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Conventional wisdom suggests that aesthetic experiences - those moments when the senses come to life - are important only after more basic needs have been met. In this inspiring wealth of provocative ideas, Yi-Fu Tuan demonstrates that feeling and beauty are essential parts of life and society. The aesthetic is shown to be not merely one aspect of culture but its central core - both its driving force and its ultimate goal. Beginning with the individual and the physical world, the author's exploration progresses from the simple to the complex. Tuan starts by examining the building blocks of aesthetic experience - sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste - and gradually expands his analysis to incl...
Over the steppes and peaks of high Asia, here is the unforgettable chronicle of a harrowing honeymoon adventure. Turkestan Reunion, a series of long "letters home", is Eleanor Lattimore's vibrant, gem-like counterpart to husband Owen's classic historical account of the same journey in High Tartary. Line drawings.
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NOMINEE Long regarded as the most magical of the European dynasties, the Rothschild family today remains one of the most powerful and wealthy in the world. No family in the past two centuries has been so constantly at the center of Europe's great events, has featured such varied and spectacular personalities, has had anything close to the wealth of the Rothschilds. In Frederic Morton's classic tale, the family is brought vividly to life. Here you'll meet characters as lively as you can imagine: Mayer, long-time advisor to Germany's princes, who broke through the barriers of a Frankfurt ghetto and placed his family on the road to wealth and power; Lord Alfred, who maintain...
A VIBRANT, MEDITATIVE WALK IN SEARCH OF THE SOUL OF JAPAN Traveling by foot through mountains and villages, Alan Booth found a Japan far removed from the stereotypes familiar to Westerners. Whether retracing the footsteps of ancient warriors or detailing the encroachments of suburban sprawl, he unerringly finds the telling detail, the unexpected transformation, the everyday drama that brings this remote world to life on the page. Looking for the Lost is full of personalities, from friendly gangsters to mischievous children to the author himself, an expatriate who found in Japan both his true home and dogged exile. Wry, witty, sometimes angry, always eloquent, Booth is a uniquely perceptive guide. Looking for the Lost is a technicolor journey into the heart of a nation. Perhaps even more significant, it is the self-portrait of one man, Alan Booth, exquisitely painted in the twilight of his own life.
An award-winning professor takes readers on a guided tour of the stunning celestial discoveries of past cultures. Interweaving the astronomy, mythology, and anthropology of ancient peoples, Aveni shows how to discover the harmony between their beliefs and their study of the sky through naked-eye observations. From CHAPTER ONE: "My tales of Venus and Mars, squash and corn, are designed to entice the reader away from some of the widely held notions about the discovery and exploration of nature that are ingrained in modern culture. I want us to walk some worthwhile paths that are not so well trod."
In inner Mongolia in 1927, when travel by rail had all but eclipsed the traditional camel caravan, Owen Lattimore embarked on the journey that would establish him as a legendary adventurer and leader among Asian scholars. THE DESERT ROAD TO TURKESTAN is Lattimore's elegant and spirited account of his harrowing expedition across the famous "Winding Road." Setting off to rejoin his wife for their honeymoon in Chinese Turkestan, Lattimore was forced to contend with marauding troops, a lack of maps, scheming travel companions, and blinding blizzard. Luckily he had with him not only his father's retainer, Moses, but a team of camel pullers and Chinese traders he had assembled to teach him the ropes about their mysterious and now extinct way of life. Lattimore's gifts as a linguist and his remarkable powers of observation lend his chronicle an immediacy and force that has lost now of its impact in the decades since its original publication.
National Geographic's 100 Best Adventure Books of All Time.
Excerpt from High Tartary Ch'eng-tze I went on to Urumchi and after some delay got a mes sage through to my wife, who had been waiting in Peking for the news that I had crossed Mongolia. Within a few days after hearing from me, she started out to travel alone through Siberia to join me, and succeeded in doing so after a journey SO difficult and uncertain that it required far more enterprise and hardihood than a man would need to travel through Mongolia. I have not said anything about her experiences at Kuei-hua, where we had parted when I set out into Mongolia, and have given only the barest sketch of her journey through Siberia, with its culminating seventeen days by sled across four hundre...
On Feb. 13, 1920, a group of independent black baseball team owners held a meeting at a YMCA in Kansas City, Missouri. While they couldn't have known at the time that they were about to change the course of American history, it was out of that meeting that the Negro National League was born. The league flourished throughout the 1920s and beyond, becoming the first successful, organized professional black baseball league in the country. By providing a playing field for African American and Hispanic baseball players to showcase their world-class baseball abilities, it became a force that provided cohesion and a source of pride in black communities. Among them were the legendary pitchers Smokey...
AN ARDENT ENVIRONMENTALIST AND HUNTER SEEKS OUR PROPER RELATIONSHIP TO THE ANIMAL WORLD For all readers who are perplexed over humanity's proper relationship to animals, Ted Kerasote's provocative exploration of the ancient human urge to hunt will dramatize the issues that fuel this controversial debate. In his opening section, "Food" the author travels to the frozen shores of coastal Greenland, living and hunting with Inuit villagers-true hunter-gatherers-who are utterly dependent for sustenance on the seals, polar bears, and narwhal that they can wrest from their punishing environment. In "Trophies," Kerasote accompanies the first Western sportsmen permitted into a remote stretch of Siberi...