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Armchair Travel April 2017
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My Beer Year : Adventures with Hop Farmers, Craft Brewers, Chefs, Beer Sommeliers & Fanatical Drinkers as a Beer Master in Training
by Lucy Burningham
Lucy Burningham is a beer lover living in America's capital of craft brews: Portland, Oregon. As a journalist spurred by curiosity and thirst, she made it her career to write about craft beer, traveling to hop farms, attending rare beer tasting parties, and visiting as many taprooms, breweries, and festivals as possible. With this as her introduction, Lucy decided to take her relationship with beer to the next level: to become a certified beer expert, a Master Cicerone. Travel with her to Europe to learn from some of Belgium's most influential brewers, and contemplate the craftsmanship and ingredients that go into making a great beer. Dine with her at three-star Michelin restaurants as she examines how the palate interprets flavors and aromas. Hang out with her as she tries her hand at brewing beer herself, both at her home and in a commercial brewery with her mentor, brewer John Harris.Lucy's journey into the world of beer is by turns educational, social, and personal--just as enjoying a good beer should be.
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All Over the Place : Adventures in Travel, True Love, and Petty Theft
by Geraldine DeRuiter
Geraldine met the love of her life long before this story began, on a bus in Seattle surrounded by drunk college kids. She gets lost constantly, wherever she goes. All Over the Place chronicles the five-year period that kicked off when Geraldine got laid off from a job she loved and took off to travel the world. Those years taught her a great number of things, though the ability to read a map was not one of them. She has only a vague idea of where Russia is, but she understands her Russian father now better than ever before. She learned that at least half of what she thought was her mother's functional insanity was actually an equally incurable condition called "being Italian." She learned about unemployment and brain tumors and lost luggage and lost opportunities and just getting lost, in countless terminals and cabs and hotel lobbies across the globe. And she learned what it's like to travel the world with someone you already know and love, how that person can help you make sense of things, and can, by some sort of alchemy, make foreign cities and far-off places feel like home.
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| Bears in the Streets: Three Journeys Across a Changing Russia by Lisa DickeyWith Russia so much a part of recent news, some may want to know more about the world's largest country. Veteran author Lisa Dickey shines a light on that topic and on the changes to Russia that have occurred during the past two decades, detailing three journeys she took across the vast nation, in 1995 (with an American photographer), 2005 (with another photographer), and 2015 (solo). On each trip, she tried to visit the same people and places, and the result is an in-depth look at Russians (including farmers, small business owners, Jews, and others) that explores everyday life, people's social attitudes, and more. Bear in the Streets provides a rich look at an intriguing place. |
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Egyptomania : A History of Fascination, Obsession, and Fantasy
by Ronald H. Fritze
The land of pyramids and sphinxes, pharaohs and goddesses, Egypt has been a source of awe and fascination from the time of the ancient Greeks to the twenty-first century. In Egyptomania, Ronald H. Fritze takes us on a historical journey to unearth the Egypt of the past, a place inhabited by strange gods, powerful magic, spell-binding hieroglyphs, and the uncanny, mummified remains of ancient people. Egypt has exerted a powerful force on our imagination. Medieval Christians considered it a holy land with many connections to biblical lore, while medieval Muslims were intrigued by its towering monuments, esoteric sciences, and hidden treasures. People of the Renaissance sought Hermes Trismegistus as the ancient originator of astrology, alchemy, and magic, and those of the Baroque pondered the ciphers of the hieroglyphs. And of course the modern era is one still susceptible to the lure of undiscovered tombs and the curses of pharaohs cast on covetous archeologists.
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| Havana: A Subtropical Delirium by Mark KurlanskyAward-winning author Mark Kurlansky, who wrote the bestesellers Salt and Cod, here turns his keen eye to the beloved city he's been visiting for 30 years: Havana, Cuba. In this adoring travelogue/history, Kurlansky shares personal stories and offers details about the 500-year-old Caribbean city's past and present, people, culture, sports, and music, as well as its appearances in art and literature (yes, Hemingway is discussed). Havana is a complex place, and if you want a talented guide to help you understand this elegant yet downtrodden city, pick up Havana, which includes not only recipes but pen-and-ink drawings by the talented author. |
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Far Afield : Rare Food Encounters from Around the World
by Shane Mitchell
Food and travel writer Shane Mitchell and photographer James Fisher have traveled the world on assignment for food and travel publications such asTravel + Leisure and Saveur. Along the way, they have encountered the fascinating people who are keeping the world's oldest traditional foodways alive, such as sacred taro farmers in Hawaii who have never left the islands, fisherman on the Swahili coast, and Icelandic shepherds who still use the techniques of their Viking ancestors. Full of lush photography from far-flung locations all over the globe,Far Afield profiles these people, sharing their unique and captivating stories and recipes.
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| The Alps: A Human History from Hannibal to Heidi and Beyond by Stephen O'SheaThough he's afraid of heights, Stephen O'Shea decided to take a road trip across the Alps, visiting parts of France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Slovenia. Driving a souped-up muscle car, he traveled around hairpin turns, through quaint villages, and up and down (and up and down) steep mountain roads. While lightheartedly describing his adventure, he shares information about the people and places he encountered along the way and comments on the rugged area's appearances in history and fiction (covering everyone from Hannibal and Hitler to Mary Shelley, Sherlock Holmes, and Heidi). The Alps should pique the interest of those who enjoy reading fun travelogues full of cool information (Bill Bryson fans, we're talking to you!). |
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Crossing Home Ground : A Grassland Odyssey Through Southern Interior British Columbia
by David Pitt-Brooke
Canadian. Like John Muir, David Pitt-Brooke stepped out for a walk one morning--a long walk of a thousand kilometres or more through the arid valleys of southern interior British Columbia. He went in search of beauty and lost grace in a landscape that has seen decades of development and upheaval. In Crossing Home Ground he reports back, providing a day-by-day account of his journey's experiences, from the practical challenges--dealing with blisters, rain and dehydration--to sublime moments of discovery and reconnection with the natural world.Through the course of this journey, Pitt-Brooke's encounters with the natural world generate starting points for reflections on larger issues: the delicate interconnections of a healthy landscape and, most especially, the increasingly fragile bond between human beings and their home-places. There is no escaping the impact of human beings on the natural world, not even in the most remote countryside, but he finds hope and consolation in surviving pockets of loveliness, the kindness of strangers and the transformative process of the walking itself, a personal pilgrimage across home ground.
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Bleaker House : Chasing my Novel to the End of the World
by Nell Stevens
Twenty-seven-year-old Nell Stevens was determined to write a novel, but somehow life kept getting in the way. Then came a game-changing opportunity: she won a fellowship that let her spend three months, all expenses paid, anywhere in the world to research and write a book. Would she choose a glittering metropolis, a romantic village, an exotic paradise? Um, no. Nell chose Bleaker Island, a snowy, windswept pile of rock in the Falklands. There, in a guesthouse where she would be the only guest, she could finally rid herself of distractions and write her 2,500 words a day. In three months, surely she'd have a novel. And sure enough, other than sheep, penguins, paranoia, and the weather, there aren't many distractions on Bleaker. Nell gets to work on her novel--a delightful Dickensian fiction she calls Bleaker House--only to discover that an excruciatingly erratic internet connection and 1100 calories a day (as much food as she could carry in her suitcase, budgeted to the raisin) are far from ideal conditions for literary production.
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A Wretched and Precarious Situation : In Search of the Last Arctic Frontier
by David Welky
In 1906, from atop a snow-swept hill in the ice fields northwest of Greenland, Commander Robert E. Peary spotted a heretofore unknown land looming in the distance. He called it “Crocker Land.” Scientists and explorers agreed that Peary had found a new continent. Several years later, two of Peary’s disciples, George Borup and Donald MacMillan—with the sponsorship of the American Museum of Natural History—assembled a team of amateurs to investigate. They pitched their two-year mission as a scientific tour de force that would fill in the last blank space on the globe. Instead, the Crocker Land Expedition became a five-year ordeal that endured Arctic blizzards, dwindling supplies, a fatal boating accident, a drunken sea captain, a shipwreck, marooned rescue parties, disease, dissension, and a crewman-turned-murderer.
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