Search results for ""author rory maclean""

Through war and revolution, decay and regeneration, Stalin's Nose is a surreal and darkly comic ride and a portrait of Europe like no other. Rory MacLean's ground-breaking debut travel book begins when Winston the pig drops onto Uncle Peter's head and kills him dead. Unwilling to be left alone in her house Aunt Zita, a faded Austrian aristocrat and a vivacious eccentric, hijacks her nephew and, together with Winston, sets out on one last ride. The Berlin Wall has fallen only weeks before and Zita is determined to reach across the reopened borders and rediscover her remarkable east European family. Zita's relations - the angel of Prague, the Hungarian grave digger who buried Stalin's nose, a dying Romanian propagandist - help tie together the loose ends of her life. They picnic at Auschwitz. They meet Lenin's embalmer. They carry a long-lost corpse over the Carpathian mountains. In a rattling Trabant the unlikely trio puff and wheeze across the changing continent, following the threads of memory.

Read more less

The first single-volume biography of Berlin, one of the world's great cities - told via twenty-one portraits, from medieval times to the twenty-first century.A city devastated by Allied bombs, divided by a Wall, then reunited and reborn, Berlin today resonates with the echo of lives lived, dreams realised and evils executed. No other city has repeatedly been so powerful and fallen so low. And few other cities have been so shaped and defined by individual imaginations.Through vivid portraits spanning five centuries, Rory MacLean reveals the varied and rich history of Berlin, from its brightest to its darkest moments. We encounter an ambitious prostitute refashioning herself as a princess, a Scottish mercenary fighting for the Prussian Army, Marlene Dietrich flaunting her sexuality and Hitler fantasising about the mega-city Germania. The result is a uniquely imaginative biography of one of the world's most volatile yet creative cities.

Read more less

When his mother Joan was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Rory MacLean and his wife Katrin took her into their home. For five months, as their life fragmented and turned inward, they fought both to resist and to accept the inevitable. Each gave vent to their emotions in different ways, but all three kept a diary.Heartbreakingly honest and deeply moving, Gift of Time is the story of those days, in the words of a son, his wife and his mother. Woven together into a poignant meditation on life and death, they illuminate the courage and dignity of one woman who confronted what we all must face. Threaded through with wisdom and guilt, anger and acceptance, the story is punctuated by a family wedding and the hope of new life, by bin-bags of old letters and books rediscovered, by the end of winter and the first signs of spring.Powerful, raw and urgent, this slender volume is above all a celebration of life. Capturing every moment of beauty and pain it acknowledges that what survives all of us is love.Praise for Rory MacLean's previous titles:Stalin's Nose: 'The most extraordinary debut in travel writing since In Patagonia. A dark, sardonic and brilliant book which grows in stature with every page' William Dalrymple'A surreal masterpiece' Colin ThubronThe Oatmeal Ark: 'One of the most original and innovative travel books for years.' Alexander Frater'A truly astonishing performance' Jan Morris'Such a book as this rather marvellously explains why literature still lives.' John FowlesUnder the Dragon: 'I cannot imagine a better book on the beauty and terror of Burma. Read it. Read it. Read it.' Fergal Keane'It will make you cry and it will give you hope. ... It is astonishingly good.' Jeanette Winterson.Magic Bus: 'A disturbing, gripping and intensely passionate story' Esther Freud.

Read more less

Shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award 'A gem of a book, informative, companionable, sometimes funny, and wholly original. MacLean must surely be the outstanding, and most indefatigable, traveller-writer of our time' John le Carré In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. In that euphoric year Rory MacLean travelled from Berlin to Moscow, exploring lands that were – for most Brits and Americans – part of the forgotten half of Europe. Thirty years on, MacLean traces his original journey backwards, across countries confronting old ghosts and new fears: from revanchist Russia, through Ukraine’s bloodlands, into illiberal Hungary, and then Poland, Germany and the UK. Along the way he shoulders an AK-47 to go hunting with Moscow's chicken Tsar, plays video games in St Petersburg with a cyber-hacker who cracked the US election, drops by the Che Guevara High School of Political Leadership in a non-existent nowhereland and meets the Warsaw doctor who tried to stop a march of 70,000 nationalists. Finally, on the shores of Lake Geneva, he waits patiently to chat with Mikhail Gorbachev. As Europe sleepwalks into a perilous new age, MacLean explores how opportunists – both within and outside of Russia, from Putin to Home Counties populists – have made a joke of truth, exploiting refugees and the dispossessed, and examines the veracity of historical narrative from reportage to fiction and fake news. He asks what happened to the optimism of 1989 and, in the shadow of Brexit, chronicles the collapse of the European dream.

Read more less

The 20th century in 10 extraordinary moments: a photographic journey by bestselling historian Rory Maclean In the 20th century, amateur photography took history—and collective memory—out of the hands of historians and gave it to individuals. In Pictures of You, bestselling British-Canadian historian and travel writer Rory MacLean narrates a journey through 10 photographs, across the globe and into the lives of 10 ordinary men and women who lived through extraordinary times. Each photograph (or group of photographs) comes from a different decade of the 20th century: the first killing of the Cold War; the dying hopes of a doomed aviator; the ghosts of Native America at Alcatraz; Chairman Mao’s most timid lover; Nature’s final battle with humankind. Through these images, MacLean ventures from Siberia to Rangoon, China to Shepperton Studios, hearing forgotten voices that echo from the depths of time, picturing lives that mirror our own, and saving the stories behind these pictures of you. All of these images belong to the Archive of Modern Conflict in London. Over the last 25 years the Archive’s small collection of amateur photographs has grown into one of the world’s most moving image treasuries, its shelves now holding pictures of some four million lost lives. “A delicately beautiful book, haunting in its effect. Superb.” –Alexander McCall Smith “Stunning! A unique virtuoso exercise in empathy, narrative and imagination.” –Jan Morris

Read more less