B>The Places In Between, Rory Stewart's moving account of his walk across Afghanistan in January 2002 was immediately hailed as a classic. /b>Caught between hostile nations, warring factions and competing ideologies, at the time Afghanistan was in turmoil following the US invasion. Travelling entirely on foot and following the inaccessible mountainous route once taken by the Mogul Emperor, Babur the Great, Stewart was nearly defeated by the extreme, hostile conditions. Only with the help of an unexpected companion and the generosity of the people he met on the way did he survive to report back with unique insight on a region closed to the world by twenty-four years of war.b>Winner of the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Award and the Spirit of Scotland Award and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize and the Scottish Book of the Year Prize./b>
Vivienne Westwood is one of the icons of our age. Fashion designer, activist, co-creator of punk, global brand and grandmother; a true living legend. Her career has successfully spanned five decades and her work has influenced millions of people across the world.For the first and only time, Vivienne Westwood has written a personal memoir, collaborating with award-winning biographer Ian Kelly, to describe the events, people and ideas that have shaped her extraordinary life. Told in all its glamour and glory, and with her unique voice, unexpected perspective and passionate honesty, this is her story. For the first and only time, she is both writing and collaborating on a unique personal memoir and authorised biography: partly her own voice, partly through contributions from her vast network of friends, family and associates. Ian Kelly (award-winning biographer of, amongst others, fashion maverick Beau Brummell and the original self-publicist, Giacomo Casanova) brings the insights of a historian and friend of Vivienne to the life and works of one of the major influences of our age in this wonderful, insightful collaboration.
This brilliant memoir brings to life an entire era through the sensibility of one of America's finest authors. Recollecting fifty years of love, desire and friendship, Burning the Days traces the life of a singular man, who starts out in Manhattan and comes of age in the skies over Korea, before reinventing himself as a writer in the New York of the 1960s. It features - in Salter's uniquely beautiful style - some of the most evocative pages about flying ever written, together with portraits of the actors, directors and authors who influenced him. This is a book that through its sheer sensual force not only recollects the past, but reclaims it.
In June of 1961, A.E. Hotchner visited an old friend in the psychiatric ward of St. Mary's Hospital. It would be the last time they spoke--a few weeks later, Ernest Hemingway was released home, where he took his own life. Their final conversation was also the final installment in a story whose telling Hemingway had spread over more than a decade.br>In characteristically pragmatic terms, Hemingway revealed to Hotchner the details of the affair that destroyed his first marriage: the truth of his romantic life in Paris and how he lost Hadley, the true part of each literary woman he'd later create and the great love he spent the rest of his life seeking. And he told of the mischief that made him a legend: of impotence cured in a house of God; of a plane crash in the African bush, from which Hemingway stumbled with a bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin in hand; of F. Scott Fitzgerald dispensing romantic advice and champagne in the buff with Josephine Baker; of adventure, human error, and life after lost love. This is Hemingway as you've never known him--humble, thoughtful, and full of regret.br>To protect the feelings of Ernest's wife--Mary, also a close friend--Hotch held back, keeping the conversations to himself for decades. Now, for the first time, he tells the whole story, mostly in Hemingway's own words. Hemingway in Love is the intimate and repentantly candid chapter missing from the definitive biography of a literary giant.
Peter Godwin, an award-winning writer, is on assignment in Zululand when he is summoned by his mother to Zimbabwe, his birthplace. His father is seriously ill; she fears he is dying. Godwin finds his country, once a post-colonial success story, descending into a vortex of violence and racial hatred.
B>With an introduction by Salman Rushdie and an/b>b> afterword by the author./b>br>b>/b>br>b>/b>It was the night of February 25, 1964. A cloud of cigar smoke drifted through the ring lights. Cassius Clay threw punches into the gray floating haze and waited for the bell.When Cassius Clay burst onto the sports scene in the 1950s, he broke the mould. He changed the world of sports and went on to change the world itself: from his early fights as Cassius Clay, the young, wiry man from Louisville, unwilling to play the noble and grateful warrior in a white world, to becoming Muhammad Ali, the voice of black America and the most recognized face on the planet. King of the World is the story of an incredible rise to power, a book of battles fought inside the ring and out. With grace and power, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Remnick tells of a transcendent athlete and entertainer, a rapper before rap was born. Ali was a mirror of his era, a dynamic figure in the racial and cultural clashes of his time and King of the World is a classic piece of non-fiction and a book worthy of America's most dynamic modern hero.
Oliver Sacks died in August 2015 at his home in Greenwich Village, surrounded by his close friends and family. He was 82. He spent his final days doing what he loved: playing the piano, swimming, enjoying smoked salmon - and writing. As Dr Sacks looked back over his long, adventurous life his final thoughts were of gratitude. In a series of remarkable, beautifully written and uplifting meditations, in Gratitude Dr Sacks reflects on and gives thanks for a life well lived, and expresses his thoughts on growing old, facing terminal cancer and reaching the end. I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and travelled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
B>The much-anticipated follow-up to the acclaimed and resoundingly fascinating Daily Rituals./b>Filled with the innovative, inspiring and wonderfully prolific accounts of some of the world's best female creators, Daily Rituals: Women at Work is the powerful and championing sequel to Mason Currey's first book, Daily Rituals. Barbara Hepworth sculpted outdoors and Janet Frame wore earmuffs as she worked to block out noise. Kate Chopin wrote with her six children 'swarming around her' whereas the artist Rosa Bonheur filled her bedroom with the sixty birds that inspired her work. Louisa May Alcott wrote so vigorously - skipping sleep and meals - that she had to learn to write with her left hand to give her cramped right hand a break.Filled with details of the large and small choices these women made, Daily Rituals: Women at Work is about the day-to-day lives of some of the world's most extraordinary creative minds who, whether Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Bronte, Nina Simone or Jane Campion, found the time and got to work.b>'An admirably succinct portrait of some distinctly uncommon lives' Meryle Secrest/b>
For centuries much of Europe was in the hands of the very peculiar Habsburg family. An unstable mixture of wizards, obsessives, melancholics, bores, musicians and warriors, they saw off - through luck, guile and sheer mulishness - any number of rivals, until finally packing up in 1918. From their principal lairs along the Danube they ruled most of Central Europe and Germany and interfered everywhere - indeed the history of Europe hardly makes sense without them. Simon Winder's extremely funny new book plunges the reader into a maelstrom of alchemy, skeletons, jewels, bear-moats, unfortunate marriages and a guinea-pig village. Danubia is full of music, piracy, religion and fighting. It is the history of a dynasty, but it is at least as much about the people they ruled, who spoke many different languages, lived in a vast range of landscapes, believed in many rival gods and often showed a marked ingratitude towards their oddball ruler in Vienna. Readers who discovered Simon Winder's genius for telling wonderful stories of middle Europe with Germania will be delighted by the eccentric and fascinating stories of the Habsburgs and their world.
When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: 'Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far'. It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California and then in New York, where he discovered a long-forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, as well as with a group of patients who would define his life, it becomes clear that Sacks's earnest desire for engagement has occasioned unexpected encounters and travels - sending him through bars and alleys, over oceans, and across continents.With unbridled honesty and humour, Sacks shows us that the same energy that drives his physical passions - bodybuilding, weightlifting, and swimming - also drives his cerebral passions. He writes about his love affairs, both romantic and intellectual, his guilt over leaving his family to come to America, his bond with his schizophrenic brother, and the writers and scientists - Thom Gunn, A. R. Luria, W. H. Auden, Gerald M. Edelman, Francis Crick - who influenced him.On the Move is the story of a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer - and of the man who has illuminated the many ways that the brain makes us human.
V.S. Naipaul undertook this Caribbean journey at the invitation, in 1960, of Dr Eric Williams, the first Prime Minister of independent Trinidad, the authors birthplace. At that time, the plantation colonies of the region were formed, culturally, in the image of the metropolis. Racial and political assertion had yet to catch up with them in varying ways. In Trinidad, African racialism found itself at odds with old colonial mimicry; forty years on, the racial issue will not be between black and white, but between black and Asian. Guyana was Marxist, but with the same racial divisions: forty years on, the country will be so ruined that a newspaper will be regarded almost as a luxury item. In Surinam, a movement was afoot to replace the Dutch language with a pidgin English called talkie-talkie: forty years on, that racial sentiment will have led to military dictatorship and an exodus of the locals to Holland. Whereas Martinique, defying geography, saw itself as France. And, in Jamaica, such rejectionism took the form of Rastafarianism which, absurdly, turns out to have been the invention of Italian black propaganda during the Abyssinian War of the 1930s. The Middle Passage catches this poor topsy-turvy world at a critical moment: a world by turns sad, earnest and hilarious indeed, a perfect subject for the understanding and comedy of this great writer.
This memoir recounts Alexandra Fuller's life in what was then Rhodesia, where her parents moved in 1971 when she was just two. While her father was away fighting for Ian Smith's government, her mother worked the family farm. This story deals with their time there during the country's civil war.
Tapping into an energy that helped shape post-war Britain, this title is a memoir of one man's life long passion for getting the look just right. It is useful for anyone interested in fashion.
Snow geese spend their summers in the Canadian Arctic. Each autumn they migrate south, to Delaware, California and the Gulf of Mexico. In the spring they fly north again. The author, William Fiennes decided to go with them and wrote about his travels.
In this, his most personal book, Winton reflects on the accidents, both traumatic and serendipitous, that have influenced his view of life and fuelled his distinctive artistic vision. By turns impassioned, funny, joyous, astonishing, The Boy Behind the Curtain offers an insight into the man who's held us enthralled for three decades and helped us reshape our view of ourselves.
B>'Killing It combines three popular, profound topics: where our food comes from, how to achieve purpose in life and how to find lasting love' - Sunday Times/b>After a career spent writing about food, Camas Davis came to a realization: she had never forced herself to grapple with how it actually got to her plate. Out of love with her life and with the world she found herself in, she knew she had to make a change.And so she set off for France. There, in the rolling countryside of Gascony, she would learn the art of butchery, and with it the art of eating and drinking well. Surrounded by farmers, producers, cooks and food-lovers, eating some of the world's least processed and most lovingly made food, Camas discovered the very authenticity she'd longed for in her old life. She just needed to return to America, and bring what she'd learnt back with her . . .b>Killing It is the story of one woman's quest to understand what it means to be human and what it means to be animal too. /b>
After losing her job as a food journalist, Camas Davis felt totally lost, out of love with her life and the world. She had spent her career writing about food, but she had never forced herself to grapple with how it got to her plate. Now she wanted to change that, she wanted to experience something real. So she travelled to France to learn the art of butchery. There, in the rolling countryside of Gascony, surrounded by farmers and producers who understood every part of the process, she realized it was time to make a change.Killing It is a book about a woman doing something simultaneously extreme and unexpected, yet incredibly simple - a return to a relationship with food we only lost a few decades ago. It is story about turning your life upside down and starting again, it is about falling in and out of love, and it is about understanding what it means to be human and what it means to be animal too.
