Toujours plus loin. Toujours plus au nord. Toujours plus seul. Inspiré par ses lectures de Tolstoï et de Thoreau, Christopher McCandless a tout sacrifié à son idéal de pureté et de nature. En 1990, une fois son diplôme universitaire en poche, il offre ses économies à une association caritative et part, sans un adieu, vers son destin. Celui-ci s'achèvera tragiquement au coeur des forêts de l'Alaska... Jon Krakauer évoque aussi à travers cette échappée belle ceux qui, un jour, ont cherché à quitter la civilisation et à dépasser leurs limites. Magistralement porté à l'écran par Sean Penn, lnto the Wild s'inscrit dans la grande tradition du road-movie tragique et lumineux, une histoire aux échos universels.
Ahead lay almost 2,200 miles of remote mountain wilderness filled with bears, moose, bobcats, rattlesnakes, poisonous plants, disease-bearing tics, the occasional chuckling murderer and - perhaps most alarming of all - people whose favourite pastime is discussing the relative merits of the external-frame backpack.
''Stunningly written'' Sunday Times ''Richly absorbing'' Guardian ''Hooks you in from the start'' Times ''Masterful'' Independent ''Hugely compelling'' Observer ''Wonderful'' Financial Times Siberia''s story is traditionally one of exiles, bitter cold and suffering. Yet there is another tale to tell. Dotted throughout this remote land are pianos created during the boom years of the nineteenth century. They tell the story of how, ever since entering Russian culture under the influence of Catherine the Great, piano music has run through the country like blood. How these pianos travelled into this snow-bound wilderness in the first place is remarkable. That stately instruments might still be capable of making music in such a hostile landscape is nothing less than a miracle. Fusing history, nature writing and travelogue, The Lost Pianos of Siberia is a story about a piano hunt - a quixotic journey through two centuries of Russian history and eight time zones stretching across an eleventh of the world''s land surface. It reveals not only an unexpected musical legacy, but profound humanity in the last place on earth you might expect to find it.
Travels to a remote country in search of a strange beast and, in the course of his travels, describes author's encounters with the people whose stories delay him on the road. This book is a quest or a Wonder Voyage. It is about wandering and exile.
Escaping the ills of the British climate, the Durrell family - acne-ridden Margo, gun-toting Leslie, bookworm Lawrence and budding naturalist Gerry, along with their long suffering mother and Roger the dog - take off for the island of Corfu. But the Durrells find that, they must share their various villas with a menagerie of local fauna.
In one devastating week, Raynor and her husband Moth lost their house and received a terminal diagnosis that took away their future together. With nowhere to call home, they instead embarked on a journey: to walk the South West Coast Path, a 630-mile sea-swept trail from Somerset to Dorset, via Devon and Cornwall. This ancient, wind-battered landscape lays them bare, stripping away every comfort they have ever known. With almost no money for food orshelter, carrying the essentials for survival on their backs, they wild camp on beaches and clifftops. Until slowly, with every step, every encounter, and every test along the way, the walk sets them on a road of discovery. They don't know how far they will travel, but unexpectedly, they find themselves on a path to freedom. The Salt Path is an unflinchingly honest, inspiring and life-affirming true story about coming to terms with grief and the healing power of nature. Ultimately, it is a book about home, and how it can be lost, rebuilt, and rediscovered in the most unexpected of ways.
''A remarkable story beautifully told... Among such classics as Goodall''s In the Shadow of Man and Fossey''s Gorillas in the Mist '' Chicago Tribune Carrying little more than a change of clothes and a pair of binoculars, two young Americans, Mark and Delia Owens, caught a plane to Africa, bought a thirdhand Land Rover, and drove deep into the Kalahari Desert. There they lived for seven years, in an unexplored area with no roads, no people, and no source of water for thousands of square miles. In this vast wilderness the Owenses began their zoology research, working along animals that had never before been exposed to humans. An international bestseller on original release, Cry of the Kalahari is the story of the Owenses''s life with lions, brown hyenas, jackals, giraffes, and the many other creatures they came to know. It is also a gripping account of how they survived the dangers of living in one of the last and largest pristine areas on Earth.
''My favourite book about the wilderness'' Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild In this shimmering masterpiece of American nature writing, Edward Abbey ventures alone into the canyonlands of Moab, Utah, to work as a seasonal ranger for the United States National Park Service. Living out of a trailer, Abbey captures in rapt, poetic prose the landscape of the desert; a world of terracotta earth, empty skies, arching rock formations, cliffrose, juniper, pinyon pine and sand sage. His summers become spirit quests, taking him in search of wild horses and Ancient Puebloan petroglyphs, up mountains and across tribal lands, and down the Glen Canyon by river. He experiences both sides of his new home; its incredible beauty and its promise of liberation, but also its isolating, cruel side, at one point discovering a dead tourist at an isolated area of the Grand Canyon. In his own irascible style, Abbey uses his time in the desert to meditate on the tension between nature and civilisation, and outlines a personal philosophy that would come to heavily influence the environmentalist movement. Now published in a special edition to celebrate its 50th Anniversary, this classic seems remarkably prescient, and has lost none of its power.
A flaneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the streets he walks - and is in covert search of adventure, aesthetic or erotic. Acclaimed writer Edmund White, who lived in Paris for sixteen years, wanders through the avenues and along the quays, into parts of the city virtually unknown to visitors and indeed to many locals, luring the reader into the fascinating and seductive backstreets of his personal Paris.
Contains three books - "My Family and Other Animals", "Birds, Beasts and Relatives" and "The Garden of the Gods". Offering portraits of the author's family and their many unusual hangers-on, this work also captures the beginnings of his lifelong love of animals.
It is the driest, flattest, hottest, most desiccated, infertile and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents and still Australia teems with life - a large portion of it quite deadly. In fact, Australia has more things that can kill you in a very nasty way than anywhere else.
Ignoring such dangers - and yet curiously obsessed by them - Bill Bryson journeyed to Australia and promptly fell in love with the country. And who can blame him? The people are cheerful, extrovert, quick-witted and unfailingly obliging: their cities are safe and clean and nearly always built on water; the food is excellent; the beer is cold and the sun nearly always shines. Life doesn't get much better than this...
In 1993, before leaving his much-loved home in North Yorkshire to move back to the States for a few years with his family, Bill Bryson insisted on taking one last trip around Britain, a sort of valedictory tour of the green and kindly island that had so long been his home.
The master of contemporary travel writing, Paul Theroux, immerses himself in the beautiful and troubled heart of modern Mexico Nogales is a border town caught between Mexico and the United States of America. A forty-foot steel fence runs through its centre, separating the prosperous US side from the impoverished Mexican side. It is a fascinating site of tension, now more than ever, as the town fills with hopeful border crossers and the deportees who have been caught and brought back. And it is here that Paul Theroux will begin his journey into the culturally rich but troubled heart of modern Mexico. Moving through the deserts just south of the Arizona border, Theroux finds a place brimming with charm, yet visibly marked by both the US border patrol looming to the north and mounting discord from within. Attending local language and culinary schools, driving through the country and meeting its people, Paul Theroux gets under the skin of Mexico. From the writer praised for his 'curiosity and affection for humanity in all its forms' ( New York Times Book Review ), On The Plain of Snakes is an urgent and mesmerising exploration of a region in conflict. Praise for Paul Theroux: 'As cool as Maugham... as observant, intuitive, wry, inventive and eloquent as Graham Greene' Sunday Times 'Theroux's work remains the standard by which other travel writing must be judged' Observer 'The world's most perceptive travel writer' Daily Mail 'One of the most accomplished and worldly-wise writers of his generation' The Times
Standing on a train as it rushes past fields of cactus; witnessing his first bullfight in Mexico, high on opium; meditating in Tangiers; or falling in love with Montmartre - Kerouac's travels reveal both the endless diversity of human life and his own particular philosophy of self-fulfillment.
One September, the writer and explorer Peter Matthiessen set out with field biologist George Schaller to journey 250 miles through the Himalayas to the Crystal Mountain on the Tibetan plateau. They wanted to study the wild blue sheep, the bharal, but also hoped to see the snow leopard, a creature so rarely spotted as to be nearly mythical. The Snow Leopard is not only an exquisite book of natural history but an extraordinary account of an inner journey ; a 'true pilgrimage, a journey of the heart.
'Out of the sea, as if Homer himself had arranged it for me, the islands bobbed up, lonely, deserted, mysterious in the fading light' Enraptured by a young woman's account of the landscapes of Greece, Henry Miller set off to explore the Grecian countryside with his friend Lawrence Durrell in 1939. In The Colossus of Maroussi he describes drinking from sacred springs, nearly being trampled to death by sheep and encountering the flamboyant Greek poet Katsumbalis, who 'could galvanize the dead with his talk'. This lyrical classic of travel writing represented an epiphany in Miller's life, and is the book he would later cite as his favourite. 'One of the five greatest travel books of all time' Pico Iyer
From their faithful camper van to boats, kayaks, bicycles, and motorbikes, join stars of Outlander Sam and Graham on a road trip with a difference, as two Scotsmen explore a land of raw beauty, poetry, feuding, music, history, and warfare. Unlikely friends Sam and Graham begin their journey in the heart of Scotland at Glencoe - the site of a great massacre and major clan feud - and travel from there all the way to Inverness and Culloden battlefield, where along the way they experience adventure and a cast of highland characters. In this story of friendship, finding themselves, and whisky, they discover the complexity, rich history and culture of their native country.
"Songlines" are what Europeans call the labyrinth of invisible pathways that meander all over Australia - they are both intricate sources of personal identity and territorial markers. From these, Bruce Chatwin has traced a great deal about Aboriginal culture, as complex as it is different.
Like so many others, David Lebovitz dreamed about living in Paris ever since he first visited the city in the 1980s. Finally, after a nearly twodecade career as a pastry chef and cookbook author, he moved to Paris to start a new life. Having crammed all his worldly belongings into three suitcases, he arrived, hopes high, at his new apartment in the lively Bastille neighborhood. But he soon discovered it's a different world en France.From learning the ironclad rules of social conduct to the mysteries of men's footwear, from shopkeepers who work so hard not to sell you anything to the etiquette of working the right way around the cheese plate, here is David's story of how he came to fall in love withyes'>#8212;and even understandyes'>#8212;this glorious, yet sometimes maddening, city.When did he realize he had morphed into un vrai parisien? It might have been when he found himself considering a purchase of men's dress socks with cartoon characters on them. Or perhaps the time he went to a bank with 135 euros in hand to make a 134euro payment, was told the bank had no change that day, and thought it was completely normal. Or when he found himself dressing up to take out the garbage because he had come to accept that in Paris appearances and image mean everything. The more than fifty original recipes, for dishes both savory and sweet, such as Pork Loin with Brown Sugaryes'>#8211;Bourbon Glaze, Braised Turkey in Beaujolais Nouveau wih Prunes, Bacon and Bleu Cheese Cake, ChocolateCoconut Marshmallows, Chocolate Spice Bread, LemonGlazed Madeleines, and Mochayes'>#8211;Cryes'>#232;me Frayes'>#238;che Cake, will have readers running to the kitchen once they stop laughing. The Sweet Life in Paris is a deliciously funny, offbeat, and irreverent look at the city of lights, cheese, chocolate, and other confections.
