Search results for ""Author Elizabeth Gowing""

Kosovo: the name conjures up blood: ethnic cleansing and war. This book reveals another side to the newest country in the world a land of generous families, strong tastes and lush landscapes: a land of honey. Elizabeth Gowing is rushed to Kosovo, on a blind date with the place , when her partner is suddenly offered the position of adviser to Prime Minister Agim Ceku. Knowing nothing of the language or politics, she is thrown into a world of unpronounceable nouns, unfamiliar foods and bewilderingly hospitable people. On her first birthday in Kosovo she is given a beehive as a gift, and starts on a beekeeping apprenticeship with an unknown family; through their friendship and history she begins to understand her new home. Her apprenticeship leads her to other beekeepers too: retired guerrilla fighters, victims of human trafficking, political activists, a women's beekeeping group who teach her how to dance, and the Prime Minister himself. She dons a beekeeper's veil, sees the bees safely through winter, manages to use a smoker, learns about wicker skeps, gets stung, harvests her honey and drizzles it over everything. In between, she starts working at Pristina s forgotten Ethnological Museum, runs a project in a restored stone house below the Accursed Mountains and falls in love with a country she had known only as a war. Travels in Blood and Honey charts the author s journeys through Kosovo's countryside and its urban sprawl, its Serbs and Albanians, its history and heartache, its etymology and entomology, its sweet and its unsavoury. Describing new ways of living, and many new ways of cooking, the book contains traditional recipes, and the flavours of Turkish coffee, chestnut honey, and the iconic food called fli. It is a celebration of travel, adventure and the new tastes you can acquire far from home.

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Elizabeth Gowing is not a likely yogini. She is too fond of cake and To-do lists, and sometimes falls over on her mat. But yoga has taken her on journeys both inside and out and now she follows yoga around Britain - from the village hall where a quivering triangle pose was interrupted by the council recycling collection to a sound gong bath in the country's noisiest city, from Cornwall to Scotland. She discovers prisoners finding solace in child's pose; children finding expression in dancer pose, and dancers sitting bendily in cobbler's pose. Her feet start to hurt and she realizes that yoga is a current of shared experience that runs quietly through British society, through Middle England to the nation's extremes from Newcastle to Nottingham, East Anglia to West Kilbride, she untangles the Ashtanga from the Kundalini, the Sanskrit from the whimsical new-age, and finds the ways that yoga is rebuilding communities and lives - and her own wobbling body. Sometimes funny, sometimes touching, Gowing evokes the characters and communities she meets along a fascinating journey in a celebration of ancient wisdom solving modern-day problems and the exultation of finally mastering the Crow.

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