For two years Monica Connell lived as a paying guest of Kalchu & Chola in the Nepalese Himalayan village of Talphi, ten days walk from the nearest road. This book poetically captures the immediacy of Connell`s experience, & her empathy & sense of wonder at the dramas of village life
- a boar hunt in winter, the wedding of a young neighbour & the magic of the full-moon festival when the gods descend to dance amongst the villagers.
...

In this no-holds-barred account, the former head of the United Nations in Sudan reveals for the first time the shocking depths of evil plumbed by those who designed & orchestrated `the final solution` in Darfur. A veteran of humanitarian crisis & ethnic cleansing in Iraq, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Afghanistan & Sierra Leone, Dr Mukesh Kapila arrived in Sudan in March 2003 having made a promise to himself that if he were ever in a position to stop the mass-killers, they would never triumph on his watch. Against a Tide of Evil is a strident & passionate cri de coeur. It is the deeply personal account of one man driven to extreme action by the unwillingness of those in power to stop mass murder. It explores what empowers a man like Mukesh Kapila to stand up & be counted, & to act alone in the face of global indifference & venality. Kapila`s story reads like a knife-edge international thriller as he risks all to use the powers at his disposal to bring to justice those responsible for the first mass murder of the twenty-first century: the Darfur genocide. ...

` Conservation in the 21st century needs to be different & this book is a good indicator of why`
- ” Bulletin of British Ecological
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` One of our best-known living philosophers` Guardian How do we respond to the refugee crisis
- by opening our doors, or pulling
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Today, hundreds of thousands of people, desperate to escape war, violence & poverty, are crossing the Mediterranean to seek refuge in Europe. Our response from our protected European standpoint, argues Slavoj Zizek, offers two versions of ideological blackmail: either we open our doors as widely as possible; or we try to pull up the drawbridge. Both solutions are bad, states Zizek. They merely prolong the problem, rather than tackling it. The refugee crisis also presents an opportunity, a unique chance for Europe to redefine itself: but, if we are to do so, we have to start raising unpleasant & difficult questions. We must also acknowledge that large migrations are our future: only then can we commit to a carefully prepared process of change, one founded not on a community that see the excluded as a threat, but one that takes as its basis the shared substance of our social being. The only way, in other words, to get to the heart of one of the greatest issues confronting Europe today is to insist on the global solidarity of the exploited & oppressed. Maybe such solidarity is a utopia. But, warns Zizek, if we don`t engage in it, then we are really lost. And we will deserve to be lost. ...

Dee Caffari became the first woman to sail solo round the world against the prevailing winds & currents. Her story is an adventure in the true sense of the word. It is about physical hardship in terrible conditions, overcoming sleep deprivation, 34 days of gales, 12 metre waves & cyclones. It is also about a woman who stepped outside her safe zone & dared to dream. Her courage resulted in a place in the history books alongside a handful of men, having achieved something truly extraordinary. More people have walked on the moon than have successfully completed a westabout circumnavigation, & in this inspirational book Dee shares the story of her journey from beginner to record breaker. A new chapter for this paperback edition recounts Dee`s experiences since her Record & her preparations for the Vendee Globe Race. ...

' You have to be on your guard when you go back to special places. You may be able to locate them easily enough on the map, but maps tell only one story. Times change & places & people with them. The memory plays curious tricks, & things aren't always as you remember or expect'. Twenty years ago, Tom Fort drove his little red car onto the ferry at Felixstowe, bound for all points east. Eastern Europe was still a faraway place, just emerging from its half-century of waking nightmare, blinking, injured, full of fears but importantly full of hope too. Things were different then. Czechoslovakia was still Czechoslovakia, Russia was the USSR & the Warsaw Pact had not formally dissolved. But what did exist then, as they do now, were the rivers: the nations' lifeblood. It was along & by these rivers that Fort travelled around Eastern Europe meeting its people & immersing himself in its culture. Since that trip though, much has changed & in more recent years around one million Poles have settled in Britain. Fort's local paper has a Polish edition, his supermarket has a full range of Polish bread, sausage & beer & an influx of Polish businesses opened in his town centre. And it's not just the Poles, his gym has a Lithuanian trainer & the woman who cuts his hair is from Hungary. As a tide of people began to leave Eastern Europe & settle in the UK, Tom Fort started to wonder about what they were leaving behind & whether the friends he had made all those years ago remained. & so he decided to make the journey again, travelling against the flow of the steady human stream to explore the once familiar places. As he did so, many began to return as the recession took hold of Western Europe. Tom was keen to find out what had changed & how the places, people & way of life had moved on & of course fit in a spot of fishing along the way. ...

Written by the author of Thirty Miles: A Local Journey in Food, this book presents an intriguing adventure that strikes at the heart of the cuisine along the Mekong River. It tells how the beating heart of a cobra snake contrasts with the remarkable everyday cuisine of Cambodia. ...

Translated from the Arabic, intifada means the shivering caused by fever. In political terms it means an explosion. The Palestinian uprising erupted in the Gaza strip in December 1987 after 20 years of Israeli military occupation. It quickly spread to the West Bank & Jerusalem. What the world saw of the intifada were the photographs of Israeli soldiers breaking Palstinians' bones, Palestinians hurling Molotov cocktails at Jewish housewives or rocks at soldiers. The author writes about the real life behind those photographs. She travelled throughout the West Bank & the Gaza Strip interviewing both Jews & Palestinians in an attempt to document their lives. She watched the intifada flourish & then wane, Middle East peace talks come & go, & more frightening, the lengths to which people of both sides are driven when they become desperate. Weaving together accounts of weeks spent with armed militant factions of the PLO, the memories of a Holocaust survivor who defended the Palestinians in military courts for 25 years, the faded dreams of the Israeli Left & the emotional impact of occupation on the children, the author builds a complex picture of the new Sparta of the Middle East. Part reportage, part travel book, this is a personal account of the stories of people trapped by history & geography. ...

Simon Yates is the man who cut the rope in Joe Simpson`s award-winning account of their struggle for survival in ” Touching the Void”. In this book, Yates recounts how he & three companions climbed the world`s largest vertical rock-face, in the Chilean Andes. ...