On a wintery night in February 1989, 22 year-old Deborah Copaken Kogan entered Afganistan as the only female in a group of Afghan freedom fighters. She had come to photograph the Soviet pull-out. This is a memoir of a young woman finding & fighting her way through the war zones of the world. Told with humour, it tells how one woman fought her way onto battlefields, & the danger, pain, truths & love she discovered there. ...

A re-envisaging of Shakespeare`s The Merchant of Venice, from the Man Booker Prize-winner & our great chronicler of Jewish life. ` Who is this guy, Dad? What is he doing here?` With an absent wife & a daughter going off the rails, wealthy art collector & philanthropist Simon Strulovitch is in need of someone to talk to. So when he meets Shylock at a cemetery in Cheshire`s Golden Triangle, he invites him back to his house. It`s the beginning of a remarkable friendship. ...

It is winner of the Booker Prize. ” The funniest British novelist since Kingsley Amis or Tom Sharpe.” (Mail on Sunday). As Seen on BBC Imagine. ` Who is this guy, Dad? What is he doing here?` With an absent wife & a daughter going off the rails, wealthy art collector & philanthropist Simon Strulovitch is in need of someone to talk to. So when he meets Shylock at a cemetery in Cheshire`s Golden Triangle, he invites him back to his house. It`s the beginning of a remarkable friendship. Elsewhere in the Golden Triangle, the rich, manipulative Plurabelle (aka Anna Livia Plurabelle Cleopatra A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever Christine) is the face of her own TV series, existing in a bubble of plastic surgery & lavish parties. She shares prejudices & a barbed sense of humour with her loyal friend D` Anton, whose attempts to play Cupid involve Strulovitch`s daughter
- & put a pound of flesh on the line. Howard Jacobson`s version of The Merchant of Venice bends time to its own advantage as it asks what it means to be a father, a Jew & a merciful human being in the modern world. ” Jacobson is quite simply a master of comic precision. He writes like a dream.” (Evening Standard).
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Shymkent (Chimkent) region at 1:500, 000 in a series of detailed, contoured maps of the mountains of Central Asia derived from the Soviet era topographic survey but with transliterated place names & an English language map legend. Maps in this series provide coverage of the Tien Shan & Pamir Mountains, with the whole of Kyrgyzstan, northern Tajikistan, plus the adjoining regions of Uzbekistan (including Tashkent & Samarkand), southern Kazakhstan (with Almaty) & the Sinkiang Province of China. The maps have contours at 100m intervals, enhanced by altitude colouring & relief shading, with plenty of spot heights & names of various mountain chains, peaks, valleys, etc. Additional colouring and/or graphics indicate glaciers, cliffs, rock boulders, sands, ridges & dunes, mud & salt flats, different types of vegetation, etc. The maps show all the information expected of topographic mapping at this scale, including detailed presentation of local roads & tracks, railways, aerodromes, isolated settlements, national & internal administrative borders, etc. Latitude & longitude grid is drawn at 20’ & 30’ respectively. Map legend is in English. The series was prepared in mid-2000s when all the place names have been transliterated from the original Russian mapping & given, where possible, modern local names for larger towns. Each map provides a guide to the transliteration, as well as English & German glossary for the abbreviations. To see the list of titles in this series please click on the series link. ...

About the series: Maps designed specifically for the trekker, presenting the topography by line drawings of mountain ridges, with main peaks & passes shown with their height above sea level. The maps also show rivers & settlements & clearly indicate trekking routes. On the reverse are descriptions of suggested routes & other information about the area. ...

Historical maps are much more than geographical records. Often they provide insights into a country's politics, trade & war. In 1996, 17 large, h&-drawn & handcoloured maps were discovered in the Princess Abhantri Paja Mansion in the Grand Palace, Bangkok. This magnificent collection is today in the care of HRH Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn. Now, for the first time, Her Royal Highness has graciously allowed five of these precious maps to go on show at the Jim Thompson House, Center for Arts. Together with 80 other related items, the exhibition Siam in Trade & War Royal Maps of the Nineteenth Century gives a fascinating picture of Siamese history & geopolitics during the first three reigns of the Chakri dynasty. ...

Legendary Scottish photographer & travel writer John Thomson (1837-1921) set off for the East in 1862 & over the next ten years undertook numerous journeys to various countries including Siam, Cambodia & China, becoming the first person to photograph Angkor Wat, Cambodia. The photographs from these journeys form one of the most extensive records of any region taken in the 19th century. The range, depth & aesthetic quality of John Thomsons photographic vision mark him out as one of the most important travel photographers. At that time cameras were large & heavy. The photographic images were exposed onto a glass negative & this had to be done in complete darkness, on location, in a portable darkroom tent. Thomson travelled with a large number of cumbersome crates, glass negatives & highly flammable & poisonous chemicals. Given that his journeys took him through difficult terrain & insect-infested jungles, sometimes to regions where a white man had not been seen before, it is all the more remarkable that Thomson was able to make photographs of such beauty & sensitivity. During an era when his contemporaries took portraits in which their subjects looking stilted & wooden, Thomson managed to capture the individuality & humanity of the diverse people of Asia, whether royalty or street vendor. In Siam, Thomson was able to photograph King Mongkut (Rama IV), his royal family & entourage. In Cambodia, Thomson was the first photographer to visit Angkor, to record what is now, one of the most important sites of ancient architecture in the world. These photographs form a unique archive of images documenting 19th century Asian landscapes, architecture, people & customs. The collection of over 600 glass plates traveled back with Thomson to Britain in 1872 & since 1921 has been housed & expertly preserved at the Wellcome Library, London. The 150-year-old glass negatives are in excellent condition allowing the exhibition to showcase very large prints, some life-size. Altogether 43 photographs taken in Siam, six taken in Angkor & 15 from Southern China are displayed in this ground-breaking exhibition. ...

Siberia in the Landscapes of the Imagination guide series; providing an in-depth cultural & account of some of the world’s most memorable & evocative landscapes. Presented as a cultural & literary guide, each title in the series explores the cultural history of a landscape, providing an overview of the area’s development from its earliest roots to the modern day. Particular emphasis is placed on the literary, poetic, architectural, cultural & historical elements that make up the landscape & each title is written & researched by an academic expert. An Epilogue offers suggestion for further reading & indices of literary, artistic & historical names & places & landmarks. ...

Siberia on a double-sided, indexed map at 1:3, 600, 000 from ITMB with coverage extending from Omsk, Nefteyugansk & Vorkuta in the west to the Sakhalin Isl&. All place names are in the Latin alphabet. Topography is presented by altitude colouring with bands in feet. The map shows the region’s road & rail networks, also indicating locations with airports & landing grounds, & symbols highlight various places of interest. Each side has a separate index. Latitude & longitude are shown by very faint lines at 5º intervals PLEASE NOTE: the course of the Trans-Siberian Railway east of Omsk is clearly marked, but coverage of the map in the south-east stops about halfway between Khabarovsk & Vladivostok. Vladivostok itself, as well as Kamchatka & the easternmost part of Chukotka are also not included. ...

Larger in area than the United States & Europe combined, Siberia is a land of extremes, not merely in terms of climate & expanse, but in the many kinds of lives its population has led over the course of four centuries. Janet M. Hartley explores the history of this vast Russian wastel&--whose very name is a common euphemism for remote bleakness & exile--through the lives of the people who settled there, either willingly, desperately, or as prisoners condemned to exile or forced labor in mines or the gulag. From the Cossack adventurers` first incursions into ” Sibir” in the late sixteenth century to the exiled criminals & political prisoners of the Soviet era to present-day impoverished Russians & entrepreneurs seeking opportunities in the oil-rich north, Hartley`s comprehensive history offers a vibrant, profoundly human account of Siberia`s development. One of the world`s most inhospitable regions is humanized through personal narratives & colorful case studies as ordinary--and extraordinary--everyday life in ”the nothingness” is presented in rich & fascinating detail. ...