for Australia. Worse, they're forced to carry three temperamental Englishmen bound for Tasmania on a mission to discover the exact location of the Garden of Eden. The year is 1857, and the study of geology is beginning to make serious inroads into areas of religious doctrine. When the Reverend Geoffrey Wilson runs across a scientific treatise that puts the age of Silurian limestone somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand years, he is scandalized: "This was despite the fact that the Bible tells, and with great clarity, that the earth was created a mere six thousand years ago." His many attempts to prove the Bible's accuracy lead, eventually, to a scientific expedition comprising himself, Timothy Renshaw, a dilettante botanist, and Dr. Thomas Potter.
Now jump back 30 years, to 1828, when a revolution of sorts is stirring on the island of Tasmania. Over the years, white settlers have been encroaching on aboriginal land and relations have deteriorated into violence. At the heart of the action is Peevay, a young half-breed abandoned by his aborigine mother, who had been kidnapped and raped by a white escaped convict. Now his vengeful mother is leading a war against the whites, and Peevay, desperate to win her love, has joined her. Chapters from the past narrated by Peevay and augmented by letters and dispatches from white settlers alternate with the sections told by Kewley, Wilson, Renshaw, and Potter. Eventually, of course, the two time lines intersect with momentous results.
War, mutiny, shipwreck, and not a little farce make English Passengers a gripping read, but it is Matthew Kneale's literary ventriloquism that renders it remarkable. In a novel with so many different points of view, the individuality of each voice stands out. There is, for instance, the mutinous Dr. Potter, whose descent into paranoia and egomania results in diary entries reminiscent of a 19th-century psychotic Bridget Jones: "Manxmen = treacherous even to v. last. Self heard Brew (lashed to mainmast as per usual) instructing helmsman to steer N.N.W. When self questioned he re. this he claiming we = carried into Bay of Biscay by difficult sea currents + must set course to avoid Breton Peninsular. He pointing to distant point of land to N.N.E. claiming this = Brittany. Self = doubtful." But perhaps the most compelling voice in English Passengers belongs to Peevay, who paints a vivid picture of aboriginal life in a foreign tongue he nonetheless makes his own:
When we sat so in the dark, after our eating, Tartoyen told us stories--secret stories that I will not say even now--about the moon and sun, and how everyone got made, from men and wallaby to seal and kangaroo rat and so. Also he told who was in those rocks and mountains and stars, and how they went there. Until, by and by, I could hear stories as we walked across the world, and divine how it got so, till I knew the world as if he was some family fellow of mine.By the close of this epic tale, the world Peevay had known is gone forever and the lives of the Manx sailors and English passengers have been irrevocably changed. Based on real events in Tasmanian history, Matthew Kneale's novel delivers a home truth about Australia's brutal colonial past, even as it conveys the wonder and allure of the age of exploration. --Alix Wilber [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Finding the Center: Two Narratives'
More editions of Finding the Center: Two Narratives:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Foreign Land'
More editions of Foreign Land:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Gone to New York: Adventures in the City'
More editions of Gone to New York: Adventures in the City:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Good Rain : An Exploration of the Pacific Northwest'
Egan succeeds in capturing the richness and beauty of the Pacific Northwest (and it's possibly imminent destruction) with rich description, appropriately chosen and reported interviews, and visits to exactly the places I would have chosen for such a book. From manicured gardens in essentially English Vancouver, B.C., to Indian reservations in western Washington, to the proud rural communities in eastern Washington, and visits to the precipitous peaks and brooding volcanos of the Cascade Mountains, Egan captures the presences and peoples of this region more effectively than most any other book I have encountered. Highly Recommended. [via]
More editions of The Good Rain : An Exploration of the Pacific Northwest:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Greece'
More editions of Greece:
› Find signed collectible books: 'A House Like a Lotus'
More editions of A House Like a Lotus:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Iceland: Land of the Sagas'
"We raised our fists and cheered. . . . With the sagas in our heads, with Iceland at its wildest beneath our boots, it would not have been impossible to see Bárdr clumping along the summit ridge, prodding the glacier with his staff, ready to show us the way down."
Iceland is a pictorial classic on one of the last "undiscovered" countries in Europe--reissued for the first time in paperback.
Iceland is often thought to be covered by ice, but in fact it is gloriously green. Lush meadows, wildflower fields, and miles of rich tundra cover a landscape of remarkable variety: deep lakes, bubbling hot springs, tumbling waterfalls, snow-capped mountains. It's also a landscape amazingly alive with massive lava flows and enormous glaciers. The human story of Iceland goes back more than eleven thousand years, and its heritage is told here in a treasury of riveting sagas of real-life heroes and all manner of supernatural beings.
Both the land and the people of one of Europe's most gorgeous countries come to life in this colorful account of the authors' adventures as they walk, climb, and photograph their way through Iceland and connect to the bone-chilling sagas and the unfamiliar terrain. With breathtaking photographs from critically acclaimed writer and journalist Jon Krakauer, author of the international bestsellers Into Thin Air and Into the Wild, and a penetrating narrative from Outside contributing editor and travel writer David Roberts, Iceland splendidly captures the spirit of this enigmatic country.
Circumnavigating Iceland in summer and winter, Krakauer and Roberts encounter tales of monks and Vikings, outlaws and adventurers, trolls and witches. While touring and photographing, they discover the myths and legends of Iceland's stirring history. Numerous other feats--including a hazardous winter climb to the summit of one of Iceland's tallest mountains--round out a fascinating introduction to this unique and beautiful land. [via]
More editions of Iceland: Land of the Sagas:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Illustrated Guide to Britain'
More editions of Illustrated Guide to Britain:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Incredible Voyage'
More editions of The Incredible Voyage:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Island of the Colorblind and Cycad Island: And, Cycad Island'
In his books An Anthropologist on Mars and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks details the lives of patients isolated by neurological disorders, shedding light on our common humanity and the ways in which we perceive the world around us. Now he looks at the effects of physical isolation in The Island of the Colorblind. On this journey, he carried with him the intellectual curiousity, kind understanding, and unique vision he has so consistently demonstrated.
Drawn to the Micronesian island of Pingelap by reports of a community of people born totally colorblind, Dr. Sacks set up a clinic in a one-room dispensary. There he listened to patients describe their colorless world in terms rich with pattern and tone, luminance and shadow. Then, in Guam, he investigated a puzzling neurodegenerative paralysis, making housecalls amid crowing cockerels, cycad jungles, and the remains of a colonial culture. The experience affords Sacks an opportunity to elaborate on such personal passions as botany and history and to explore the meaning of islands, the dissemination of species, the birth of disease, and the nature of deep geologic time. [via]
More editions of The Island of the Colorblind and Cycad Island: And, Cycad Island:

› Find signed collectible books: 'La Perdida'
More editions of La Perdida:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Last Pink Bits : Travels Through the Remnants of the British Empire'
More editions of Last Pink Bits : Travels Through the Remnants of the British Empire:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Life And Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir'
More editions of The Life And Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Little Women'
This authoritative, accurate text of the first edition (186869) of Little Women is accompanied by textual variants and thorough explanatory annotations.
Backgrounds and Contexts includes a wealth of archival materials, among them previously unpublished correspondence with Thomas Niles and Alcotts own precursors to Little Women. Criticism reprints twenty nineteenth-century reviews. Seven modern essays represent a variety of critical theories used to read and study the novel, including feminist (Catharine R. Stimpson, Elizabeth Keyser), new historicist (Richard H. Brodhead), psychoanalytic (Angela M. Estes and Kathleen Margaret Lant), and reader-response (Barbara Sicherman). A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included. [via]More editions of Little Women:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Looking for a Ship'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Napa'
A tour of California's premier wine country introduces readers to the family who inherited and then lost historic Inglenook, winemaker Francis Ford Coppola, the Mondavis, and more. Reprint. NYT. K. [via]
More editions of Napa:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women'
Geraldine Brooks spent two years as a Middle East news correspondent, covering the death of Khomeini and the like. She also learned a lot about what it's like for Islamic women today. Brooks' book is exceedingly well-done--she knows her Islamic lore and traces the origins of today's practices back to Mohammed's time. Personable and very readable, Brooks takes us through the women's back door entrance of the Middle East for an unusual and provocative view. [via]
More editions of Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Outermost House'
In 1926, Henry Beston spent two weeks in a two-room cottage on the sand dunes of Cape Cod. He had not intended to stay longer, but, as he later wrote, "I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go." Beston stayed for a year, meditating on humanity and the natural world. In The Outermost House, originally published in 1928, he poetically chronicled the four seasons at the beach; the ebb and flow of the tides, the migration of birds, storms, stars, and solitude. The landscape was his major character, and his writing provides a snapshot of the Cape, a place physically changed yet as soulful 80 years later. Like Henry D. Thoreau before him, and Rachel Carson after him, Beston was a writer of stunning beauty, importance and vision. Robert Finch once wrote of him, His are burnished, polished sentences, richly metaphoric and musical, that beg to be read aloud. The Outermost House is a classic of American nature literature. It is now available, for the first time, on audio. *Including an interview with Beston biographer, Dr. Daniel G. Payne *Unabridged on 5 CDs / approximately 5 hours *Narrated by Brett Barry [via]
More editions of The Outermost House:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Paradise of Cities: Venice in the 19th Century'
More editions of Paradise of Cities: Venice in the 19th Century:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Pleasures of a Tangled Life'
More editions of Pleasures of a Tangled Life:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Prester Quest'
More editions of The Prester Quest:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Racing Through Paradise: A Pacific Passage'
More editions of Racing Through Paradise: A Pacific Passage:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Riding With Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles And Books'
A motorcycle odyssey that combines the sensory seduction of the road with the intellectual rewards of archival research.
Ted Bishop took one last ride before the fall term. When he tried to pass a tractor-trailer at 80 miles per hour, his motorcycle began to vibrate out of control. Bishop was flung into a ditch, breaking his back in two places, shattering a wrist and ankle, and collapsing his lungs. Left with time to write and reflect, Bishop produced Riding with Rilke, an account of the epic motorcycle trip he had completed just before the crash. Here, Bishop takes readers from Edmonton to Austin, through the classic landscapes of the American West, and to a few of America and Europe's most famous cities as he reconciles what it means to be both a road dog and a researcher. Whether describing the shock of holding Virginia Woolf's suicide note in the British Library or the outlaw thrill of cruising small American towns on his Ducati, Bishop meditates with wit and honesty on the tangled interplay of life, work, and art. [via]More editions of Riding With Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles And Books:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Road Through Miyama'
More editions of The Road Through Miyama:

› Find signed collectible books: 'A Romantic Education'
More editions of A Romantic Education:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Rome'
This beautifully written, informative study is a portrait, a history and a superb guide book, capturing fully the seductive beauty and the many layered past of the Eternal City. It covers 3,000 years of history from the citys quasi-mythical origins, through the Etruscan kings, the opulent glory of classical Rome, the decadence and decay of the Middle Ages and the beauty and corruption of the Renaissance, to its time at the heart of Mussolinis fascist Italy. Exploring the citys streets and buildings, peopled with popes, gladiators, emperors, noblemen and peasants, this volume details the turbulent and dramatic history of Rome in all its depravity and grandeur. [via]
More editions of Rome:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Running in the Family'
Picture The Great Gatsby with heat, tea plantations, and even more gin and you've got part of Michael Ondaatje's 1982 Running in the Family. Set in Ondaatje's native Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Running begins with the champagne shenanigans of competitively romantic upper-class youths swept up in that first global trend, the Jazz Age: "They all went swimming again with just the modesty of the night. An arm touched a face. A foot touched a stomach. They could have almost drowned or fallen in love." The main characters to emerge from this frolicking set of dancers and drinkers are Ondaatje's parents, and it is upon them that the book turns from moonlit serenades to financial and emotional ruin.
Part travelogue, part family memoir (complete with photographs), part collection of poems, Running is also a poignant autobiography/biography that reimagines the alcoholism of Ondaatje's father Mervyn and the eventual (inevitable?) divorce of his parents. In telling these tall tales, Ondaatje is affectionate and insightful toward a father who was clearly difficult to accommodate in life. Driving intoxicated over a rickety wooden bridge no one else would trust in any condition, Mervyn turns to young Michael to wink and claim, "God loves a drunk."
Running marks the commencement of Ondaatje's growing interest in migration (does running run in the family?). The expatriate characters of Ondaatje's later novels are here presaged by a generation of Ceylonese steaming off to England for education and an enduring love of cricket. Salman Rushdie knows that "the past is a country from which we are all migrants." In Running in the Family, Ondaatje reaches back, inwards, and abroad to map that most treasured and troubled of places, the human heart. --Darryl Whetter [via]
More editions of Running in the Family:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Russian Journal'
A subtly crafted reflection of both the bleak and golden shadings of Russian life . . . Its tones belong more to the realm of poetry than journalism. The New York Times Book Review
At age twenty-five, Andrea Lee joined her husband, a Harvard doctoral candidate in Russian history, for his eight months study at Moscow State University and an additional two months in Leningrad. Published to enormous critical acclaim in 1981, Russian Journal is the award-winning authors penetrating, vivid account of her everyday life as an expatriate in Soviet culture, chronicling her fascinating exchanges with journalists, diplomats, and her Soviet contemporaries. The winner of the Jean Stein Award from the National Academy of Arts and Lettersand the book that launched Lees career as a writerRussian Journal is a beautiful and clear-eyed travel-writing classic.
[Lee] takes us wherever she is, conveying a feeling of place and atmosphere that is the mark of real talent.
The Washington Post Book World
A book of very great charm . . . [Lee] records what she saw and heard with unassuming delicacy and exactness.
Newsweek
From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]
More editions of Russian Journal:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened Japan'
Samurai William tells how, in 1598, William Adams, an English seaman of humble origin, sailed out of Rotterdam on a Danish ship en route to the East Indies. After 20 months at sea in which they survived a series of disasters, starvation and disease, Adams and a few remaining sailors floated into a harbour on the island of Kyushu in southwestern Japan. Though not the first Westerner to reach Japan--Portuguese traders and Jesuit monks from Spain had arrived about 60 years earlier--Adams was the first Englishman to arrive. The impact this one man would have on future relations between East and West is the subject of this engrossing book.
After landing, Adams spent some time in prison and was nearly executed before he made an unlikely ally in Tokugawa Ieyasu, a powerful feudal lord who would later become shogun of Japan. Intrigued by the outside world and impressed with the sailor's navigational abilities, Ieyasu commissioned Adams to oversee the construction of some ships to be used for both trade and exploration. In time, Adams mastered the language and complex social customs of Japan, began teaching the shogun about geometry and mathematics and served as a translator and political counsellor to Ieyasu. For his service, he was awarded great wealth, land holdings and even a lordship, making him the first foreigner ever to be honoured as a samurai. When news of his high standing reached England, a small crew of Englishmen were sent to Japan to use Adams's political connections to open trade between the two countries.
Giles Milton, author of Nathaniel's Nutmeg does a masterful job of covering Adams's remarkable life. His narrative moves along briskly as he recounts harrowing sea adventures, fascinating details about Japanese culture and the attempts of various countries, including Holland, Portugal, Spain and England, to gain a foothold in Japan to exploit the rich trade possibilities. Samurai William is an impressive achievement and a thoroughly entertaining read. --Shawn Carkonen, Amazon.com [via]
More editions of Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened Japan:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Search for Shangri-la : A Journey into Tibetan History'
More editions of The Search for Shangri-la : A Journey into Tibetan History:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Serpent in Paradise'
More editions of Serpent in Paradise:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Setting Free the Bears'
It is 1967 and two Viennese university students want to liberate the Vienna Zoo, as was done after World War II. But their good intentions have both comic and gruesome consequences, in this first novel written by a twenty-five year old John Irving, already a master storyteller.
From the Paperback edition. [via]
More editions of Setting Free the Bears:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Sky Burial'
It was 1994 when Xinran, a journalist and the author of The Good Women of China, received a telephone call asking her to travel four hours to meet an oddly dressed woman who had just crossed the border from Tibet into China. Xinran made the trip and met the woman, called Shu Wen, who recounted the story of her thirty-year odyssey in the vast landscape of Tibet.
Shu Wen and her husband had been married for only a few months in the 1950s when he joined the Chinese army and was sent to Tibet for the purpose of unification of the two countries. Shortly after he left she was notified that he had been killed, although no details were given. Determined to find the truth, Shu Wen joined a militia unit going to the Tibetan north, where she soon was separated from the regiment. Without supplies and knowledge of the language, she wandered, trying to find her way until, on the brink of death, she was rescued by a family of nomads under whose protection she moved from place to place with the seasons and eventually came to discover the details of her husbands death.
In the haunting Sky Burial, Xinran has recreated Shu Wens journey, writing beautifully and simply of the silence and the emptiness in which Shu Wen was enveloped. The book is an extraordinary portrait of a woman and a land, each at the mercy of fate and politics. It is an unforgettable, ultimately uplifting tale of love loss, loyalty, and survival. [via]
More editions of Sky Burial:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Spanish Recognitions: The Roads To The Past'
More editions of Spanish Recognitions: The Roads To The Past:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Sparring with Charlie : Motorbiking down the Ho Chi Minh Trail'
More editions of Sparring with Charlie : Motorbiking down the Ho Chi Minh Trail:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Storyteller's Daughter : One Woman's Return to Her Lost Homeland'
The vivid, often startling memoir of a young woman shaped by two dramatically disparate worlds. Saira Shah is the English-born daughter of an Afghan aristocrat, inspired by his dazzling stories to rediscover the now lost life their forebears presided over for nine hundred years within sight of the minarets and lush gardens of Kabul and the snow-topped mountains of the Hindu Kush. Part sophisticated, sensitive Western liberal, part fearless, passionate Afghan, falling in love with her ancestral mythchasing AfghanistanShah becomes, at twenty-one, a correspondent at the front of the war between the Soviets and the Afghan resistance. Then, imprisoning herself in a burqa, she risks her life to film Beneath the Veil, her acclaimed record of the devastation of womens lives by the Taliban. Discovering her extended family, discovering a world of intense family ritual, of community, of male primacy, of arranged marriages, and finding at last the now war-ravaged family seat, she discovers as well what she wants and what she rejects of her extraordinary heritage. [via]
More editions of The Storyteller's Daughter : One Woman's Return to Her Lost Homeland:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Street in Marrakech'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Sydney'
Let loose in a town whose first citizens were British criminals, a world-renowned travel writer shows how Sydney has grown into a beguiling, vibrant city full of promise. [via]
More editions of Sydney:

› Find signed collectible books: 'A Taste for Travel'
More editions of A Taste for Travel:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Traveler's Key to Ancient Egypt: A Guide to the Sacred Places of Ancient Egypt'
More editions of The Traveler's Key to Ancient Egypt: A Guide to the Sacred Places of Ancient Egypt:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Trekking'
More editions of Trekking:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Uncommon Carriers'
More editions of Uncommon Carriers:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Vagabonding in Europe and North Africa'
More editions of Vagabonding in Europe and North Africa:

› Find signed collectible books: 'A Vanished World'
More editions of A Vanished World:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Venice: The Biography of a City'
More editions of Venice: The Biography of a City:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Venice: Tales of the City'
More editions of Venice: Tales of the City:
› Find signed collectible books: 'A Viking Voyage: In Which an Unlikely Crew Attempts an Epic Journey to the New World'
The author himself describes his story as a tale of "quixotic idiocy, passion, determination, frightening beauty, love, loss, enlightenment, failure, and redemption...." Initially, only the idiocy is apparent. On a whim, Carter decides to reenact the voyage of Viking Leif Ericson, who, in the year 1000, sailed his knarr (a Viking longboat) from Greenland to a land he called "Vinland." But why should anyone care? Because Vinland, many experts believe, was located somewhere on the northeast coast of North America, meaning that Ericson beat Columbus to the New World by nearly 500 years.
To realize his dream voyage, Carter endures an almost comical assortment of trials. First, he must find someone to build, pay for, and help sail the boat. Then, he and his novice crew must sail it from Greenland to North America, struggling with the arctic cold, 1,000-year-old technology, and their own ineptitude. Carter describes their exploits with equal parts humor and terror. Fighting frostbite, he muses,
Like Robert Peary, I was going to lose my toes. Unlike him, I would whine and scream until the end. And I certainly would not be able to claim I discovered the North Pole or anything at all beyond learning that Viking boats were not meant to sail windward in anything beyond a duck pond.
For the landlubber, it's difficult to fathom why even the most die-hard Viking fanatics would go to such dangerous lengths to emulate their Norse heroes. Carter's account renders their passion more understandable, revealing little-known gems of Viking history and myth, and garnishing them with thrills and triumphs from his own adventures. Readers may not be inspired to rush out and build their own knarr, but they will find that Carter makes good on his introductory boast, wrenching new adventure from a world with seemingly no unexplored territory. --Andrew Nieland [via]
More editions of A Viking Voyage: In Which an Unlikely Crew Attempts an Epic Journey to the New World:

› Find signed collectible books: 'A Viking Voyage: In Which an Unlikely Crew of Adventurers Attempts an Epic Journey to the New World'
More editions of A Viking Voyage: In Which an Unlikely Crew of Adventurers Attempts an Epic Journey to the New World:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Virgil's Aeneid'
More editions of Virgil's Aeneid:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Voyage Out'
The Modern Library is proud to include Virginia Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out--together with a new Introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Cunningham. Published to acclaim in England in 1915 and in America five years later, The Voyage Out marks Woolf's beginning as one of the twentieth century's most brilliant and prolific writers.
Less formally experimental than her later novels, The Voyage Out none-theless clearly lays bare the poetic style and innovative technique--with its multiple figures of consciousness, its detailed portraits of characters' inner lives, and its constant shifting between the quotidian and the profound--that are the signature of Woolf's fiction.
Rachel Vinrace, Woolf's first heroine, is a motherless young woman who, at twenty-four, embarks on a sea voyage with a party of other English folk to South America. Guileless, and with only a smattering of education, Rachel is taken under the wing of her aunt Helen, who desires to teach Rachel "how to live."Arriving in Santa Marina, a village on the South American coast, Rachel and Helen are introduced to a group of English expatriates. Among them is the young, sensitive Terence Hewet, an aspiring writer, with whom Rachel falls in love. But theirs is ultimately a tale of doomed love, set against a chorus of other stories and other points of view, as the narrative shifts focus between its central and peripheral characters. E. M. Forster praised The Voyage Out as "a book which attains unity as surely as Wuthering Heights, though by a different path."
This edition includes a new Introduction by Michael Cunningham, bestselling author of The Hours. Cunningham at once unfolds an engaging short essay of Woolf's early life and career, an insightful exploration of the themes to which Woolf returns again and again in her fiction, and a spirited defense of the relevance and lasting importance of her art. Katherine Anne Porter wrote of Woolf: "The world of arts was her native territory; she ranged freely under her own sky, speaking her mother tongue fearlessly."
From the Hardcover edition. [via]
More editions of The Voyage Out:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan'
More editions of Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Watermark'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Where Nights Are Longest: Travels by Car Through Western Russia'
Where Nights Are Longest is Thubron's account of his 10-thousand-mile journey through the western half of Russia, its cities and its countryside. "A magnificent achievement."--Nikolai Tolstoy. [via]
More editions of Where Nights Are Longest: Travels by Car Through Western Russia:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Writer and the World: Essays'
V.S. Naipaul is a creature of paradox. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his essay collection, The Writer and the World. These essays, selected and introduced by Pankaj Mishra, range from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s. In them, our man travels the world, from his native Trinidad to his ancestral India to America and beyond, always looking with clear eyes at what's right there in front of him. In doing so, he's given us a distinctly Naipaulean journalism: he writes about countries as though they were people. "The politics of a country," he says, "can only be an extension of its idea of human relationships." His writing is, as a result, simultaneously petty and grand. Here, he writes of Belize City:
In the late afternoons Negroes in jackets and ties--famous throughout Central America for their immunity to disease--walk behind the hearses to the cemetery just outside the town, waving white handkerchiefs... It is like a ceremony of bewildered farewell at the limit of the world. But they are only keeping off the mosquitoes and sand flies.Here is a writer who turns the specific to the universal, seemingly without effort. If Naipaul has a reputation as a grouch, it's only because he never lets go of the specific in favor of the universal. The two always coexist. The pieces contained here--mostly heretofore out of print--are short in length, catholic in interest, and in all a fine introduction to our most cosmopolitan postcolonial writer. --Claire Dederer [via]
More editions of The Writer and the World: Essays:

› Find signed collectible books: 'A Writer's Britain: Landscape in Literature'
More editions of A Writer's Britain: Landscape in Literature:
Results page: PREV 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101-200 201-293 NEXT
