You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
None
These three imperial cities constitute the most popular Morocco tour: Marrakesh, the exotic heart of the country; historic Fez; and Rabat.
"Lebanon has fallen prey to the rapacious appetites of most of the world's great powers - France, Ancient Egypt, Rome, Assyria, Alexander the Great, the Arabs, Crusaders, Persians, Mamlukes and Ottoman Turks. Vestiges of all these transient civilisations are still there: Phoenician tombs and Roman temples, Gothic castles, venerable mosques and churches all jostling for attention. The Lebanese themselves bear genetic witness to this history: dozens of ethnic and religious groups coexist uneasily, hemmed in between mountains and sea, stubbornly defending their rites and traditions in a mosaic-like society where politics informs religion and vice versa. Violence, beauty, poetry, struggle, humour, an occasional example of inspiring inter-cultural harmony - and bigotry - all are reflected through these writers' eyes."--Jacket.
Dilys Powell's love affair with Greece and the Greeks began on a sun-baked archaeological dig in 1931. Joining her husband the archaeologist Humfry Payne on the remote peninsula of Perachora, she came to know the villagers who labored on the site, camping beside them year after year, for months at a time. Despite personal tragedy, the occupation of Greece and civil war, Powell's affair of the heart continued. She returned time and again through the '40s and '50s, and with each visit there was a reconciliation with her idyllic memories of the country. Both with Humfry and without, she explored remote mountains in the company of shepherds, isolated stretches of coast and island with local fishermen and olive-dotted hillsides with the subsistence farmers who worked them. Out of this she has fashioned a gem of a travel book.
Bombed and cut-off from normal contact with the rest of the world, life in Gaza is beset with structural, medical and mental health problems, yet it is also bursting with political engagement and underwritten by an intense enjoyment of family life. During her month by the sea, Dervla Murphy develops an acute eye for the way in which isolation has shaped this society. Time and again she meets men who have returned to the Strip as an act of presence. Yet the mosque is often their only daily activity, as difficulties obtaining supplies mean few opportunities for creative work.
One winter, Dervla Murphy and her six-year-old daughter explored 'Little Tibet' high up in the Karakoram Mountains in the frozen heart of the Western Himalayas. Dervla records their adventures, from crumbling tracks over bottomless chasms, to assaults by lascivious Kashmiris.
Norman Lewis arrives in war-torn Naples as an intelligence officer in 1944. The starving population has devoured all the tropical fish in the aquarium, respectable women have been driven to prostitution and the black market is king. Lewis finds little to admire in his fellow soldiers, but gains sustenance from the extraordinary vivacity of the Italians. There is the lawyer who earns his living bringing a touch of Roman class to funerals, the gynaecologist who "specializes in the restoration of lost virginity" and the widowed housewife who times her British lover against the clock. "Were I given the chance to be born again," writes Lewis, "Italy would be the country of my choice."
An American woman residing in Sicily for the past twenty years portrays the Sicilian landscape and customs--both rural and urban--from the perspectives of both a "foreigner" and a resident.
Out of a lifetime of travelling, Martha Gellhorn has selected her "best horror journeys". She bumps through rain-sodden, war-torn China to meet Chiang Kai-Shek, floats listlessly in search of u-boats in the wartime Caribbean and visits a dissident writer in the Soviet Union against her better judgement. Written with the eye of a novelist and an ironic black humour, what makes these tales irresistible are Gellhorn's explosive and often surprising reactions. Indignant, but never righteous and not always right, through the crucible of hell on earth emerges a woman who makes you laugh with her at life, while thanking God that you are not with her.
We get to share in his personal discoveries through the humour and good fellowship of the road, full of entertaining misadventures. But there is never any doubt that there is an ultimate purpose to these journeys: a passionate need to bear witness to the truth about the past, after centuries of persecution by an alien ruling class. So through the dense clouds of historical tragedy, Wright exchavates hope that a revival of pride and dignity in Andean culture is possible.