Search results for ""Author Thomas Pakenham""

Acclaimed historian and bestselling author Thomas Pakenham shares his profound love of trees and reverence for nature, rooted in the family estate of Tullynally in Ireland.

Read more less

Standing tall on the sunburned plains of Africa and Australia, baobabs may be the oldest life forms on the planet. Many of the specimens still standing today have been around for well over two thousand years. Tremendous in size and bizarre in appearance, they have provided food, medicine, and places of refuge and worship to countless peoples, even serving as prisons and tombs on occasion. Long before European explorers opened up the African continent, the news of these "gnarled upside-down giants" had astonished the world of science and stoked the imagination of naturalists everywhere. Thomas Pakenham chronicles his personal encounters with the baobabs of Africa, Australia, Madagascar, and America and shares the countless superstitions and myths, as well as the often-strange history, that surround these enigmatic trees. With 60 color photos and 144 pages with color throughout, The Remarkable Baobab will be a great, and reasonably priced, gift book for the Christmas season.

Read more less

'The master. Puts all other modern tree-writers in the shade' John Lewis-Stempel, author of MeadowlandThomas Pakenham is an indefatigable champion of trees. In The Company of Trees he recounts his personal quest to establish a large arboretum on the family estate, Tullynally in Ireland; his forays to other tree-filled parks and plantations; his often hazardous seed-hunting expeditions; and his efforts to preserve magnificent old trees and historic woodlands.Whether writing about the terrible storms breaking the backs of hundred-year-old trees or a fire in the peat bog on Tullynally which threatens to spread to the main commercial spruce-woods, his fear of climate change and disease, or the sturdy young saplings giving him hope for the future, his book is never less than enthralling.

Read more less

The publication of Remarkable Trees of the World took American audiences by storm. Thomas Pakenham embarks on a five-year odyssey to most of the temperate and tropical regions of the world to photograph sixty trees of remarkable personality and presence: Dwarfs, Giants, Monuments, and Aliens; the lovingly tended midgets of Japan; the enormous strangler from India; and the 4,700-year "Old Methusalehs." American readers will be fascinated by Pakenham's first examination of North American trees, including the towering Redwoods of Sequoia and Yosemite, the gaunt Joshua Trees of Death Valley and the Bristlecone pines discovered in California's White Mountains. Many of these trees were already famous—champions by girth, height, volume or age—while others had never previously been caught by the camera. Pakenham's five-year odyssey, sweating it out with a 30 pound Linhof camera and tripod, took him to most of the temperate and many of the tropical regions of the world. Although North American trees dominate this book, Pakenham also trekked to remote regions in Mexico, all over Europe, parts of Asia including Japan, northern and southern Africa, Madagascar, Australia and New Zealand. Remarkable Trees of the World is a lavish work that will be treasured for generations by all those who marvel at nature.

Read more less

In 1880 the continent of Africa was largely unexplored by Europeans. Less than thirty years later, only Liberia and Ethiopia remained unconquered by them. The rest - 10 million square miles with 110 million bewildered new subjects - had been carved up by five European powers (and one extraordinary individual) in the name of Commerce, Christianity, ''Civilization'' and Conquest. The Scramble for Africa is the first full-scale study of that extraordinary episode in history.

Read more less

Thomas Pakenham's beautifully illustrated, bestselling book of tree portraits.With this astonishing collection, Thomas Pakenham produced a new kind of tree book. The arrangement owes little to conventional botany. The sixty trees are grouped according to their own strong personalities: Natives, Travellers, Shrines, Fantasies and Survivors. From the ancient native trees, many of which are huge and immeasurably old, to the exotic newcomers from Europe, the East and North America, MEETINGS WITH REMARKABLE TREES captures the history and beauty of these entrancing living structures. Common to all these trees is their power to inspire awe and wonder. This is a lovingly researched book, beautifully illustrated with colour photographs, engravings and maps - a moving testimonial to the Earth`s largest and oldest living structures.

Read more less

For centuries, English country gentlemen had collected exotic pictures for their saloons and rare books for their libraries. By the end of the 17th century, they had begun to plant nurseries. Within the space of a few years thousands of new plantations enriched the British landscape, and demand was high for the most splendid imports: maples and pines from the American colonies, cypresses and cedars from Europe and Lebanon, oriental plane from Greece and Turkey, with its romantic associations with Plato''s Academy.How did these extraordinary plants make their way to the forests of Britain and Ireland? Who were the scholars and daredevils who combed the new and old worlds in search of green treasure? What crimes did they commit, and what price did they pay, to bring the world''s charismatic megaflora to the gardens of home? In this exuberant history, Thomas Pakenham reveals the marvellous tales of adventure, discovery, rivalry and passion that created the modern British lands

Read more less

This classic account of the great Irish rebellion of 1798 remains the only full-scale history of that tragic event. As relevant today as it was when first published in 1969, THE YEAR OF LIBERTY is now reissued with the addition of a chronology and a glossary of terms. In May 1798 a hundred thousand peasants rose against the British government in Ireland. By the time the revolt had been put down four months later, thirty thousand dead were literally rotting in heaps in a smoking and desolate countryside. Yet it was not a schoolroom story of the heroic oppressed rising against the brutal oppressor, but the result of a complex, tragic, often absurd and sometimes heroic interplay between different groups of people. A tough and arrogant oligarchy of country gentlemen, mainly Protestant and mainly British in origin, lived off a Catholic peasantry. Meanwhile, idealistic merchants and hot-headed young lawyers dreamed and plotted for an Irish Republic on the French model. From a mass of sources including confidential government reports, contemporary newspapers, poems, broadsheets and letters, the author pieces together a story at once complex, tragic, absurd and heroic.

Read more less

'Unforgettable . . . no better compilers could have been found' - History Today'Dublin's past comes dazzlingly alive' - Publishing News'Erudite and practical simultaneously' - Gemma Hussey, Irish IndependentDublin's turbulent history, its intensely literary and theatrical character of long literary lineage, its revolutionary ideals and heroes, and its ordinary life are all brought to life in this collection of letters, diaries and memoirs of travellers to the city and by Dubliners themselves. The extracts, from medieval times onwards, include Red Hugh O'Donnell's escape from Dublin Castle, James Joyce's plans for a novel while staying at the Martello Tower, and the seizure of the GPO by Irish volunteers during the Easter Rising. The book also includes gossip and story-telling in the humorous sketches of many famous Dubliners.

Read more less