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. ...

For just over a hundred years there was a regular passenger liner service across the Pacific connecting Australia & New Zealand with North America, the main terminal ports being San Francisco & Vancouver. This book describes the rather chaotic development of these services into a reliable & successful trade that flourished into the 1970s before the advent of the jumbo-jet led to a rather rapid decline & eventual termination of the trans-Pacific passenger liner. With his usual meticulous research, Peter Plowman describes the liners that traversed the Pacific & companies that owned & managed them. The main North American ports were San Francisco, Los Angeles & Vancouver. The Pacific Mail Steamship Company was the first to instigate regular operations, the route was then taken over by the Oceanic Steamship Company. This in turn became the Matson Line with its famous liners the Mariposa & the Monterey. The Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand used the Tahiti & Maunganui. Details of the liners are given, their voyages, changes of name & ownership & their eventual fate. The various company mergers & associations are covered (such as that of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company & the Union Steamship Company of New Zealand). Some of the liners were requisitioned during World War I & II. The Aorangi for example, survived the war. Her sister ship, the Niagara was victim to a mine. ...

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. ...

In June 2003, Maud Fontenoy, a young woman & seasoned mariner, set out from Newfoundland in her 24-foot-long boat, Pilot, to row across the North Atlantic. Her goal: to prove that a woman could do the impossible. She knew how hazardous the trip would be, but the reality was far more harrowing than even she had imagined: violent storms & crashing 15-foot waves that capsized her sturdy but vulnerable craft not once but dozens of times; bouts of intense cold, hunger & sheer exhaustion from long days of rowing; near-freezing waters; circling sharks; &, huge freighters that suddenly emerged out of the thick fog, almost hitting her boat. Then there was her map, updated daily, that constantly reminded her how far she was from her goal. But her journey also had its share of wonders: breathtaking sunsets, the serenity of a star-studded night, her close encounters with dolphins & whales, & the overwhelming feeling of relief & accomplishment when at long last she reached the coast of Spain on October 7, 117 days after her departure. ...