Author: Paul TherouxPublisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 061883933X
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 373
Book Description
The world's most acclaimed travel writer journeys through western Africa from Cape Town to the Congo.
The Great Railway Bazaar
Author: Paul TherouxPublisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 054752515X
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 406
Book Description
The acclaimed author recounts his epic journey across Europe and Asia in this international bestselling classic of travel literature: “Compulsive reading” (Graham Greene). In 1973, Paul Theroux embarked on a four-month journey by train from the United Kingdom through Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. In The Great Railway Bazaar, he records in vivid detail and penetrating insight the many fascinating incidents, adventures, and encounters of his grand, intercontinental tour. Asia's fabled trains—the Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Frontier Mail, the Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, the Mandalay Express, the Trans-Siberian Express—are the stars of a journey that takes Theroux on a loop eastbound from London's Victoria Station to Tokyo Central, then back from Japan on the Trans-Siberian. Brimming with Theroux's signature humor and wry observations, this engrossing chronicle is essential reading for both the ardent adventurer and the armchair traveler.
Deep South
Author: Paul TherouxPublisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544323521
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 485
Book Description
"Paul Theroux has spent fifty years crossing the globe, adventuring in the exotic, seeking the rich history and folklore of the far away. Now, for the first time, in his tenth travel book, Theroux explores a piece of America--the Deep South. He finds there a paradoxical place, full of incomparable music, unparalleled cuisine, and yet also some of the nation's worst schools, housing, and unemployment rates. It's these parts of the South, so often ignored, that have caught Theroux's keen traveler's eye."--
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
Author: Paul TherouxPublisher: Emblem Editions
ISBN: 0771085389
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 513
Book Description
National Bestseller In Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Theroux recreates an epic journey he took thirty years ago, a giant loop by train (mostly) through Eastern Europe, Turkey, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, China, Japan, and Siberia. In short, he traverses all of Asia top to bottom, and end to end. In the three decades since he first travelled this route, Asia has undergone phenomenal change. The Soviet Union has collapsed, China has risen, India booms, Burma slowly smothers, and Vietnam prospers despite the havoc unleashed upon it the last time Theroux passed through. He witnesses all this and more in a 25,000 mile journey, travelling as the locals do, by train, car, bus, and foot. His odyssey takes him from Eastern Europe, still hungover from Communism, through tense but thriving Turkey, into the Caucasus, where Georgia limps back toward feudalism while its neighbour Azerbaijan revels in oil-driven capitalism. As he penetrates deeper into Asia’s heart, his encounters take on an otherworldly cast. The two chapters that follow show us Turkmenistan, a profoundly isolated society at the mercy of an almost comically egotistical dictator, and Uzbekistan, a ruthless authoritarian state. From there, he retraces his steps through India, Mayanmar, China, and Japan, providing his penetrating observations on the changes these countries have undergone. Brilliant, caustic, and totally addictive, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is Theroux at his very best.
Where the Roads All End
Author: Ilisa BarbashPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0873654099
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Book Description
Where the Roads All End tells the remarkable story of an American family’s expeditions to the Kalahari Desert in the 1950s. Raytheon founder Laurence Marshall and his family recorded the lives of the last remaining hunter-gatherers, the so-called Bushmen, in what is now recognized as one of the most important anthropology ventures in Africa.
Riding the Iron Rooster
Author: Paul TherouxPublisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547526997
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 533
Book Description
The acclaimed travel writer chronicles a year of train travel across China in a revealing travelogue that “gives the reader much to relish and think about” (Publishers Weekly). The author of the train travel classics The Great Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonian Express, takes to the rails once again in this account of his epic journey through China. The always irascible, infectiously curious author “is in top form as he describes the barren deserts of Mongolia and Xinjiang, the ice forests of Manchuria and the dry hills of Tibet. He captures their otherworldly, haunting appearances perfectly. He is also right on target when he talks about the ugliness of China's poorly planned, hastily built cities” (Mark Salzman, The New York Times). Theroux hops aboard a train as part of a tour group in London and sets out for China's border. He then spends a year traversing the country, where he pieces together a fascinating snapshot of a unique moment in history. From sweeping and desolate natural landscapes to the dense metropolises of Shanghai, Beijing, and Canton, Theroux offers an unforgettable portrait of a magnificent land and an extraordinary people.
The Tao of Travel
Author: Paul TherouxPublisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141044268
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 317
Book Description
Paul Theroux celebrates fifty years of wandering the globe in this collection of the best writing from the books that shaped him as a reader and traveler. Part philosophical guide, part miscellany, part reminiscence, "The Tao of Travel "contains excerpts from the best of Theroux's own work interspersed with selections from travelers both familiar and unexpected: " Vladimir Nabokov Eudora Welty Evelyn Waugh James Baldwin Charles Dickens Pico Iyer Henry David Thoreau Anton Chekhov Mark Twain John McPhee Freya Stark Ernest Hemingway Graham Greene and many others" PAUL THEROUX is the author of many highly acclaimed books, including "Ghost Train to the Eastern Star "and "Dark Star Safari. "He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.
The Lower River
Author: Paul TherouxPublisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547746504
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 361
Book Description
A taut, tense, darkly suspenseful novel about a man who flees to Africa after his marriage falls apart, only to be caught up in a precarious situation in a seemingly benign village.
What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa?
Author: Clapperton Chakanetsa MavhungaPublisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262533901
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 257
Book Description
Explorations of science, technology, and innovation in Africa not as the product of “technology transfer” from elsewhere but as the working of African knowledge. In the STI literature, Africa has often been regarded as a recipient of science, technology, and innovation rather than a maker of them. In this book, scholars from a range of disciplines show that STI in Africa is not merely the product of “technology transfer” from elsewhere but the working of African knowledge. Their contributions focus on African ways of looking, meaning-making, and creating. The chapter authors see Africans as intellectual agents whose perspectives constitute authoritative knowledge and whose strategic deployment of both endogenous and inbound things represents an African-centered notion of STI. “Things do not (always) mean the same from everywhere,” observes Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, the volume's editor. Western, colonialist definitions of STI are not universalizable. The contributors discuss topics that include the trivialization of indigenous knowledge under colonialism; the creative labor of chimurenga, the transformation of everyday surroundings into military infrastructure; the role of enslaved Africans in America as innovators and synthesizers; the African ethos of “fixing”; the constitutive appropriation that makes mobile technologies African; and an African innovation strategy that builds on domestic capacities. The contributions describe an Africa that is creative, technological, and scientific, showing that African STI is the latest iteration of a long process of accumulative, multicultural knowledge production. Contributors Geri Augusto, Shadreck Chirikure, Chux Daniels, Ron Eglash, Ellen Foster, Garrick E. Louis, D. A. Masolo, Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Neda Nazemi, Toluwalogo Odumosu, Katrien Pype, Scott Remer
Sunjata
Author: Bamba SusoPublisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141906340
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 119
Book Description
Sunjata Keita was the founder of one of the greatest empires of Western Africa. These two epic accounts of his life portray a greedy, slow-witted child - said to have crawled until the age of seven - who grew up as prophecy foretold to become a mighty warrior, renowned for his bravery and superhuman strength. They describe how, with the help of his sister, who seduced their arch-enemy Sumanguru into revealing his secret powers, Sunjata defeated the Susu overlords and created the Mali Empire which would last for two centuries. Based on events from the early thirteenth century, these tales of heroism and magic are still celebrated across West Africa as part of a living epic oral tradition.
