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A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
by Bill Bryson
Back in America after twenty years in Britain, Bill Bryson decided to reacquaint himself with his native country by walking the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail, which stretches from Georgia to Maine. The AT offers an astonishing landscape of silent forests and sparkling lakes -- and to a writer with the comic genius of Bill Bryson, it also provides endless opportunities to witness the majestic silliness of his fellow human beings. But A Walk in the Woods is more than just a laugh-out-loud hike. Bryson's acute eye is a wise witness to this beautiful but fragile trail, and as he tells its fascinating history, he makes a moving plea for the conservation of America's last great wilderness.
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On the Road
by Jack Kerouac
Follows the counterculture escapades of members of the Beat generation as they seek pleasure and meaning while traveling coast to coast. As he travels across 1950s America, aspiring writer Sal Paradise chronicles his escapades with the charismatic Dean Moriarty. Sal admires Dean's passion for experiencing as much as possible of life and his wild flights of poetic fancy.
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A Year in Provence
by Peter Mayle
In this witty and warm-hearted account, Peter Mayle tells what it is like to realize a long-cherished dream and actually move into a 200-year-old stone farmhouse in the remote country of the Lubéron with his wife and two large dogs. He endures January's frosty mistral as it comes howling down the Rhône Valley, discovers the secrets of goat racing through the middle of town, and delights in the glorious regional cuisine. A Year in Provence transports us into all the earthy pleasures of Provençal life and lets us live vicariously at a tempo governed by seasons, not by days.
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Sun After Dark: Flights Into The Foreign
by Pico Iyer
Follows the psychologically significant forays of a cultural journalist to such sites as a Bolivian prison, a hidden monastery in Tibet, and the Khmer Rouge killing fields of Cambodia, a journey during which he met such individuals as Kazuo Ishiguro, the Dalai Lama, and W. G. Sebald.
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Into the Wild
by Jon Krakauer
A portrait of Chris McCandless chronicles his decision to withdraw from society and adopt the persona of Alexander Supertramp, offering insight into his beliefs about the wilderness and his tragic death in the Alaskan wilderness.
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Journey Without Maps
by Graham Greene
Details the author's 1935 journey in search of Liberia, a remote and unfamiliar West African republic founded for released slaves, recalling his journey across the red-clay terrain from Sierra Leone to the coast of Grand Bassa with a chain of porters and his discovery of one of the few areas of Africa untouched by Western colonization.
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Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Life in Letters
by Patrick Leigh Fermor
Spanning over 70 years, the letters of the gifted British travel writer, often decorated with illustrations and humorous verse, describe his life experiences from fighting in World War II to being knighted in 2004.
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Travels in Siberia
by Ian Frazier
A Dazzling Russian travelogue from the bestselling author of Great Plains. In his astonishing new work, Ian Frazier, one of our greatest and most entertaining storytellers, trains his perceptive, generous eye on Siberia, the storied expanse of Asiatic Russia whose grim renown is but one explanation among hundreds for the region's fascinating, enduring appeal.
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Travels with Charley: In Search of America
by John Steinbeck
An intimate journey across America, as told by one of its most beloved writers. To hear the speech of the real America, to smell the grass and the trees, to see the colors and the light--these were John Steinbeck's goals as he set out, at the age of fifty-eight, to rediscover the country he had been writing about for so many years. With Charley, his French poodle, Steinbeck drives the interstates and the country roads, dines with truckers, encounters bears at Yellowstone and old friends in San Francisco. Along the way he reflects on the American character, racial hostility, the particular form of American loneliness he finds almost everywhere, and the unexpected kindness of strangers.
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Notes from a Small Island
by Bill Bryson
A humorous social commentary conveys the eccentricity of Britain, from zebra crossings and Shakespeare to Twiggie Winkie's Farm and beyond, based on the author's two decades on English soil.
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Ghosts of Spain: Travels through Spain and its Silent Past
by Giles Tremlett
An eloquent odyssey through Spain's dark history journeys into the heart of the Spanish Civil War to examine the causes and consequences of a painful recent past, as well as its repercussions in terms of the discovery of mass graves containing victims of Franco's death squads and the lives of modern-day Spaniards.
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Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere
by Jan Morris
The travel author and historian journeys to the city of Trieste, Italy, which has enchanted her for more than fifty years, to explore issues of patriotism, decency, wildness, and sex.
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Wild Coast: Travels on South America's Untamed Edge
by John Gimlette
Presents an introduction to the region, describing its jungles and swamps, diverse and unusual wildlife, dangerous towns, indigenous tribes, and difficult history with European conquerors.
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Fear and loathing in Las Vegas and other American Stories
by Hunter S. Thompson
First published in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is Hunter S. Thompson's savagely comic account of what happened to this country in the 1960s. It is told through the writer's account of an assignment he undertook with his attorney to visit Las Vegas and "check it out." The book stands as the final word on the highs and lows of that decade, one of the defining works of our time, and a stylistic and journalistic tour de force. Includes three companion pieces
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The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle
by Sara Wheeler
The best-selling author of Terra Incognita assesses the Arctic as a political and ecological barometer of change, surveying the territories belonging to different nations to mark significant transformations and how they reflect the planet's overall health.
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Crazy River: A Journey to the Source of the Nile
by Richard Grant
The author details his adventures in East Africa as he travels down an unexplored river in Tanzania, gets waylaid in Zansabir by thieves, befriends ethnic street gangsters in Burundi, and interviews the dictatorial president of Rwanda.
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In Xanadu: A Quest
by William Dalrymple
While waiting for the results of his college exams, William Dalrymple decides to fill in his summer break with a trip. But the vacation he plans is no light-hearted student jaunt - he decides to retrace the epic journey of Marco Polo from Jerusalem to Xanadu, the ruined palace of Kubla Kahn, north of Peking. For the first half of the trip he is accompanied by Laura, whom he met at a dinner party two weeks before he left; for the second half he is accompanied by Louisa, his very recently ex-girlfriend. Intelligent and funny, In Xanaduis travel writing at its best.
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