On 21 February 1968, Wally Herbert & his team of three companions & forty huskies set out from Point Barrow, Alaska, embarking on a journey that no one had ever attempted. Sixteen hard months later they finally set foot once more on solid l&, having attained the North Pole & crossed the frozen Arctic Ocean for the first time via its longest axis. It stands today as one of the greatest expeditions of all time. Illustrated with unpublished photographs & other personal materials from the Herbert archive, this exceptional photography book is a first-hand record of an astonishing journey one that with rising temperatures & Arctic ice melt will probably never be repeated. An impressive team of explorers & polar experts, including Wally Herberts daughter Kari, also provide their reflections & tributes to the expedition & to Wally Herbert, contributing to a remarkable visual & personal testimony of this historic event. ...

The route from Port Augusta in South Australia, along the coast of the Great Australian Bight including the Eyre Peninsula & the Nullabor National Park, to Esperance in Western Australia, described by Moon Adventure Publication in a spiral-bound guide slightly larger than A5, illustrated with numerous maps. An introductory section to the area, covering its history & fauna/flora, is followed by advice on planning & preparation. The route is described in sections, each accompanied by a map of the area showing the road network with symbols indicating local facilities. Descriptions of places along the route include useful website addresses and/or contact details for 4WD tours, fishing & camping stores, recreational sites/providers, accommodation in remote places, etc. The guide also provides GPS coordinates for important road junctions & various other locations. Also included is a chapter on the Trans-Australian railway line from Pimba & Woomera to Kalgoorlie. ...

Olivia lives with her mum & her grandparents. She has a relatively normal modern family. The opening of a new Army cadets unit causes turmoil both at home & at school. Olivia wants to join, a decision her ex-army grandfather supports, but her pacifist mother is ardently opposed. Her best friend Aiden also disagrees with her decision causing tension in their friendship. When her mum is imprisoned for leading a pacifist protest, Olivia is forced to spend time with her dad who lives on Lindesfarne. The island feels far away & detached from the mainl&, almost magical. & even William, a young boy she meets there seems different... Is her mum ever going to be released? & what will Olivia do with her Future? ...

Across the Empty Quarter charts Thesiger's amazing journey across the inhospitable, vitually untouched Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia. Restless & gripped by an overwhelming wish to make a name for himself in a world ever more hemmed in by progress & 'civilization', Thesiger (1910-2003) embarked on his amazing journeys across the Empty Quarter to test himself & to show what could still be done. The result was a monument both to his resilience & to the Bedu who guided him & who emerge as the book's real heroes. This extract is taken from Thesiger's Arabian Sands About this series: Penguin's Great Journeys series presents extracts from some of the most important classic travelogues in a compact paperback format. The series allows readers to travel both around the planet & back through the centuries
- but also back into ideas & worlds frightening, ruthless & cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things: Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent & implacable jungles, deserts & mountains, multitudes of birds & flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends & stories were treated as facts & in which so much was still to be discovered.
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Turkey lies at the crossroads of history. Since the beginning of civilisation, Anatolia has been crossed & re-crossed by waves of ancient people: the Hittites, the ancient Persian Empire & the mighty Ottoman Empire that spread as far as Budapest, Baghdad, Cairo & Arabia, have created a country as varied as it is possible to find in the world. With a climate & landscape as diverse as its past, Turkey has provided an alluring & yet sometimes challenging destination for westerners throughout the ages. This, & the hospitality of its people has ensured that countless visitors, from classical times to the present, have fallen under the spell of Turkey. ” Across the Hellespont” describes in lively detail the remarkable literature which Turkey has inspired for two millennia. At a time when Turkey`s position on the fringe may be set to change to a deeper involvement in Europe, the need for Europeans to understand the country is even more compelling. The range of travel writing represented in this book shows how, while political circumstances may change, the lure of Turkey remains constant. ...

An introduction to the nautical history of the North Atlantic. For centuries the Atlantic hemmed Europe behind its storms & mysterious breadth. This was the ocean sea that extended to nowhere, or to the end of the world. Although there were legends of crossings by Celtic saints & Norse ocean farers, it took the vision of an Italian & the finance of a Spanish queen to shatter the shackles of superstition. Columbus was the catalyst who opened the door to the modern world. ” Across the Pond” tells of the changing use of this ocean, from a barrier to a route to riches & a highway for trade. There are episodes of exploration & exploitation, there are fighting ships & fisheries, treasure & timber, & always the danger of the sea. There also slipped the slavers with their cargo of shame. This is an ocean that bred some of the world`s hardiest mariners, famous men such as Cabot & Hudson & Vespucci, but also the nameless thousands who manned ships, the hard-used mariners from the Chesapeake, the Solway & Seville. Here was bred the down east Yankee, the Nova Scotian bluenose & the Scouser from Liverpool. ...

Americans have long been fascinated with the oddness of the British but we, says literary critic Terry Eagleton, find our transatlantic neighbours just as strange. Only an alien race would admiringly refer to a colleague as ”aggressive”, use superlatives to describe everything from one`s pet dog to one`s record collection or speak frequently of being ”empowered”. & why must they remain so irritatingly optimistic, even when all signs point to failure? On his quirky journey through the language, geography & national character of the United States, Eagleton proves to be an informal & utterly idiosyncratic guide. He answers the questions we (being British) dare not ask, like why Americans willingly rise at the crack of dawn, even on Sundays or why they publicly chastise cigarette smokers as if they`re all spokespeople for the surgeon general. In this pithy, warm-hearted & very funny book, Eagleton melds a good old-fashioned roast with genuine admiration for his neighbours ”across the pond”. ...

Across the Ravaged Land is the third & final volume in Nick Brandt`s trilogy of books documenting the disappearing natural world & animals of East Africa. The book`s title, combined with the titles of Brandt`s first two books, captures the change he has witnessed: ” On this Earth, a shadow falls across the ravaged l&.” The book offers a darker vision of the world that Brandt has been photographing for the last decade, a world still filled with a stunning beauty, but now tragically tainted & fast disappearing at the hands of man. In addition to a range of new, starkly powerful portraits of animals; elephants, lions, leopards, hyenas, that appear to be posing especially for the photographer as if in a studio, Brandt introduces some new themes. For the first time, humans make an appearance in his photographs. On the jacket, a crouched ranger supports the weight of two giant tusks of an elephant killed by poachers. One new series of photographs has hunters` trophies placed back in the epic landscapes where once these creatures roamed. Another features perfectly preserved animals calcified by the salts of a Rift Valley soda lake. In both instances, the subjects appear strangely alive & sentient in death. Brandt also contributes two essays summing up his photographic odyssey, which has taken more than a decade of intensive work to complete. One details his work from the perspective of conservation, giving a broad overview of the wave of destruction of wildlife & habitat across Africa & describing the work his Big Life Foundation is doing to preserve the Amboseli ecosystem of Kenya & Tanzania. The other discusses technical aspects of his project. ...

The War is just over. In Venice, a city elaborately & affectionately described, the American Colonel, Richard Cantrell, falls passionately in love with Renata, a young Italian countess who has `a profile that could break your or anyone else`s heart`. Cantrell is embittered, war-scarred & old enough to be Renata`s father, but he is overwhelmed by the selflessness & freshness of the love she is offering. But this is no fairy tale. The fighting may be ended, but the wounds of war have not yet healed. & for some, the longed-for peace has come too late. A lesser known classic by one of the great American writers of the twentieth century, Across the River & Into The Trees is still vintage Hemingway. ...

Richard Cantrell is an American colonel living in Venice just after the Second World War. The fighting has left him scarred & embittered, a middle-aged man with a heart condition. It seems that only the love of Renata, a nineteen-year-old countess can save him. But Cantrell is living in the shadow of war, every move he makes dictated by old battle instincts, & it is possible that for him the longed-for peace may have come too late. ...