At the centre of this extraordinary historical narrative are two linked themes: the grinding down of the aborigines during the long rivalries of the quest for El Dorado, the mythical kingdom of gold; &, two hundred years later, the man-made horror of the new slave colony. Naipaul shows how the alchemic delusion of El Dorado drew the small island of Trinidad into the vortex of world events, making it the object of Spanish & English colonial designs & a Mecca for treasure-seekers, slave-traders, & revolutionaries. & through an accumulation of casual, awful detail, he takes us as close as we can get to day-to-day life in the Caribbean slave plantations -- at the time thought to be more brutal than their American equivalents. In this brilliantly researched book, living characters large & small are rescued from the records & set in a larger, guiding narrative -- about the New World, empire, African slavery, revolution -- which is never less than gripping. ` History as literature, meticulously researched & masterfully written` New York Times Book Review `A formidable achievement... No historian has attempted to weave together in so subtle a manner the threads of the most complex & turbulent period of Caribbean history` Times Literary Supplement ` Brilliant... Startling` New Statesman `A remarkable book... Intelligent, humane, brilliantly written` Book World ...

The gripping first-hand narrative of the whaling ship disaster that inspired Melville`s ” Moby-Dick ”and informed Nathaniel Philbrick`s monumental history, ” In the Heart of the Sea.” In 1820, the Nantucket whaleship ” Essex” was rammed by an angry sperm whale thousands of miles from home in the South Pacific. The ” Essex ”sank, leaving twenty crew members drifting in three small open boats for ninety days. Through drastic measures, eight men survived to reveal this astonishing tale. ” The Narrative of the Wreck of the Whaleship Essex, ” by Owen Chase, has long been the essential account of the ” Essex”`s doomed voyage. But in 1980, a new account of the disaster was discovered, penned late in life by Thomas Nickerson, who had been the fifteen-year-old cabin boy of the ship. This discovery has vastly expanded & clarified the history of an event as grandiose in its time as the ” Titanic.” This edition presents Nickerson`s never-before-published chronicle alongside Chase`s version. Also included are the most important other contemporary accounts of the incident, Melville`s notes in his copy of the Chase narrative, & journal entries by Emerson & Thoreau. ...

In 1941 Richard Evans Schultes took a term's leave of absence from Harvard University & disappeared into the north west Amazon of Colombia. Twelve years later, he returned having gone places no outsider had ever been, mapping uncharted rivers & living among two dozen Indian tribes while collecting some thirty thousand botanical specimens, including two thousand novel medicinal plants & three hundred species new to science. The greatest Amazonian botanical explorer of the twentieth century, Schultes was not only a living link to the great naturalists of the Victorian age, but the world authority on toxic, medicinal & hallucinogenic plants. The Lost Amazon is the first major publication to examine Richard Evans Schultes's work through his photographs. Over the course of two decades, he took more than ten thousand images of plants, of landscapes, & of the indigenous peoples with whom he lived. Among his collection are images of teonanacatl, the sacred hallucinogenic mushrooms knows to the Aztecs as Flesh of the Gods, & whose identification sparked the psychdelic era. There are also photographs from the heart of the rain forest, a mantle of green that once stretched across the entire continent. Most importantly, there are portraits of many people never before photographed, lovingly & respectfully captured in moments of unguarded innocence that reflect his deep relationships with the native peoples. ...

When an explosion reverberates through the Swan Hotel in Shanghai, it is not just shards of glass & rubble that come crashing down. Li Jing & Zhou Meiling find their once-happy marriage rocked to its foundations. For Li Jing, his head pierced by a shard of falling glass, awakens from brain surgery only able to utter the faltering phrases of the English he learnt as a child
- a language that Meiling & their young song Pang Pang cannot speak. When an American neurologist arrives, tasked with teaching Li Jing to speak fluently again, she is as disorientated as her patient in this bewitching, bewildering city. As doctor & patient grow closer, feelings neither of them anticipated begin to take hold. Feelings that Meiling, who must fight to keep both her husband`s business & her family afloat, does not need a translator to underst&.
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Long before GPS, Google Earth, & global transit, humans traveled vast distances using only environmental clues & simple instruments. John Huth asks what is lost when modern technology substitutes for our innate capacity to find our way. Encyclopedic in breadth, weaving together astronomy, meteorology, oceanography, & ethnography, The Lost Art of Finding Our Way puts us in the shoes, ships, & sleds of early navigators for whom paying close attention to the environment around them was, quite literally, a matter of life & death. Haunted by the fate of two young kayakers lost in a fogbank off Nantucket, Huth shows us how to navigate using natural phenomena--the way the Vikings used the sunstone to detect polarization of sunlight, & Arab traders learned to sail into the wind, & Pacific Islanders used underwater lightning & ”read” waves to guide their explorations. Huth reminds us that we are all navigators capable of learning techniques ranging from the simplest to the most sophisticated skills of direction-finding. Even today, careful observation of the sun & moon, tides & ocean currents, weather & atmospheric effects can be all we need to find our way. Lavishly illustrated with nearly 200 specially prepared drawings, Huth`s compelling account of the cultures of navigation will engross readers in a narrative that is part scientific treatise, part personal travelogue, & part vivid re-creation of navigational history. Seeing through the eyes of past voyagers, we bring our own world into sharper view. ...

Sixty years after his father left to be a mapmaker in the war in Europe, Emerson Johansson received a package that had been lost in the mail for decades. The package contained a most extraordinary gift: an exquisite book Johansson s father lovingly handmade detailing an extraordinary adventure they shared together just months before his departure. This book tells the tale of how father & son set out into the mountains on Christmas Eve to cut a tree, but get caught in a dangerous blizzard. Lost in the snow, they are helped by a mysterious figure, a silvery man who does not speak but leaves them a series of gifts that help them survive & who ultimately leads them home in an almost magical way. The enigmatic man`s image is not captured in the photographs the boy took with his new camera, pictures he believed, until now, were long lost. Little did he know that his father had taken the photographs, & drawing on vellum overlays from his own memory of that night`s events, meticulously reconstructed, mapped, & narrated their adventure, revealing that the curious man in the woods was, in fact, no stranger, but somebody well known to us all. This book, destined to become a Christmas classic, is a faithful facsimile of the magnificent handcrafted present Johnasson s father sent him, & a poignant reminder that the best gifts, of memory, family, & the kindness of strangers, transcend time but never our understanding. ...

`” Is it really possible, do you suppose, ” said Sherlock Holmes to me one morning, as we took breakfast together, ”that a healthy & robust man may be so stricken with terror that he drops down dead?”` So begins ` The Adventure of the Brown Box`. Even better than his first collection, twelve new stories from the much praised Denis O. Smith, including ` The Adventure of the Velvet Mask`, ` The Adventure of the Tomb on the Hill`, & ` The Secret of Shoreswood Hall`. Smith`s stories are of the sort most eagerly devoured by avid fans of Holmes & Dr Watson. A would-be client tells Holmes a strange tale, & he is drawn in to a seemingly impenetrable mystery. Whether in the shrouding fog of London, or far from the city, deep in the countryside, these fast-paced stories, set in the late nineteenth century, before Holmes`s disappearance at the Reichenbach Falls, recreate with wonderful fidelity the world of Conan Doyle`s best Holmes stories. This captivating anthology brings to a new audience the very best of Denis O. Smith`s work in a satisfyingly hefty compendium. ...

The Lost City is Henry Shukman’s (Aldeburgh Poetry Prize winner) visceral novel that evokes deadly dangers & ancient mystery with an all too real sense of its rainforest setting. Invalided out of the army at barely twenty, Jackson Small returns to England traumatised by the violent death of his fellow soldier & blood-brother Connolly. Unable to settle & incapacitated by grief, Jackson sets off on a lunatic quest, back to the Peruvian jungle in search of something he cannot even be sure is real: the lost city of La Joya, the ancient capital of a vanished empire
- a place of rare wonder once glimpsed by Connolly & never forgotten. The city is hidden in the cloud forest that hangs between the copper-green rivers of the Andes & the impenetrable jungle of Amazonia. The pilgrimage Jackson has to make to reach it will bring him into contact with worlds he has never before imagined: that of the American patriarch farming in the wilderness, a great-hearted native priest, & the love of his life. But the lethal green depths of the forest that hide La Joya turn out also to conceal other searchers, with motives far more sinister & complex than Jackson’s.
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In 1666 London was devastated by the Great Fire, which gutted over 13, 000 houses, over eighty parish churches & St Paul`s Cathedral. Robert Wynn Jones has set out to discover the original structures & streets that survived the Great Fire & can still be seen today. This book maps, describes & illustrates what remains of the City of the Black Death, the Peasants` Revolt, the Reformation, the Civil War, & the Great Plague; the City of Chaucer & Shakespeare & Pepys. Discover the Roman ruins buried beneath Cannon Street Station, the seven parish churches that survived the blaze, the drinking establishments still open for business, & much more. ...

This is a song for Stoke: a fanfare for one of the great cities of the world`s first industrial revolution; a lament for the bottle kilns & pot banks, the terraces & mansions that were thrown up or carefully planned to house a global industry & then torn down in the 1960s; & the ballad of a remarkable city
- how she was born, how she grew & behaved as a big, bold grown up & how she crumbled as she grew old but, surprisingly, never died. This is not a guide book but an invitation to explore & discover a (deeply flawed) treasure trove Matthew Rice`s detailed
- & often funny
- architectural watercolours are the basis of this book, but those bones are fleshed out with a narrative of the place: the towering figures of the eighteenth century, Wedgwood, Spode & Brindley; the geological underpinning of coal & clay that fixed its position; the trade with America with cargos mapping the great marches west across the prairies of the New World; the reports of unspeakable humanitarian horrors that sent a thrilling shudder through the drawing rooms of Victorian Britain & the changes those reports brought about; & the sad decline & mismanagements that all but destroyed the city after the second World War. The foreword is written by Matthew`s wife Emma Bridgewater, whose first visit to Stoke twenty five years ago inspired her to start a business that still employs over one hundred people in a Victorian factory in the heart of the city.


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