I won't score it because I did not make it to the end. I gave up. I thought it would be about following in RLS's footsteps through the islands -- instead it's about the author and his ongoing 12-step program.An early joke (I assume it was a joke) about our president being a Muslim from Africa mad...
Lovely! A recovering alcoholic follows in Robert Louis Stevenson's journeys in the South Pacific. Troost writes great prose. You may as well read this book aloud because you're just going to chase after people and read chunks of it to them anyway. "Listen to this!" He has a knack for a well-t...
Elsewhere in the world, governments typically confine their activities to the defense of their nation, the education of their youth, monetary policy, and the disbursement of pensions. True, a few—maybe more than a few—governments have pursued more nefarious ambitions, such as global hegemony and ...
Imagine a world inhabited by Sogdians, Gokturks, Ferghanians, Parthians, Bactrians, Nabataeans, Samanids, and other civilizations now lost to us, a world of traders and conquerors, missionaries and zealots, poets and muses, traversing the vast distances of Eurasia, trading the gold of Rome for th...
PROVOCATIVE AND outlandish as that might seem, it’s true. That fondness, however, didn’t mean I had any great desire to climb a twenty-five-thousand-foot mountain—where’s the fun in oxygen depletion?—or dogsled across the frozen tundra. I just liked knowing that nature was there, out there, somew...