Once in a while a person accidentally stumbles on an especially annoying book. One written particularly because a desperate publisher made a phone call, or mailed a letter with a check to an author with the words: "It's time to write another one, Shirley..." and the author hurled herself to write...
The author combines history, political intrigue, stories of people she travels with or meets along the way, verbal snapshots of unbelievable landscape, and box after box of wine (mixed with Coke) into a travel book that has made Chile even more of a mystery to me NOW than when I started reading i...
I read Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World many years ago without learning anything about the author except that the book itself was as good a tale as I’d heard.Sara Wheeler’s biography is also a great book, well-written and sympathetic but man, he was a tragic character. He was, I t...
‘He had seen what men with imagination cannot help seeing in a dream country like Africa.’This biography is about Denys George Finch Hatton (24 April 1887 – 14 May 1931). Finch Hatton was one of the British settlers of East Africa early in the 20th century, was a big-game hunter, and also the lo...
springs to mind. —LORD CRANWORTH, Kenya Chronicles, 1939 NEWSPAPERS AT HOME WERE STILL GLOATING OVER A SMASHING VICTORY near Messines, southwest of Ypres, on June 7. British miners had spent a year tunneling under enemy lines in order to lay a trail of explosives. When nineteen mines went up at o...
One was always scheduled to avoid Christmas, a festivity he disliked so vehemently that he talked about founding a society dedicated to its abolition (this was also a popular Shavian theme). Despite the explosion of commercial air travel, he was never tempted to fly to a fixed holiday destination...
The outer or Northern edge of this immence Ice field was compose[d] of loose or broken ice so close packed together that nothing could enter it; about a mile in began the field ice, in one compact solid boddy and seemed to increase in height as you traced it to the South; In this field we counted...
Henry Reed, The Primal Scene as it were I had to go north, but from Punta Arenas it wasn’t going to be possible to continue very far by land, as the country soon disintegrates into an archipelago. The land simply runs out on you. I could have travelled over the Andes, through Argentina and then b...