Search results for ""Eland Publishing Ltd""

Mungo Park's account of his journeys into West Africa in 1795 and again in 1805 provided Europeans with their first reliable description of the interior of the continent. Though he failed in the object of his mission - to chart the course of the Niger River - he succeeded in leaving a unique record of everyday life before the exploitation of Africa by Europeans, as valuable today as it was then. His first-hand experiences of tribal justice, gold mining and the slave trade are recorded, as well as his own understated heroism, a story of courage, open-hearted friendship and betrayal.

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In "Jackdaw Cake" Norman Lewis recounts the first half of his adventurous life with dry, infectious, laconic wit, observing the transformation of a stammering schoolboy into a worldly wise multilingual intelligence agent on the point of becoming a formidable travel writer.

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Martha was the youngest of sixteen, handpicked reporters who filed accurate, confidential reports on the human stories behind the statistics of the Depression directly to Roosevelt's White House. From these pages, we understand the real cost of sudden destitution on a vast scale. We taste the dust in the mouth, smell the disease and feel the hopelessness and the despair. And here, too, we can hear the earliest cadences of a writer who went on to become, arguably, the greatest female war reporter of the 20th century.

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In "The Missionaries", Norman Lewis brings together a lifetime's experience of travelling in tribal lands in a searing condemnation of the lethal impact of North American fundamentalist Christian missionaries on aboriginal life throughout the world.

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This is the story of a street in London's docklands and of the family who lived on it. The street was built in the 1880s, and the Wheelwright family (originally dockers) lived there until its demolition in the 1960s, when it was replaced with tower blocks. As a social document, the book rings with truth, but it is much more than that: its compelling narrative brings the reader right into the life of the Wheelwright family and their neighbours.

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In 1973, the Afghans still had a King who ruled from a palace in Kabul with his own resident court of musicians when Veronica set up home in Herat. This Afghan city sat close to the Persian frontier and was fully cognisant of its glorious history as the capital of a once vast Central Asian Empire. Veronica was not a casual traveler but a young musician married to a scholar. She was determined to make use of her time in Afghanistan and break out of the charmed circle of the expatriate academic and make real friendships with local women. The tentative story, the growth in these very different friendships, takes the reader into a rare, deep, and privileged insight into the hidden world of Afghan female society. This is more than enough to make this book remarkable, but it has an afterlife of its own. For a Communist coup, then the Russian invasion, a long guerrilla war of Resistance is followed by Civil War and the rise of the Taliban. Veronica was separated from her friends: feared the worst, sought to assist but was also aware that contact from a westerner could be lethal to them. Then a fragile peace allowed her to meet them again and pick up their stories. It is a most exceptional work, which reads like a novel. ‘I was fascinated by this story of ordinary life before the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. The three women are remarkable and unforgettable, and the story of how the author gained their friendship is like a novel.’ – Doris Lessing‘Three Women of Herat is a sensitive, knowledgeable and very moving account of an annihilated civilisation.’ –The Sunday Times‘Her understanding of 'purdah' is certainly the most illuminating by any Western writer for a long time. It is in describing the rituals of the day-to-day life of these women that the author excels, all are minutely depicted with a ravishing eye for detail.’ – Ahmed Rashid

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Nigel Barley travels to the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia to live among the Torajan people, known for their spectacular buildings and elaborate ancestor cults. At last he is following his own advice to students, to do their anthropological fieldwork `somewhere where the inhabitants are beautiful, friendly, where you would like the food and there are nice flowers. With his customary wit and delight in the telling detail, he takes the reader deep into this complex but adaptable society. The mutual warmth of his friendships allows Barley to reverse the habitual patterns of anthropology. He becomes host to four Torajan carvers in London, invited to build a traditional rice barn at the Museum of Mankind. The observer becomes the observed, and it is Barley s turn to explain the absurd complexities of an English city to his bemused but tolerant guests in a magnificent, self critical finale. Not a Hazardous Sport provides a magnificent end to a trilogy of anthropological journeys that began with The Innocent Anthropologist and A Plague of Caterpillars (both published by Eland). A postscript, penned thirty years after these adventures had been concluded, confirms the rich arc of this storyline of role reversals.

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In little more than a century, Fiji islanders have made the transition from cannibalism to Christianity, from colony to flourishing self-government, without losing their own culture. As Ronald Wright observes, societies that do not eat people are fascinated by those that did, and often used this fact as an excuse to conquer, kill and enslave. Touring cities bustling with Indian merchants, quiet Fijian villages and taking part in communal ceremonies, he attributes the remarkable independence of Fiji to the fact that the indigenous social structure remains intact and eighty-three per cent of the land remains in local hands. Wright tells their story with wit and evident pleasure.

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This is the story of a village in East Anglia, astride its common stream, a saga of continuity and change which stretches back across a landscape of two thousand years. It took Rowland Parker thirteen years of detective work to piece this jigsaw together, combing his way through records of archaeological excavations and manor court rolls, and collecting stories at the pub alongside his scholarly inspection of old wills and land tax returns. The intense focus he brought to his work was amplified by his desire to tell the story of the common man, his feuds and fun, his farms, fights, fornications and families.

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The Pacific Ocean calls to mind a world of fabulous kingdoms and noble savages, guilt free sex and gin-clear lagoons, and a perfect idleness fed by lush fruits and fish-rich seas. Ever since Captain Cook first went to Tahiti in 1769 to observe the transit of Venus across the sun, this dream of the Pacific has not lost its force. But Julian Evans's journey through the island archipelagos of the Great Ocean was also informed by a quest into our more modern myths - such as Peacekeeper missiles and nuclear bombs being tested by the US Army. With humour and vivid imagery, honesty and a wickedly sardonic wit, Evans uncovers the reality of these two Pacific dreams: a brave new ocean where the islanders have money and booze, military coups and cold-war politics, atomic explosions and rising sea levels, but where, in the remotest atolls, beyond all our modernity and rationality, the old dream of islands continues to assert itself.

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Presents a portrait of the Greece the author came to know through a lifetime of exploration. This work is a fusion of experience, a gift of insight from one philhellene to all those who have come to love Greece.

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During the war, Gerald Hanley spent several years in the remote and scorching deserts of Somalia. The rigours of living in such heat, and the difficulties of attempting to control blood-feuding nomads, led to the suicide of seven fellow-officers. Despite these problems, Gerald Hanley writes with great affection for the local clans, an affection that is untainted by sentimentality. Of all the races of Africa, there cannot be one better to live among than the most difficult, the proudest, the bravest, the vainest, the most merciless, the friendliest: the Somalis.

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In "The Waiting Land" (first published in 1967) Dervla Murphy affectionately portrays the people of Nepal's different tribes, the customs of an ancient, complex civilization and the country's natural grandeur and beauty. This is the third of Dervla Murphy's early travel books: an exploration of Nepal by a feisty, generous-hearted young Irish woman. Yet it can also be seen as the completion of a trilogy of books concerned with her experience of self- sufficient mountain cultures, first tasted in crossing Persia and Afghanistan in "Full Tilt", and deepened with her experience of working with Tibetan refugees in the frontiers of Northern India, as told in "Tibetan Foothold". Having settled in a village in the Pokhara Valley to work at a Tibetan refugee camp, she makes her home in a tiny, vermin-infested room over a stall in the bazaar. In diary form, she describes her various journeys by air, by bicycle and on foot into the remote and mountainous Lantang region on the border of Tibet. Murphy's charm and sensitivity as a writer and traveller reveal not only the vitality of an age-old civilization facing the challenge of Westernisation, but the wonder and excitement of her own remarkable adventures.

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A masterpiece of local history, by the Queen of the genre; Gillian Tindall has acquired a devoted readership through her lovingly researched works, such as the prize-winning "The House" by the Thames and "Celestine: Voices from a French Village". A journey through time: from a scattering of cottages along a pre-roman horse track, to a medieval parish and staging post for travellers, onwards into a prosperous Tudor village favoured by gentlemen for their country seats and an 18th century resort of pleasure gardens eventually transformed by a warren of railway lines into a thickly populated working-class district. Fragments of this past can still be found by the observant eye. This is one of a precious handful of books (such as Montaillou and Akenfield) that in their precise examination of a particular locality open our understanding of the universal themes of the past. In this case it is Kentish Town in London that reveals its complex secrets to us, through the resurrection of its now buried rivers and wells, coaching house, landlords, traders, and simple tennants.

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"The Island That Dared" is a passionate book from the pen of Dervla Murphy, which begins with a three-generational family holiday in Cuba. Led by their redoubtable hard-walking grandmother, the trio of young girls and their mother soon find themselves camping out on empty beaches beneath the stars with only crabs and mosquitoes for company. This pure Swallows and Amazons experience confirms Dervla in her quest to understand the unique society that has been created by the Cuban Revolution. She returns again and again to explore the island, investigating the experience of modern Cuba with her particular, candid curiosity. Through her own research and through conversations with Fidelistas and their critics alike, "The Island That Dared" builds a complex picture of a people struggling to retain their identity in the face of insistent hostility, and to stand against the all-but-overwhelming fire-power of capitalism. Whatever the fate of Cuba, "The Island That Dared" beautifully fulfils the role of a great travel book, 'to catch the moment on the wing, and stop it in Time' - Colin Thubron.

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This is the patriot's song book, which includes such rollicking word-smiths as Hilaire Belloc, G K Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling and the lyrics of Gilbert and Sullivan. England, as every fan of Flanders and Swan will know, hasn't really got a national song. This collection more than fills the gap. Despite the worldwide spread of the English language in the wake of the Empire, the poets of England were always more interested in personal freedom than political conformity. Those rallying cries from the pens of Blake, Byron and Brook are as relevant as ever. Armed with the clarion calls of Milton and Shakespeare, "England" still calls upon us to do our duty: to cleanse our land of a media monoculture linked by a spreading cancer of motorways, hypermarkets and a rootless, heartless international capitalism that rots the spirit.

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Stuff Dublin into your coat pocket. The perfect companion for a visit to the Fair City, or indeed to any inn, bar or cafe in Ireland. Some of the greatest writers in the English language were born in Dublin and every corner of the city has links with the written word, made explicit in this far-ranging collection. From Oscar Wilde to Rudyard Kipling, from Jonathan Swift to WB Yeats and Samuel Beckett: the city of Dublin has enchanted and inspired some great poetry.

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Even before Islam, poetry was at the heart of Arabic culture. It spread and developed wherever the Arabic language came to be spoken, from Damascus to Fez, Baghdad to Cairo as well as in the Arabian heartland. This book takes us on a poetic journey through the Classical age of Arabic poetry, from about the year 600 AD to about 1000 AD. Poignant images of solitude, impossible love and the austere beauty of the desert pervade Arabic poetry from its beginnings, even when the poet lived in an urbane, courtly milieu. There are mystical poems, and blasphemous ones; war poems, political ones; satires, joke poems and overwrought if ingenious nature poems.

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London's poetry ranges from the up-beat rap of Benjamin Zephaniah to Wordsworth's dawn sigh over the beauty of Westminster Bridge, from half-charred lines of Anglo-Saxon to yesterday's lyrics retrieved from a pub floor. Like the city itself this collection is full of grief, irony and delight. It shares no unifying historical vision and offers no single perspective over this tidal valley of mud, gravel, power and gold. Instead the unblinking eyes of the poets, touched by God, madness and desire, create a potent and highly personal corrective to political history.

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Rimbaud was the original enfant terrible. A poetic genius, he destroyed all those who attempted to befriend him, most notoriously wrecking the marriage and sanity of the poet Verlaine. Having conquered the literary world of Paris, he abandoned France and in the dogdays of August 1880 he disembarked in Aden, on the coast of Yemen, a lean twenty-five-year-old Frenchman carrying only a brown suitcase fastened with four leather straps and a touch of fever. The subsequent period, the lost years , is the subject of this biographical quest.

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Smelling the Breezes is an inspiring adventure, that throws down a gauntlet about what can be achieved in a family holiday. Rather than give a leaving party, Ralph and Molly Izzard had their own plans about how to say goodbye to their home in the Middle East. They would walk the three-hundred mile spine of the Lebanese mountains, camping where ever they stopped with their four children, two donkeys and Elias (their gardener-nursemaid-friend) as their sole travelling companions.

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Spellbound by his grandmother s Anglo Indian heritage and the exuberant annual visits of her friend the Begum, Isambard Wilkinson became enthralled by Pakistan as an intrepid teenager, eventually working there as a foreign correspondent during the War on Terror. Seeking the land behind the headlines, Bard sets out to discover the essence of a country convulsed by Islamist violence. What of the old, mystical Pakistan has survived and what has been destroyed? His is a funny, hashish? and whisky?scented travel book from the frontline, full of open?hearted delight and a poignant lust for life.

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The Purple Land is a romantic novel set in the war torn borderlands of Uruguay, the Banda Oriental. The story of Richard Lamb, an idealistic young Englishman, it begins with his abduction of Paquita and their escape from the vengeance of her Argentine father. Finding refuge in Montevideo, he is catapulted into a series of picaresque adventures: horse-stealing, duelling, escaping prison, and fighting on the losing side of a civil war, all the while falling constantly and unsuitably in love. Rooted in Hudson s evocation of the simplicity and dignity of life on the pampas as well as his masterful depiction of its wildlife and landscape, The Purple Land is the first modern `road novel . It is also a narrative of transformation, the Creolisation of an Englishman, redeemed by the heightened exuberance, energy, warmth and innate humanity of South America.

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The narrator arrives in his 117th rented room at the end of an epic journey, abandoned by his lover, almost broke and certainly feverish. His obsession with the insects he shares the room with and his beautifully articulated observations of himself on the edge of a physical and mental collapse extend out to include the insect-like habitues of the local cafe - the charlatans, the indolent landowners and even a levitating priest who has been dead for six years. This razor-sharp chronicle of experience, which grew out of Bouvier's seven-month stay on the island of Ceylon, shows that if you travel, you must be prepared to discover not only delights but also the worst as well.

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Istanbul, capital of two great empires, confluence of Asia and Europe, has called forth poetry throughout her long history, from paupers and sultans, natives and visitors alike.

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A useful companion for those travelling to Sicily, this work is part of a series that is a collection of writing, aiming to invest the traveller with a cultural and historical background to Sicily.

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Mexico, through the eyes of Sybille Bedford is a country of passion and paradox: arid desert and shrieking jungle, harsh sun and deep shadow, violence and sentimentality. In her frank descriptions of the horrors of travel - through bug-infested jungle, trapped in a broiling stationary train, or in a bus with a dead fish slapping against her face - she gains our trust. But it is the charmed world of Don Otavio which steals our imagination. He is, she says, one of the kindest men I ever met. She stays in his crumbling ancestral mansion, living a life of provincial ease and observing with glee the intense life of a Mexican neighbourhood.

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Out of a lifetime of travelling, Martha Gellhorn has selected her best horror journeys. She bumps through rain-sodden, war-torn China to meet Chiang Kai-Shek, floats listlessly in search of u-boats in the wartime Caribbean and visits a dissident writer in the Soviet Union against her better judgement. Written with the eye of a novelist and an ironic black humour, what makes these tales irresistible are Gellhorn's explosive and often surprising reactions. Indignant, but never righteous and not always right, through the crucible of hell on earth emerges a woman who makes you laugh with her at life, while thanking God that you are not with her.

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a simple blueprint for Utopia - the best travel book on Burma since World War II - despite travelling at a time of massive internal insecurity, Norman Lewis still found the eternal Burma, where pagodas are the only punctuation on the horizon and strangers are treated with an overwhelming friendliness - an overnight best-seller when first published - revisits the tragic Burma road, treked by so many refugees fleeing Burma before the Japanese advance in 1942

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When the Japanese take Borneo in 1942, Agnes Keith is captured and imprisoned with her two-year-old son. Fed on minimal rations, forced to work through recurrent bouts of malaria and fighting with rats for scraps of food, Agnes Keith's spirit never completely dies. Keeping notes on scraps of paper which she hides in her son's home-made toys or buries in tins, she records a mother's pain at watching her child go hungry and her poignant pride in his development within these strange confines. She also describes her captors in all their complexity. Colonel Suga, the camp commander, is an intelligent, highly educated man, at times her adversary, at others a strange ally in a distorted world.

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"Voices of the Old Sea" is Lewis' masterly description of the Costa Brava on the cusp of tourist development in the 1950s, a place where men regulated their lives by the sardine shoals of spring and autumn and the tuna fishing of summer, and where women kept goats and gardens, arranged marriages and made ends meet.

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'Somewhere in the world there may be a noisier street than Acharnon Street; but I hope not.' 92 Acharnon Street is a loving portrait of Athens in all its dusty, dirty, trafficridden reality, complete with bars, prostitutes, corruption and imperious bureaucrats. This is a book about Greeks not just Greece, in all their rich and confusing humanity.

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The wittiest introduction to the life of a social anthropologist ever written. Studying in the Cameroons for his first experience of fieldwork, Barley discovers that the society of the Dowayo people refuses to conform to the rules of his new discipline. Although set amongst a little-known tribe in the Cameroons, this slim volume reaches out to a vast audience who would otherwise never look at a travel book about West Africa, let alone an anthropological field study. A seminal text for any student in search of a laugh. Witty, hilarious and unconventional, but also a remarkable intellectual achievement; Barley manages to turn the western science of anthropology on its head, so that for once the laugh is on the professional practitioners not the observed.

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"Libyan Sands" is unmistakably the work of an Englishman, a modest, machine- and desert-loving young officer whose passionate amateur enthusiasm led to the exploration of the Egyptian western desert and the Libyan Sahara on the eve of the second world war.

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'Jonathan Raban is one of the world's greatest living travel writers.' William Dalrymple 'The best book of travel ever written by an Englishman about the United States' Jan Morris, IndependentNavigating the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to New Orleans, Raban opens himself to experience the river in all her turbulent and unpredictable old glory. Going wherever the current takes him, he joins a coon-hunt in Savana, falls for a girl in St Louis, worships with black Baptists in Memphis, hangs out with the housewives of Pemiscot and the hog-king of Dubuque. Through tears of laughter, we are led into the heartland of America – with its hunger and hospitality, its inventive energy and its charming lethargy – and come to know something of its soul. The journey is as much the story of Raban as it is of the Mississippi. Navigating the dangerous, ever-changing waters in an unsuitably fragile aluminium skiff, he immerses himself with an irresistible emotional intensity as he tries to give shape to the river and the story – finding himself by turns vulnerable, curious, angry and, like all of us, sometimes foolishly in love.

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Henrietta is a true original. Clever, vivacious and interested in everything, she managed to balance the demands of high profile public life with that of a caring mother. She was the home-schooled daughter of a bankrupt Earl and more than just a little bit in love with her handsome wayward brother, but had been married off to a plump pudding of a man, the nabob Edward Clive, governor of Madras. And her partial escape was to ride across southern India (in a vast tented caravan propelled by dozens of elephants, camels and a hundred bullock carts) and write home. For centuries this account, the first joyful description of India by a British woman, remained unread in a Welsh castle. Fortunately it was transcribed by a Texan traveller, who went on to splice this already evocative memoir with complementary sections from the diary of Henrietta's precocious daughter, the 12-year old Charly and images of their artist companion, Anna Tonelli. The resulting labour of love and scholarship is Birds of Passage, a unique trifocular account of three very different women travelling across southern India in the late 18th century, in the immediate aftermath of the last of the Mysore Wars between Tipoo Sahib and the Raj. Half a generation later, the well travelled Charly would be chosen as tutor for the young princess Victoria, the First Empress of India.

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This intensely remembered, partly autobiographical novel, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989, describes the childhood of Billi, a girl growing up in Europe between the wars. When her father dies, she swaps life in a run-down German château for an exhilarating existence with her beautiful, talented and unreliable mother on the French Riviera. Sent away to England for schooling, the gypsy-like Billi ricochets between short-lived tutors and a life of reading, friends and public lectures. Returning to the Mediterranean, her unorthodox education intellectual, emotional and sexual continues among the vibrant community of artists, exiles and intellectuals who have colonised the coast, coaxing her towards a life of literature.

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the best book on the Mafia in Sicily - its origins, its code of honour, its secrecy and its brutality. A chilling insight. - reveals how Mafia violence and corruption crept even into every aspect of Sicilian society, including the police and the church - and how this was only possible with the help of the American army, who gave the Mafia, by then all but destroyed by the Fascist government, the kiss of life when they occupied the island in 1943 - the perfect companion for any traveller to Sicily, and a gripping armchair read

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a poignant description of Cambodia, Laos & Vietnam in 1950, with all their beauty, gentleness, grandeur and intricate political balance intact - Restores this lost world, like a phoenix, from the ashes of the Vietnam war and its aftermath - shows the Vietnamese guerilla movement in its infancy, ranged against the French colonial powers, and the early affects of imported Western materialism - a best-seller when first published, and venerated by all the Saigon-based war correspondents in the '70s - inspired Graham Greene to go to Vietnam and write The Quiet American

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Richard Burton's life offers dazzling riches. He was one of the greatest Victorian explorers, an innovative translator and brilliant linguist, a prolific travel writer, a pioneer in the fields of anthropology and sexual psychology, a mesmeric lover, a spy and a publisher of erotica. Fawn Brodie has created a vivid portrait of this remarkable man, who emerges from the richly textured fabric of his time. His travels to Mecca and Medina dressed as a Muslim pilgrim, his witnessing of the human sacrifices at Dahomey and his unlikely but loving partnership with his pious Catholic bride are all treated with warmth, scholarship and understanding.

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Dark Journey is the disturbing, fast-paced story of a young Turkish woman's descent towards moral annihilation - one part The Thousand and One Nights, two parts Maupassant. Thirty years after Irfan Orga, author of the cult memoir Portrait of a Turkish Family, died, his son opened an old attache case and found a coffee-stained typescript tied up with string. This is Dark Journey, a suffocating, Oedipal drama set against the backdrop of the nascent Turkish Republic.

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In 1966 Dervla Murphy travelled the length and breadth of Ethopia, first on a mule, Jock, whom she named after her publisher, and later on a recalcitrant donkey. The remarkable achievement was not surviving three armed robberies or the thousand-mile trail, but the gradual growth of affection for and understanding of another race.

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Whether you're a backpacker from Idaho on your first visit, or a cultural swallow on an annual migration to Paris, this pocket book will intoxicate and inspire, goad and guide. Unlike the grand city of public architecture and political achievement, the poetic tradition of Paris is personal, irreverent, sexy and invigorating. This collection delights in the company of such swashbuckling gallows-fodder as Francois Villon, and chuckles at the audacity of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, the perpetual rebels. What it proves is that in Paris, creativity is always political - whether it's Rimbaud reacting to the events of 1871, the Surrealists to the horrors of First World War trenches, or the generation of '68 to the excesses of Algeria and the complicities of Vichy. It's also fitting inspiration for taking a day off from monuments and making your own magic revolution from your bed.

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There are few landscapes in the western world more bewitching than the mountain glens of the Scottish Highlands and the scattered islands of the Hebrides. From its bleak mountains to its flower-filled meadows, from savage sea-cliffs to pure white beaches, it has inspired an equally varied oral heritage. There are the works of gentle scholar saints, epic tales of murderous clan rivalry, Norse legends of monsters and unsubdued spirits and the romantic tale of how an exiled prince came back to rescue his land and crown, though his defeat brought ruin to this ancient culture. More recently, it is the landscape and its animal inhabitants that have inspired some of the greatest of the poems captured here by Mary Miers, whose feel for the spirit of the Highlands and islands is unerring. She combines the sensibility of a native from the island of South Uist with the eye of a travelling scholar of architecture. Small books that open our vast landscapes of the mind.

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In 1986, Charles Nicholl travels through Thailand to learn about the spiritual traditions of forest Buddhism in the north of the country. But interesting things have a habit of getting in the way. When Nicholl meets Harry, an old French Indochina hand, on the night train north with his tales of Kachin jade and Shan opium it leads to a journey along the banks of the Mekong, into the Golden Triangle and then across the border into Burma, in the company of the book s Thai heroine, Kitai.

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